Governed by Affect offers a new history of psychology's contradictory and contested public life in the United States and beyond since World War II, with a special emphasis on a series of transformations which have occurred since the 1970s. For both policymakers and ordinary people, the discipline of psychology has come to furnish a seemingly inexhaustible array of tools and concepts for making individuals healthier, wealthier, and happier. At the heart of this psychologized neo-liberalism is the notion that attention or the will exists as a scarce resource in a distracted and tempting world. Breaking with the austere and deliberative rationality of Cold War cognitive science, the new psychology depicts individuals as beholden to their unbridled passions and wants. At the same time as this unprecedented cultural influence, psychologists' expertise came under greater scrutiny than ever before, with the discipline finding itself mired in a pair of moral and epistemological crises which th
