Social Psychology Quarterly

The Cooley-Mead Address presented an overview of the development of identity theory over the past five decades. This development of identity theory has followed the scientific pathway of replication, refinement, and advancement of new ideas to inform the study of roles, persons, and group identities in everyday life. This paper outlines the concepts that are foundational to identity theory, the measurement of identity, the theoretical refinements that highlight the organic nature of the theory that have led to greater specification and the addition of conceptual measures of the theory, the empirical research and methodological development in the concepts of identity theory, and suggestions for future research.

How do perceptions of the economy moderate the association between financial strain and powerlessness? This article tests four novel hypotheses using two nationally representative samples of American (N = 2,466) and Canadian (N = 2,501) workers collected in late 2023. The amplified threat and protective economic optimism hypotheses suggest that for those who are financially struggling, perceiving the economy as “poor” is associated with more powerlessness and perceiving it as “good” is associated with less powerlessness, respectively, relative to those who perceive the economy as “fair”; the comparison-protection and meritocratic attribution hypotheses propose the opposite. We find support for the meritocratic attribution hypothesis in both countries. Those who are financially struggling report higher levels of powerlessness if they perceive a good economy than if they perceive a poor or fair economy. In other words, the positive association between personal financial strain and powerlessness is stronger among those who perceive a good economy. By contrast, we do not find evidence that perceiving a poor economy weakens financial strain's association with powerlessness relative to those who perceive a fair economy.

A central tenet in social psychology is the importance of perceived control in the stress process; another focuses on the well-being implications of mismatches between preferred and actual arrangements. Integrating these perspectives and leveraging the pandemic-driven shift to remote work, we examine “work-place captivity,” the misalignment between employees’ actual and preferred work locations combined with feeling a lack of control over location. Applying mixed-effects models on nationally representative panel data (April 2021 to April 2022) of employees who worked from home at some point during the pandemic, we reveal heterogeneities in work-place captivity: Hispanic workers, those without a college degree, and on-site workers are more likely to experience it. We find considerable fluidity in work-place captivity over time. Both sustained and transitions into captivity predict declines in subjective well-being. This study contributes to understanding the links between structure and agency in times of organizational fluidity around the geography of work.

The present work takes a multimethod approach to examine young U.S. adults’ engagement across political, religious, and civic activities. Of key interest was how their motivations to engage (internal vs. external), emotions when thinking about the cause (other-focused vs. self-focused), and political ideology related to their past and future engagement. We collected 1,000 survey responses and 30 interview transcripts of young adults ages 18 to 29 to identify patterns in these outcomes. We argue that although motivation of varying sources can drive engagement, the source of young people's motivation (internal vs. external) has critical implications for whether social engagement is short-lived or potentially persists into the future. In addition, the motivational and emotional reactions that the participants had to their engagement varied as a function of their political ideology. Implications for understanding the factors that may strengthen engagement and a deeper consideration of the nature of external motivation are discussed.

Drawing on 40 interviews with LGBTQ+ people about their health experiences, we examine the consequences of identity nonrecognition—which occurs when mutual recognition of the situationally relevant identities for self and other in an encounter cannot be established—and discordance in the definition of the situation. We found that respondents experienced identity nonrecognition in two ways: (1) identity reductionism, or moments when providers leaned on medical authority, heteronormativity, and essentialist ideas to reduce their LGBTQ+ patients to biological entities, and (2) identity rejection, or interactional moments between patient and provider outside of medical decision-making when respondents asserted their gender and/or sexual identities mattered in the health encounter but found that providers rejected these identities. This work contributes to social psychological theories of identities and medical sociology scholarship by situating identity nonrecognition as an overlooked but important identity-relevant stressor, examining the importance of power differentials in defining the situation, and offering new conceptual tools for understanding the perpetuation of inequality.