James Maddux, Ph.D., is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology. He is the former director of the clinical psychology doctoral program at Mason and former editor of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Alabama in 1982. His major scholarly interest is how theory and research from social psychology can be used to understand psychological adjustment, subjective well-being, and health-related behavior. Most of his research has been concerned with the role of agency beliefs, also known as self-efficacy beliefs, in psychological well-being and health-related behavior. He writes regular columns on the science of well-being for our center.
He has been a visiting professor at Klaipeda University in Lithuania; the Free University in Berlin, Germany; and Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, Austria. Maddux is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association Divisions of General, Clinical, and Health Psychology; a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science; and a former member of the Examination Committee of the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards. He is co-editor (with Barbara Winstead of Old Dominion University) of Psychopathology: Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding (now in its 6th edition), co-editor (with June Tangney) of Social Psychological Foundations of Clinical Psychology, and editor of Subjective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction: A Social Psychological Perspective for the Routledge series "Frontiers in Social Psychology" (now in its 2nd edition).
Since his retirement from Mason in 2011, he has traveled extensively internationally for conferences, lectures, workshops, and classroom teaching – mainly in countries where clinical psychology is an evolving scientific discipline and profession, such as the former communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe. Read more about his research and visit his Mason website.