Phillip L. Hammack

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Psychology

The twenty-first century has seen the proliferation of new sexual identity subcultures rooted in creative role-play dynamics, expanding our cultural and scientific understanding of diversity in sexuality and intimacy. In an international sample of 568 people who identified with the kink subculture of pup play, we analyzed responses to open-ended qu...

The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumption...

With its emphasis on practices like social distancing and periods of intermittent isolation, the COVID-19 pandemic likely presented unique challenges for individuals who engage in consensual nonmonogamy (CNM). Interviews with 16 practitioners of CNM in the United States conducted in May-July, 2021 revealed five themes about how COVID-19 impacted th...

In this article, four associate editors reflect on their experience overseeing the review of articles in Qualitative Psychology (QP). The article describes the role of associate editor and discusses the commitments and goals that have influenced our work while serving in this position. We consider common challenges that authors face when publishing...

The twenty-first century has been a time of considerable change in cultural attitudes, social policies, and scientific understandings of sexuality and gender. This article introduces the special issue on sexual and gender diversity in this century, situating the endeavor in a new documentary paradigm for the social sciences which pushes us away fro...

As identities within the ace spectrum gain greater visibility in describing those who experience limited or no sexual attraction, it is vital to understand points of commonality and distinction among individuals who identify as asexual, graysexual, and demisexual. Among respondents to the Ace Community Survey, a large international sample of indivi...

Purpose: This study examined the health profile of a national probability sample of three cohorts of sexual minority people, and the ways that indicators of health vary among sexual minority people across age cohorts and other defining sociodemographic characteristics, including sexual identity, gender identity, and race/ethnicity. Methods: The Gen...

The 21st century has been a time of change in recognition of sexual and gender diversity (SGD) in the United States, but we know little about how community-level variability in support for SGD shapes the experience of youth who hold minoritized sexual or gender (MSG) identities. This study used mixed methods to examine regional variability in commu...

What forms of intracommunity stigma do young sexual minority men narrate as they participate in communities through mobile apps? In a content analysis of 32 interviews with a racially diverse sample of young sexual minority men (ages 19–25; 84.4% non-White) from four regions of the USA, a majority of men (62.5%) spontaneously discussed mobile apps...

Recognizing the historical grounding of sexual identity development, we examined the spontaneous narration of the internet's significance among a diverse sample of three distinct birth cohorts of sexual minority adults (n = 36, ages 18-59) in the United States. Thematic analysis revealed two structural barriers and four roles of the internet in sex...

This study examined the extent to which social stress stemming from a stigmatized social status (i.e., minority stress) was associated with three domains of health in younger as compared with older age cohorts of sexual minority individuals. Data were analyzed from the Generations Study, a longitudinal study using a probability sample ( N = 1518) o...

Purpose: Multi-level hostility toward sexual minority (SM; includes, but is not limited to those identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or same-gender loving) and other minority populations (e.g., racial/ethnic) increased after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This may generate stress and mental health problems among those groups, and pa...

Understandings of sexual and gender identity have expanded beyond traditional binaries, yet we know little about adolescents' appropriation of identity labels across diverse communities. In a mixed-methods study of adolescents recruited from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) spaces in communities differing in support of sexual...

During the past 50 years, there have been marked improvement in the social and legal environment of sexual minorities in the United States. Minority stress theory predicts that health of sexual minorities is predicated on the social environment. As the social environment improves, exposure to stress would decline and health outcomes would improve....

This study explored familiarity with, attitudes toward, uptake and discontinuation of PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis) among a national probability sample of gay and bisexual men. PrEP is one of the most effective biomedical HIV prevention strategies; however, use among gay and bisexual men remains low within the United States. This study used a nat...

Empirical research on the origins of kinky erotic desires (e.g., sadomasochism, bondage, domination/submission, roleplaying, sexual fetishism, etc.) has been limited and rarely rooted in the narratives of kinky people themselves. Among a sample of 260 self-identified kinky users of a kink-oriented social networking website living in 21 countries, w...

Using data from the first national probability sample of Black, White, and Latinx sexual minority people in the United States, we examined whether and how sexual identity development timing and pacing differs across demographic subgroups at the intersections of cohort, sex, sexual identity, and race/ethnicity. Among a sample of 1,491 participants a...

Scientific evidence regarding sexual minority populations has generally come from studies based on two types of samples: community-derived samples and probability samples. Probability samples are lauded as the gold standard of population research for their ability to represent the population of interest. However, while studies using community sampl...

Genderqueer identities-those that challenge a strict binary between woman and man-are increasingly visible within mainstream culture and psychological research. However, little is known about generational differences in the lived experience of genderqueer people. Inductive thematic analysis of interviews with 30 genderqueer sexual minorities of 3 d...

Purpose: We assessed how psychological distress and felt stigma (perceived sexual minority stigma in one's community) are associated with key HIV prevention outcomes in a U.S. national probability sample of sexually active, HIV-negative sexual minority men. Methods: Using data from the Generations study (2017-2018, N = 285), the present study asse...

Interviewing is considered a key form of qualitative inquiry in psychology that yields rich data on lived experience and meaning making of life events. Interviews that contain multiple components informed by specific epistemologies have the potential to provide particularly nuanced perspectives on psychological experience. We offer a methodological...

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with Truvada has emerged as an increasingly common approach to HIV prevention among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. This study examined generational differences and similarities in narrative accounts of PrEP among a diverse sample of 89 gay and bisexual men in the U.S. Over 50% of men in the older...

With heightened cultural visibility and greater opportunities for connection, individuals with kinky sexual desires (e.g., BDSM, sexual fetishism, sexual role-playing) are increasingly constructing sexual identities that foreground their kink-oriented desires. However, we know little about how kinky individuals negotiate stigma as they construct se...

Recognition of sexual and gender diversity in the 21st century challenges normative assumptions of intimacy that privilege heterosexual monogamy and the biological family unit, presume binary cisgender identities, essentialize binary sexual identities, and view sexual or romantic desire as necessary. We propose a queer paradigm to study relationshi...

This study examined HIV testing and use, familiarity, and attitudes toward pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among HIV-negative gay and bisexual men in the United States. A national probability sample (N = 470) of three age cohorts (18–25, 34–41, and 52–59 years) completed a survey between March, 2016 and March, 2017. Most men did not meet CDC recomm...

Data used for this paper are available at Generations W1_PLOS ONE_PrEP.xls. (XLS)

Due to significant historical change in the late 20th and early 21st century related to both health and cultural attitudes toward homosexuality, gay men of distinct birth cohorts may diverge considerably in their health and identity development. We argue that research on gay men's health has not adequately considered the significance of membership...

Commentary Human Development 2015;58:350–364 DOI: 10.1159/000446054 Putting the Social into Personal Identity: The Master Narrative as Root Metaphor for Psychological and Developmental Science Commentary on McLean and Syed Phillip L. Hammack Erin E. Toolis University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif. , USA Key Words Culture · Identity · Interpretiv...

The way that public space is structured has significant implications for identity, social interaction, and participation in society. For those experiencing homelessness, with no or limited private space, survival hinges on the accessibility and livability of public space. However, the increasing privatization of public space in the United States ha...

Groups in conflict routinely use historical narrative to compete for status in intergroup encounters. This study examines power dynamics in conversations about history facilitated according to distinct social psychological theories. Israeli and Palestinian youth participating in an existing intergroup contact program were randomly assigned to eithe...

Homeless youth are an understudied and stigmatized group. In their daily lives, these youth confront negative social perceptions and harrowing circumstances related to survival, which may present challenges to the construction of a meaningful, coherent identity. Using the theoretical notion of narrative engagement (Hammack & Cohler, 2009), this stu...

Women and sexual minorities in the United States continue to experience subordinate status, and the policy gains they have made in areas such as reproductive rights and marriage equality continue to be challenged in political discourse. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of texts from the 2012 Democratic and Republican national conventions...

This chapter outlines a theoretical position on culture and human development grounded in cultural psychology’s theses of psychological diversity, mutual constitution, and linguistic mediation, as well as a view of identity and narrative linked to critical perspectives on language and power. Adolescence represents the life course moment of cultural...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective provides an in-depth and comprehensive synopsis of theory and research on human development, with every chapter drawing together findings from cultures around the world. This includes a focus on cultural change, migration, and globalization. The handbook covers t...

Intergroup dialog affords an opportunity to study the deployment of historical narratives in conversation. In this field study, Israeli and Palestinian adolescents were randomly assigned to one of two conditions of intergroup dialog commonly in practice in intergroup encounter programs. In the coexistence condition, facilitators encouraged particip...

This chapter develops three points of elaboration and theoretical expansion upon Cohler's (1982) treatise on personal narrative and life course. First, we highlight Cohler's emphasis on an interpretive, idiographic approach to the study of lives and reveal the radicalism of this approach, particularly in its ability to interrogate the lived experie...

We analyzed speeches made by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to reveal how each president justified post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policy. Our analysis revealed that both Bush and Obama delegitimized terrorists by distinguishing them from other legitimate political categories, by emphasizing the morally condemnable and apolitically moti...

To address the dearth of research on the process and meaning participants make of intergroup contact in settings of intractable conflict, Israeli, Palestinian and US youth were randomly assigned to conditions of dialogue-based contact rooted in distinct social psychological theories. Over a 2-week period, participants completed diaries containing s...

American Indians must negotiate the cultural and psychological legacy of colonialism as they construct coherent, purposive individual and communal narratives. Analysis of the life stories of highly generative members of these groups who have emerged as leaders offers important insights for psychological adaptation in the context of the historical l...

Researchers have yet to account for the potentially unique experiences of emerging adults who are in or seeking to be in a relationship with a same-sex romantic partner. This article articulates an agenda for research focused on better understanding and addressing the health and well-being of emerging adults in or pursuing same-sex romantic relatio...

In his speech formally nominating US president Barack Obama for re-election at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton used the power of language to forge a link between Obama and the would-be voter. He crafted contrasting societal narratives of ‘you’re-on-your-own’ versus ‘we’re-all-in-this-together’, evoking contras...

Jewish Americans’ opinions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict influence both the Israeli and the U.S. governments. Consequently, the Jewish American diaspora can act to promote or inhibit the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Several different sociopsychological beliefs have been postulated to lead individuals to support the perpetu...

Informed by social identity theory and a rhetorical approach to the study of social category construction in social interaction, this study analyzed the nature and function of participant utterances in two conditions of intergroup dialogue about history between Israelis and Palestinians. Across conditions that sought to either emphasize recategoriz...

Contemporary Israeli youth are socialized in the context of intractable nationalist conflict with Palestinians, characterized by a “master” historical narrative of Jewish Israeli identity that exacerbates the conflict. This exploratory study examines the relation between this master narrative and the personal narratives of youth motivated to partic...

Clashing narratives and power asymmetry can serve as obstacles to promoting reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. In this study, we examine transcripts from a contact encounter among Israeli, Palestinian, and American adolescents. The first aim of this study was to identify the basic root narratives articulated by the Israeli and Palest...

Bertram Joseph Cohler, our dear mentor and close friend, died on May 9, 2012. Bert was born on December 3, 1938, in Lake Forest, Illinois. Bert leaves an intellectual legacy in several key branches of the discipline, including social and personality psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, lesbian and gay psycholog...

In this chapter we focus on a key sociopsychological mechanism that frees human beings from their normative and moral restrains and therefore leads individuals and groups to engage in acts that intentionally harm others, including discrimination, oppression, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Delegitimization is defined as the categorization of a...

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (GLBTQ) youth face oppression despite some increases in cultural support for GLBTQ individuals. Research has revealed the psychological and social distress associated with oppression and the benefits of peer social support programs. This study was conducted to analyze the types and frequenc...

The idea of narrative has become increasingly appropriated in empirical research in both psychology and politics, yet there is a notable absence of integrative frameworks that specify a conceptual and methodological approach to narrative research in political psychology. An integrative conceptual framework is proposed and anchored in four principle...

Since early legal, medical and scientific discussions of homosexuality, the discipline of psychology has assumed an instrumental role in both maintaining and challenging cultural and political perspectives on same-sex desire, identity and behaviour. This article presents a critical historical review of psychological research on same-sex desire in t...

The social and political context of sexual identity development in the United States has changed dramatically since the mid twentieth century. Same-sex attracted individuals have long needed to reconcile their desire with policies of exclusion, ranging from explicit outlaws on same-sex activity to exclusion from major social institutions such as ma...

Psychological science has assumed an increasingly explicit role in public policies related to same-sex desire in the United States. In this article, we present a historical analysis of the relationship between policy discourse and scientific discourse on homosexuality produced within U.S. psychology over the 20th and early 21st centuries through th...

In this study we examine the content and frequency of ethnocentric talk during a peace education camp with Israeli, Palestinian and American participants. We compared participants' invocation of national narratives, use of collective pronouns and statements rejecting the action of the collective across different conversational conditions. We found...

Intractable political conflicts are characterized by a sociopsychological infrastructure (Bar-Tal, 200717. Bar-Tal , D. ( 2007 ). Sociopsychological foundations of intractable conflicts . American Behavioral Scientist , 50 , 1430 – 1453 . [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) in which individuals are subject to a cognitive and emotiona...

In a renewed call for interpretive psychological science, this paper argues for narrative as an integrative concept to interrogate mental experience and human development in social and political context. Master narrative engagement is defined as the process by which individuals engage with and internalize competing storylines of history and identit...

Since the late 19th century, Jews and Arabs have been locked in an intractable battle for national recognition in a land of tremendous historical and geopolitical significance. While historians and political scientists have long analyzed the dynamics of this bitter conflict, rarely has an archaeology of the mind of those who reside within the matri...

Contemporary Palestinian youth engage with a tragic master narrative of loss and dispossession supported by the social structure of ongoing intractable conflict and Israeli military occupation. This article illustrates a narrative and idiographic approach to research in cultural psychology, interrogating the relationship between constructions of pe...

Scholars across a range of disciplines have increasingly argued that the intractability of political conflicts is rooted in the proliferation of competing historical narratives. These collective narratives construct the basis of a sense of shared collective identity. Narrative and identity are thus increasingly conceptualized as fundamental to the...

Contemporary Palestinian citizens of Israel must negotiate disparate identities as they construct a “hyphenated” self. Their status as a national indigenous minority places them in a particular location of subordination and existential insecurity within Israeli society, which has been accentuated during the intensification of conflict between Israe...

Guided by theories of narrative identity, racial identity development, andFreire's (1970)notion of conscientização, this paper presents an interpretive analysis of Barack Obama's personal narrative. Obama's narrative represents a progressive story of self-discovery in which he seeks to develop a configuration of identity (Erikson, 1959; Schachter,...

Youth with same-sex desire undergo a process of narrative engagement as they construct configurations of identity that provide meaning and coherence with available sexual taxonomies. This article presents a theoretical analysis and four case studies centering on the relationship among context, desire, and identity for youth with same-sex desire. Th...

When viewed through the broad lens of social history, the story of sexual identity across place and time is infused with extraordinary contextual specificity. Different cultures in different historical eras have organized human sexuality in a multiplicity of diverse forms and functions, constructing stories of sexual identity that serve a larger so...

When viewed through the broad lens of social history, the story of sexual identity across place and time is infused with extraordinary contextual specificity. Different cultures in different historical eras have organized human sexuality in a multiplicity of diverse forms and functions, constructing stories of sexual identity that serve a larger so...

Contemporary Israeli youth are socialized in the context of intractable nationalist conflict with Palestinians, characterized by a “master” historical narrative of Jewish Israeli identity that exacerbates the conflict. This exploratory study examines the relation between this master narrative and the personal narratives of youth motivated to partic...

Ali, a young Palestinian Muslim, introduces a fundamental dilemma for peace education programs: How can identities attuned to peaceful coexistence be cultivated in the context of an ongoing intractable conflict? In the midst of intractability, what role can peace education assume? The ideological setting of Ali’s life story at age sixteen, which wo...

This article presents a tripartite model of identity that integrates cognitive, social, and cultural levels of analysis in a multimethod framework. With a focus on content, structure, and process, identity is defined as ideology cognized through the individual engagement with discourse, made manifest in a personal narrative constructed and reconstr...

This paper examines the application of concepts of normal adolescence pioneered by Offer and colleagues to the study of gay and lesbian youth. Adolescent development among this population demonstrates remarkable historical variability along the lines of generation-cohort, revealing the utility of a life-course approach to the study of normal adoles...

Assuming a cultural psychology approach, this study examines the life stories of 30 Israeli and Palestinian adolescent participants in a coexistence program. Prior to participation, youth identity was characterized by polarization in which an ingroup ideology is internalized with little understanding of the outgroup’s ideological perspective. Three...

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm‐induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has...

Through the application of life course theory to the study of sexual orientation, this paper specifies a new paradigm for research on human sexual orientation that seeks to reconcile divisions among biological, social science, and humanistic paradigms. Recognizing the historical, social, and cultural relativity of human development, this paradigm a...

Through the application of life course theory to the study of sexual orienta- tion, this paper specifies a new paradigm for research on human sexual orienta- tion that seeks to reconcile divisions among biological, social science, and hu- manistic paradigms. Recognizing the historical, social, and cultural relativity of human development, this para...

Using both surveys and the experience sampling method (ESM), community violence exposure, social support factors, and depressive and anxiety symptoms were assessed longitudinally among inner-city African American adolescents. Moderator models were tested to determine protective factors for youth exposed to community violence. Several social support...

We examined the role of family stress as a mediator of the relationship between poverty and depressed mood among 1,704 low-income, inner-city African- American adolescents. Nearly half of participants (47%) reported clinically significant levels of depressive symptoms. Being female, reporting higher levels of family stress, and scoring higher on a...

Gay and bisexual men who indicated they were currently in a primary relationship with another man (N = 230) completed measures of HIV treatment attitudes, sexual risk behaviour and sexual sensation seeking. Results indicate non-primary partner sexual activity is common in many gay relationships and men in non-exclusive relationships possessed great...

With the recent increase in empirical studies investigating depression among urban African American youth comes the need to refine and integrate theoretical perspectives that address culture-specific etiologic mechanisms and developmental trajectories. The purpose of this article is to review four theories of depression relevant to the study of Afr...

Theories underlying psychotherapeutic interventions are subject to empirical and ideological scrutiny. This article reviews, integrates, and synthesizes core ideological critiques of Beck's cognitive therapy, recognized as the progenitor of most cognitive-behavioral therapies. The context of this review and its philosophical implications are discus...

The Children's Television Act of 1990 requires broadcasters to provide programming that furthers the development of children. The purpose of this study was to examine second through sixth grade children's learning from educational programs broadcast by affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX compared to PBS and Nickelodeon. Using the Internet as a dat...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Human Development, December 2006. Includes bibliographical references.