PY799 Psychosocial Challenges to the Management of Anxiety in the Modern Era (2 cr.)

This multidisciplinary course contributes to students’ development of cultural competency by examining challenges to managing existential anxiety that both underlie and emanate from the social construction of culture amid discontinuous and/or violent contexts in modern history.  Strategies to manage anxiety–as articulated in selected approaches to cultural anthropology, social psychology, philosophy, and multigenerational systemic therapies–are emphasized.

Upon completion of the course, students are expected to be able to do the following:

1. Utilize selected concepts from Terror Management Theory, pragmatic utilitarianism, and multigenerational systemic therapy to identify and describe the antecedents, relational processes, and systemic consequences of a coercive social interaction in terms of anxiety management and on-going processes of cultural development.
2. Identify universal aspects of human experience that are represented in particular events and actions among diverse groups with different styles of managing anxiety and decision making—especially around issues of personal freedom, class, ethnicity and national identity, gender, and age.   
3. Conceptualize and describe how to effectively do the following:

• reduce one’s own anxious reactivity within a coercive social context;
• help an individual or group identify and subsequently modify their most frequently used strategies to manage anxiety in a manner that is less destructive to self and others;
• facilitate peaceful and constructive resolution of differences among two or more multisystemic levels of social interaction; and
• help a participant in a coercive or violent interaction work through subsequent grief and trauma or gratification derived from winning or dominating.