Marc Pilisuk

The Dark Side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF), the focus of the January 2011 special issue of the American Psychologist, is a

A job and a home : Social networks and the integration of the mentally disabled in the community

125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for soldiers and veterans. These are worthy goals. Soldiers and veterans deserve the best care possible, and military psychologists have critically important roles to play. But the special issue is troubling in several important respects. Elsewhere, we have offered a detailed review (Eidelson, Pilisuk, & Soldz, 2011). Here we offer only a summary of our concerns. The CSF program is a massive research project launched without pilot testing to determine, first, the effectiveness of the training in a military environment. This is highly irregular and obviously worrisome considering the stakes. No evidence was provided indicating that CSF received preliminary review by an independent ethics review board. There are other ethically fraught possibilities.This special issue reveals much about current moral challenges facing the profession of psychology.

Addictive rewards in nuclear weapons development

Formerly hospitalized psychiatric patients participated in a program including skills in apartment living and employment. Contrasted to a comparison group, program graduates showed more multifunctional and more reciprocal relationships with other people. Results highlight the importance of work, housing, and the utilization of community services, and suggest the quality of supportive interpersonal relations as a criterion of program success.

Divine Politics and Warning Signs of Fascism

Over the next decade the U.S. plans to invest U.S.

Advancing the Social Psychology of Conflict Resolution

45 billion in the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program for nuclear weapons research, development, testing and production. In constant dollars, that amount is well in excess of the annual Cold War spending average of U.S.S3.64 billion for directly comparable activities. The recent testing of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan are cases of nuclear weapons development unrelated to military security needs. Could there be analogous psychological needs driving nuclear weapons programs in the U.S. long after the Soviet Union has ceased to exist?

Selective civility, apolitical politics, limited democracy, and mainstream psychology.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton identifies fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity . . . ” Working in collaboration with traditional elites, the party of committed nationalist militants “abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” The May 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller by a fanatical abortion opponent continues to raise questions about a culture that produces violent individuals and the needs that are being addressed by groups that condone such violence.

Coming Together for Action: The Challenge of Contemporary Grassroots Community Organizing

Conflict resolution is gradually being transformed from art to social science. Important within the social science contribution is our understanding of what occurs between two or more parties who perceive a disagreement between them. The condition is ubiquitous but the characteristics, perceptions, and motives of the participants will widely vary as will their skills, knowledge, and the internal and external constraints that will limit or enhance their moves. So, too, will there be important differences in the circumstances of need that may affect their views of what might be changed in their positions and in the power that each party holds to push its agenda. These are all concepts that have been studied in social psychology, some for half a century. In this 940-page anthology, the authors have assembled what the field of social psychology has to offer to our understanding of conflict and to its constructive resolution. The senior editor, Morton Deutsch, contributed some of the seminal research in conflict resolution, and has followed the evolution of the field for many years. As he notes, the aim of the anthology ‘‘is to enrich the field by presenting the theoretical underpinnings that throw light on the fundamental social psychological processes involved in all levels of conflict.’’ The 38 separate articles do indeed fill the promise significantly. To a large extent, the articles focus on highlighting concepts, defining categories, and taking note of the growing research

The hidden structure of contemporary violence.

There is much merit in the proposals of Johnson and Johnson (this issue), especially in their explicit depiction of ways to raise the level of discourse in the nation and thereby improve democratic processes. However, unless fundamental flaws in the social- economic-political system are corrected, those most in need will not participate in the discourse.