Professors are a hard-working lot, with classes to prepare, papers to correct, committees to chair, and intellectual knots to untangle. It's remarkable, then, that after thirty years at Kenyon, Professor of Psychology Allan Fenigstein still exudes cheerfulness and calm -- all the more remarkable because he studies such emotionally fraught subjects as infidelity, paranoia, and the Holocaust.

"In my soul of souls, I see myself as a kid," says Fenigstein, whose quick smile and open manner suggest that the secret of keeping stress at bay involves maintaining one's sense of perspective. For Fenigstein, perspective may have something to do with the fact that his parents lived through the Holocaust. He understands, in intimate terms, the relative insignificance of commonplace stress -- or, as he puts it, that "being busy is no justification for feeling sorry for yourself."

A widely published authority on paranoia, Fenigstein has also done research on self-consciousness and self-esteem. He is known for having created a nationally used scale system for measuring self-consciousness. His work on the psychology of infidelity seeks to explain gender differences (men feel particularly threatened by a partner's sexual infidelity, women by emotional infidelity) through both evolutionary theory and socialization theory. His findings, which point to a role for evolution, have sparked some controversy and inspired Fenigstein to pursue follow-up research.

In part because of his family background, Fenigstein regularly volunteers to team-teach Kenyon's interdisciplinary seminar on the Holocaust. He is particularly interested in the psychology of the perpetrators -- what made ordinary people do monstrous things? -- and he has published several papers on the subject.

Given the intensity of the subjects he studies, Fenigstein is well served by his sense of perspective. And by a personal maxim: "Be a mensch. Make a difference."