Elizabeth Stanley

Georgetown University | GU · Walsh School of Foreign Service

Previous empirical research has demonstrated that war has negative duration dependence: the longer a war has already lasted, the harder it is to end. Many arguments have been advanced to explain this, including bargaining or commitment problems, domestic politics, entrapment dynamics, sunk costs, and cognitive and emotional biases. Drawing on recen...

Policy makers and researchers have worked to explain the perplexing rise in U.S. military suicides since 2001, with little progress in explaining this widespread phenomenon. This article synthesizes several literatures to highlight the role of emotion dysregulation in military suicidality. After considering advances in suicidal ideation‐to‐action f...

The ability to regulate negative emotions is especially necessary for service members in the contemporary U.S. armed forces, since they routinely face situations that elicit negative emotions while executing their professional roles. Yet difficulties with regulating emotions, which are associated with stress and mood disorders, suicidality, and imp...

This study is the first attempt to systematically examine the impact of prior military service and childhood adversity on physical and psychological health outcomes during subsequent law enforcement employment. Given that at least one in five US law enforcement officers (LEOs) is a military veteran, and many law enforcement agencies provide prefere...

Attention and working memory are at risk of degradation over intensive intervals in groups engaged in highly demanding jobs. Accordingly, there is great interest in identifying training regimes to promote cognitive resilience in such populations. Herein, US Army Soldiers were assigned to either an 8-week, 16-h mindfulness training (MT) program (n =...

Over the last two decades, there has been increased interest in the role of emotions in decision‐making, with new theorizing to highlight how leader decisions often differ from rational choice and purely cognitive models. To date, however, existing theories have not adequately explained why emotions drive decisions in some situations and not others...

The recent ‘affect revolution’ in strategic decision-making research has placed greater emphasis on the role of stress and emotions in decision-making, with new theorizing to highlight how leader decisions often differ from rational choice expectations. However, while existing theories add to our understanding of the interplay between affect and co...

This groundbreaking book examines the cultural norms that impede resilience in America, especially our collective tendency to disconnect stress from its consequences and override our need to recover. It explains why an event that’s stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another. Most importantly, it explores how recovery and resilience ca...

Though empirical evidence of the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions is wide-ranging across clinical and healthy populations, high-stress environments—those in which individuals are subjected to prolonged stress and/or trauma—come with distinct challenges that many traditional mindfulness-based interventions were not designed to address. Ad...

This book presents the latest in neuroscience and resiliency research alongside the personal stories of military veterans to advocate for an empirically validated training protocol. In Bulletproofing the Psyche: Preventing Mental Health Problems in Our Military and Veterans editors Kate Hendricks Thomas and David L. Albright lead an interdisciplina...

Periods of persistent and intensive demands may compromise working memory (WM) and increase susceptibility to distraction. We investigated if mindfulness training (MT) may mitigate these deleterious effects and promote cognitive resilience in military cohorts enduring a high-demand interval of military training. To better understand which aspects o...

Attention is critical for successful performance in demanding real-world situations. Yet, protracted periods of high demand may compromise attention and increase off-task thinking. Herein, we investigate if mindfulness training (MT) may promote cognitive resilience by curbing attentional lapses in high-stress cohorts. Two military cohorts were recr...

Neuroimaging studies of mindfulness training (MT) modulate anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula among other brain regions, which are important for attentional control, emotional regulation and interoception. Inspiratory breathing load (IBL) is an experimental approach to examine how an individual responds to an aversive stimulus. Military per...

We investigated the impact of mindfulness training (MT) on attentional performance lapses associated with task-unrelated thought (i.e., mind wandering). Periods of persistent and intensive demands may compromise attention and increase off-task thinking. Here, we investigated if MT may mitigate these deleterious effects and promote cognitive resilie...

Objective: Military deployment can have profound effects on physical and mental health. Few studies have examined whether interventions prior to deployment can improve mechanisms underlying resilience. Mindfulness-based techniques have been shown to aid recovery from stress and may affect brain-behavior relationships prior to deployment. The autho...

This chapter examines a novel approach to mindfulness training, optimized for high-stress contexts, called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT).® MMFT follows in the lineage of warrior traditions that train the body and mind to cultivate two foundational warrior qualities—wisdom and bravery. Wisdom is the ability to see clearly how things...

Current military deployments have resulted in many psychological and physical health issues and created interest in protective measures to mitigate effects of prolonged and repetitive stress. Mindfulness training has been successfully used for stress reduction in other contexts. The following case report presents a detachment of U.S. Marines who re...

The missions that the U.S. military is being called upon to execute in today’s security environment require a tremendous amount of awareness—of self, others, and the wider environment. Awareness is the foundational meta-skill for being able to “learn and adapt.” This chapter proposes a new way to achieve such awareness. It draws on the well-documen...

We investigated the impact of mindfulness training (MT) on working memory capacity (WMC) and affective experience. WMC is used in managing cognitive demands and regulating emotions. Yet, persistent and intensive demands, such as those experienced during high-stress intervals, may deplete WMC and lead to cognitive failures and emotional disturbances...

The authors’ theory contributes an alternative domestic politics pathway to traditional bargaining models of war termination. In bargaining models, the rational updating process that produces an overlapping bargaining space can develop a significant lag, which extends the war beyond a logical ending point. The authors posit that a change in the dom...

Paths to Peace begins by developing a theory about the domestic obstacles to making peace and the role played by shifts in states' governing coalitions in overcoming these obstacles. In particular, it explains how the longer the war, the harder it is to end, because domestic obstacles to peace become institutionalized over time. Next, it tests this...

This book begins by developing a theory about the domestic obstacles to making peace and the role played by shifts in states' governing coalitions in overcoming these obstacles. In particular, it explains how the longer the war, the harder it is to end, because domestic obstacles to peace become institutionalized over time. Next, it tests this theo...

This chapter outlines the existing literature about war termination. It demonstrates that there is a causal connection between the difficulty of ending wars and the fact that they are started and ended by politicians. Realpolitik, domestic politics, and bargaining models can be used to illustrate categories about war termination. Bayesian models of...

This chapter describes a new theory about shifts in domestic governing coalitions. It also analyzes this theory with detailed historical case studies of the Korean War and quantitative analysis of all interstate wars since 1862. Old Baldy is a mountain in central Korea that is currently sited within the demilitarized zone between North and South Ko...

Bargaining models of war suggest that war ends after two sides develop an overlapping bargaining space. Domestic mechanisms—domestic governing coalitions, a state’s elite foreign policy decisionmaking group, and their role in ending interstate war—are critical in explaining how, when, and why that bargaining space develops. Through preference...

Creating Military Power examines how societies, cultures, political structures, and the global environment affect countries' military organizations. Unlike most analyses of countries' military power, which focus on material and basic resources—such as the size of populations, technological and industrial base, and GNP—this volume takes a more e...

This chapter examines the military profession—the officer corps of the five armed services—as a profession, and the effects of tangible and intangible rewards for service, seated in a wider discussion of professions and compensation generally. Tangible rewards include both monetary pay and in-kind benefits, such as housing, medical care, and assist...

This chapter outlines the Army’s efforts to create a fully networked force in light of its evolving professional jurisdiction. Information technologies from the contemporary revolution in military affairs (RMA) are both an objective and subjective force for jurisdictional change; some changes may possess unintended consequences for the profession....

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.1 (2001) 103-105 Why Nations Go to War. By John G. Stoessinger (New York, Bedford St. Martin's, 2000; 8th ed.) 286 pp. $31.95 Why Wars Happen. By Jeremy Black (New York, New York University Press, 1998) 272 pp. $30.00 These two books attempt to take a new look at the age-old problem of war, thus adding to the...

In the past decade, U.S. military forces have deployed more frequently to operations other than war. Those operations include missions to provide humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, or the forced cessation of hostilities in areas of conflict. Geopolitical changes and shifts in U.S. foreign and security policies since the end of the Cold War -- combined...