GLBC 1200 - What Would Captain America Do?

This article presents content and analysis pertinent to psychology from two major motion pictures:Captain America: The First AvengerandCaptain America: The Winter Soldier. Characters are discussed in how they relate to the audience and the overall human experience. Steve Rogers’s (Captain America) development into Captain America and the associated struggles are highlighted for the reader. Across both movies, struggles with morality, mattering, and social allegiance are also emphasized as major internal struggles for Steve Rogers/Captain America. Psychological themes are identified through content analysis such as belongingness, power, courage, selflessness, and loss/grief. These topics are discussed and related to possible psychotherapy interventions.

The article explores several studies regarding the importance of character. Psychologist Tanya Cohen studied the element of moral character called guilt proneness. Canadian psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton reported on the honesty-humility factor of personality. Geoffrey Goodwin, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, talked about character and social cognition.

The article analyzes the film "Black Panther" of director Ryan Coogler. Particular focus is given to the concept of "Pan Africanism" in the film which depicts consciousness and the mutual responsibility of African descendants to free themselves from oppression and exploitation. It outlines the character development in the film and describes their role in the fictitious African nation of Wakanda.

In the territory of violence and despair, hope is rare. Recent work on hope has shifted attention from hope as a feeling to hope as a practice that people can do together. This case report of a family exposed to domestic violence highlights the role played by a South African police officer in the mother's actions to separate from the context of violence. As a witness to the violence, the police officer acted from an ethic of justice and an ethic of compassion. Outsider witnessing of a counseling session resulted in the recruiting of a community of acknowledgement for the mother, the police officer, and an Assistant Commissioner of Police. Listening carefully and doing hope together gave rise to alliances against practices of violence. As a step of accountability, the authors used reflexive practices to question their responses and to avoid colonizing practices.

A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters -- or, evil people, to put it less sensationally -- "mirror" one another, in a sense to be explained. Call this the mirror thesis. The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis. To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies that (...) evil persons mirror moral saints insofar as the characters of each are marked by similar aretaic properties: suffering from extremely vicious character traits -- in a sense to be explained -- suffices for being evil whereas possessing extremely virtuous character traits similarly suffices for moral sainthood.

R. L. Stevenson's novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a prominent example of Victorian fiction. The names Jekyll and Hyde have become synonymous with multiple personality disorder. This article seeks to examine the novel from the view point of dualism as a system of philosophy and as a religious framework and also from the view point of Freud's structural theory of the mind.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) crystallizes how the superhero genre is now inflected by employment: by one's relation to a larger organization. If the superhero movie remains escapist, then that escape is no longer from the impotence of the individual, but rather from the stereotypes of the lumbering, ineffective organization and the disconnected participant. A survey of pre-MCU superhero movies will demonstrate that the MCU is on the leading edge of a change in the dream of superpowers: from the ability to do anything to the ability to meaningfully contribute through one's affiliations.

This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner-researchers on how young children construct and reason with Santa. We then discuss the threat to Santa from the audit culture, which involves an inversion of his benign characteristics in terms of suspicion and surveillance. Our conclusion is that Santa is more of a religious figure than he is often given credit for being, and is felt by 'believers' to be superior in terms of 'delivery', as current systems of accountability might put it. But he is threatened by an audit culture for which he is almost the epitome of Stranger Danger. 'Santa', after all, is an anagram of 'Satan'.

The author presents a case against spontaneity as an ideal for human behavior. Topics include what the author describes as the sociopathy of a truly spontaneous life, the role of modern psychology in positing a cognitive duality between instinctive and rational thought processes, and nudge politics or choice theory, which posits people will choose the easiest available path, making control of choices simple.

The article discusses utilitarian ethics in contrast to the ethical thought of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Topics include the relation of utilitarianism to the trolley car problem, Kant's notion of a categorical imperative for ethical reasoning, and the contrast of natural-rights theory with utilitarian and Kantian ethics.