Clinical Associate Professor Emerita, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
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.
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.
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 co-edited a monograph on emotional development and co-authored several book chapters on emotional development. As a post-doctoral fellow, she wrote about children’s fears of nuclear war.
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.