Professor & Academic Director, Compass Program
Academic Director, Compass Program
Most research in psychology focuses on very specific problems in very specific areas of study. I am interested in understanding how people function as whole persons. How can we understand how all the various processes that psychologists study come together to form the person as a whole? How do persons — and the psychological processes that compose them — develop over time?
Toward this end, I have developed coactive systems theory, which is a general framework for understanding psychological development. I have applied this approach to the analysis of a variety of psychological problems, including the nature and development of persons; the development of intellectual and socio-emotional skills; moral and personality development; parenting processes; and the development of everyday skills.
Recent Books
Mascolo, M. F. (2015). “Eight Keys to Old School Parenting for Modern-Day Families.” New York: Norton.
Basseches, M., and Mascolo, M. F. (2010). “Psychotherapy as a Developmental Process.” New York, N.Y.: Routledge/Taylor and Francis.
Recent Articles
Mascolo, M. F., and Kallio, E. (in press). “Beyond Free Will: The Embodied Emergence of Conscious Agency.” Philosophical Psychology.
Mascolo, M. F. (in press). “Rekindling the Humanistic Soul of the Academy: Pursuing Knowledge for the Good of Humanity. To appear in J. Trajtelová and M. Zvarík (Eds.), Epimeleia tēs Psychēs: The Idea of University and Phenomenology of Education, The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology 2017. Germany: Peter Lang.
Mascolo, M. F. and Raeff, C. (2017). “Understanding Personhood: Can We Get There From Here?” New Ideas in Psychology, 44, 49-53.
Mascolo, M. F. (2017). “How Objectivity Undermines the Study of Personhood: Toward an Intersubjective Epistemology for Psychological Science.” New Ideas in Psychology, 33, 41-48.
Mascolo, M. F. (2016). “Beyond Subjectivity and Objectivity: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Science.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50, 185-195.
Mascolo, M. F. (2016). “The Transformation of an Ex-white Supremacist: A Dialectical-Developmental Analysis.” Qualitative Psychology, 1-20.
Mascolo, M. F., Van Geert, P., Fischer, K. W and Steenbeek, H. (2016). “Dynamic Systems Approaches to Developmental Psychopathology.” In Cicchetti, D. (Ed.) Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology (pp. 665-716). New York: John Wiley.
Mascolo, M. F. and Fischer, K. W. (2015). “Dynamic Development of Thinking, Feeling and Acting.” In Overton, W., and Molennar, P. (Eds.) Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (Vol 1: Theory and Method) (pp. 113-161). New York: John Wiley.
Stephanie Garrone-Shufran, associate professor in the School of Education and Social Policy and 2024 Roddy Award winner, delivered the event’s keynote speech.
