Petra Hesse is an associate professor of human development. Trained in developmental and clinical psychology and international relations, she has been teaching courses on the human life cycle, social-emotional development, abnormal and counseling psychology, children and the media, and children’s political socialization.<\/p>\n
Her research interests are children’s emotional development and emotional education, children’s political socialization and political education, and children’s media and media literacy education.<\/p>\n
She has written for a variety of European and American publications: Psychosozial, Telemedium, International Journal of Mental Health, Young Children, and Contemporary Psychological Review. In graduate school, she coedited a monograph on emotional development and coauthored several book chapters on emotional development. As a postdoctoral fellow, she wrote about children’s fears of nuclear war.<\/p>\n
Since her arrival at Wheelock, she has written about children’s enemy images in different cultures, about German adolescents before and after reunification, and about children’s reactions to 9\/11. She produced a videotape and wrote several articles and book chapters about political messages on children’s television. Hesse’s most recent publications are about media literacy education.<\/p>\n