On the first day of any of the psychology courses she teaches, Janis Walters sets a key expectation for her students.
“I tell them that by the end of the course, they should have a grasp of basic psychological concepts,” says Walters, an associate professor in BMCC’s Psychology Department. “But more importantly, they should be able to apply them in their everyday life.” The proper study of psychology, she explains, goes beyond textbooks and theories. “The challenge is to get away from the dryness of theory and make it real.”
Walters teaches courses in personality development and abnormal psychology; in all cases, she avoids framing concepts in terms of moral absolutes—right vs. wrong—pushing her students instead “to understand who a person is, based on where they came from, their experiences, and all the social, economic cultural and environmental factors that shape personality.”
How personalities are formed
By the same token, Walters has little use for the timeworn “nurture vs. nature” debate. “Actually, I think most serious psychologists now believe the debate is outdated and that personalities are formed by a combination of inherited and acquired traits,” she says. “Most people in the field agree that neurotransmitters affect our behavior, but neurotransmitters are affected by our environment—so there are complex interactions between the two.”
Born in Australia, Walters moved to New York after completing her undergraduate studies. She earned a Masters degree at City College and a doctorate in educational psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She then went on to a multifaceted career in medical education and clinical psychology, returning to school to do a postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis at Adelphi College. She joined the BMCC faculty in 2000.
In teaching about—and studying—personality development, Walters is particularly interested in the capacity of individuals to change and grow. “We come into the world with ingrained biological temperaments and characteristics, which set the stage,” she says. “But what happens in our environment after that determines how our personality unfolds and develops.” But do people really have the capacity to change?
The capacity to change
“I believe if someone wants to change, they can change,” Walters says. “Of course, when someone is in a stressful environment, they may revert back to earlier ways of coping. But for the most part, we do grow with our experiences. We do change.”
Culture, she says, can play a key role in shaping personality. “In Japan, for example, children are encouraged from an early age to focus on the welfare of the group and individualistic behavior is discouraged. Conversely, here in the U.S., students are expected to speak up and show their individualism in the classroom. So culture is an important factor, and I incorporate it into my teaching as much as I can.”
Not surprisingly, Walters derives great pleasure from the cultural diversity of the BMCC student body. “The students here are diverse and non-traditional—and they bring out the best in me,” she says, adding, “I was a non-traditional student too.”
