1st Edition
Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-Being The Search for the 'Good Life' and the 'Body Perfect'
H. Dittmar, Understanding the Impact of Consumer Culture. To Have is to Be? Psychological Functions of Material Possessions. Consuming Passions? Psychological Motives for Buying Consumer Goods. with Gardardsdottir & Jankovic, Is This as Good as it Gets? Materialistic Values and Well-being. I Shop Therefore I am? Compulsive Buying and Identity-seeking. with Halliwell, Does Size Matter? The Impact of Ultra-thin Media Models on Women's Body Image and Advertising Effectiveness. with Halliwell, Think "Ideal" and Feel Bad? Using Self-Discrepancies to Understand Negative Media Effects. with Banerjee, What is Beautiful and Who is 'Cool'? Consumer Society and Socialisation. What is the Price of Consumer Culture? Consequences and Implications.
Biography
Helga Dittmar, D.Phil, is Reader in Psychology at the University of Sussex in England, where she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications, after beginning her studies in psychology at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Her research focuses on mass consumer society and how this has an impact on people’s sense of who they are and their well-being. Her work has received strong media interest (TV, radio) and includes: psychological functions of material possessions, buying motivations, compulsive buying, materialism, as well as the influence of the mass media on the body image of girls, women and men.
"... The author and her contributors write commandingly and offer a well-structured, well-presented analysis of the existing studies and illustrate quite succinctly the maladaptive consequences of a society and its individuals who equate material success with self-worth." - Kristina Downing-Orr, clinical psychologist, London, UK, in The Psychologist
"Dr. Dittmar has done us a great service by writing a book on the importance of 'consuming' to society and to individual identity and well-being that is both scholarly and accessible. The book tackles some tough questions regarding who and what people want to be, how they go about constructing their 'selves', and just what is it that people want from life and why. I wish more research psychologists were writing books like this." - James E. Maddux, George Mason University, Washington, USA
"Dittmar's book provides a valuable review of her ground-breaking psychological studies of consumer culture. In my mind, the book's strongest contribution is its explication of how identity-related processes help explain the damage that occurs when individuals take on the materialistic values and unhealthy body images encouraged in our contemporary world." - Tim Kasser, Knox College, USA
"Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-Being: The Search for the 'Good Life' and the 'Body Perfect' discusses an important and timely issue - the psychological impact of mass consumption that visibly pervades our consumer culture. ... The author makes a contribution by focusing on identity." - Candice R. Hollenbeck & George M. Zinkhan, PsycCRITIQUES
