Much of my research has explored the political psychology of foreign policy, including the way leaders use information and advice, the way we form impressions of other countries, and the role of emotion in foreign policy.

My book on leadership and learning, Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from Their Advisors?, explores the effects of personality on the way leaders gather and use advice. The danger of groupthink is well known. Born out of a desire to preserve harmony and access to power in high-level policymaking groups, advisors may fail to “speak truth to power,” and leaders may fail to listen even when they do. The opposite sort of danger, however, is less appreciated. Particularly for more introverted leaders, highly diverse and contentious groups lead to a condition of policy gridlock or “deadlock” that is incapacitating in its own way. The challenge for all types of leaders is to devise arrangements for getting advice and testing policy options that is best suited to their personality and learning style.

I am also engaged in a long-term research project on the way people think about countries—both their own country and other countries—and the way these country images shape foreign policy. Perceived differences among countries can have profound consequences for foreign policy. One offshoot of this research is my forthcoming book, Seeing Japan, which argues that Japan’s image in the United States, China, and South Korea is subject to emotional pressures that go beyond the “heavy brush strokes” of geopolitics and the legacy of the Second World War.

Recently, as an extension of the argument developed in my book on Japan and in a paper delivered in a workshop on descriptive research, I’ve begun to investigate what we know about the range of emotions that influence foreign policy. Steve McAvene and I recently published a paper in International Politics, “Mapping the Emotional Terrain of Foreign Policy,” that uses the text of UN Special Session Proceedings and speeches delivered by national leaders to study the way emotion is structured in international relations. In this paper, we develop a “time-control-valence” (TCV) model of emotion in foreign policy.

More generally, in a co-edited book on Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations: An Ideational Alliance, Vaughn Shannon and I argued that constructivists and political psychologists have more to gain from intellectual cooperation than to lose from failing to maintain the “purity” of the differences in their outlook.