Paul Silvia

Institution University of North Carolina at Greensboro Current Position Associate Professor Highest Degree Ph.D. in Psychology from University of Kansas, 2001 Research Interests Emotion Motivation/Goal Setting Research Methods/Assessment Self/Identity Social Cognition Laboratory Home Page Tools for Self-Awareness Research Courses Taught Academic Writing Advanced Research Methods Advanced Social Psychology Attitudes and Social Influence Cognition & Emotion Interest, Curiosity, and Intrinsic Motivation Motivation & Emotion Psychology of Art, Creativity, & Genius Social Psychology Theories of Personality   Paul Silvia Department of Psychology University of North Carolina at Greensboro P. O. Box 26170 Greensboro, North Carolina 27402-6170 U.S.A. Home Page Phone: (336) 256-0007 Fax: (336) 334-5066 Viewed broadly, my research explores cognitive influences on motivation and emotion. My research on interest examines the cognitive appraisal processes that make things interesting or boring. So far, I've outlined the pattern of appraisals that cause interest and explored how an appraisal model generalizes to diverse areas. My book "Exploring the Psychology of Interest" (2006, Oxford UP) takes an integrative view of how interest has been studied across the subfields of psychology. My ongoing work places interest within the context of other "knowledge emotions," such as confusion, surprise, and awe. I'm particularly interested in emotional aspects of art and aesthetics. This research examines how appraisal processes influence emotional responses to art, explores similarities between aesthetic emotions and everyday emotional experience, and advocates for a model of aesthetics informed by mainstream theories of emotion. I received the 2006 Berlyne Award from APA Division 10 for my research on aesthetics. My research on self-awareness examines how self-focused attention influences self-evaluation. Recent work has explored (1) the role of conscious awareness in the self-evaluation process; (2) how self-awareness influences the self-regulation of effort; (3) underlying similarities between spontaneous and controlled self-criticism; and (4) self-regulatory processes that underlie social anxiety. This research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. Regarding methods, I'm interested in experience-sampling techniques and tools for analyzing within-person data, particularly novel applications of GLLAM models to experience-sampling designs. The psychology of writing is a new interest. I recently wrote a short book called "How To Write A Lot": it describes how to overcome the motivational and self-regulatory problems involved in academic writing. APA Books published it in January, 2007. If you find writing difficult, struggle with "finding time to write," or believe that psychology books should have a lot of distracting, irrelevant remarks about coffee, Icelandic, and Bernese mountain dogs, then you might find this book helpful. Books: Duval, T. S., & Silvia, P. J. (2001). Self-awareness and causal attribution: A dual-systems theory. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Feldman, D. B., & Silvia, P. J. (in press). Public speaking for psychologists: A lighthearted guide to research presentations, job talks, and other opportunities to embarrass yourself. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Silvia, P. J. (2006). Exploring the psychology of interest. New York: Oxford University Press. Silvia, P. J., Delaney, P. F., & Marcovitch, S. (2009). What psychology majors could (and should) be doing: An informal guide to research experience and professional skills. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Journal Articles: Brown, L. H., Silvia, P. J., Myin-Germeys, I., & Kwapil, T. R. (2007). When the need to belong goes wrong: The expression of social anhedonia and social anxiety in daily life. Psychological Science, 18, 778-782. Duval, T. S., & Silvia, P. J. (2002). Self-awareness, probability of improvement, and the self-serving bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 49-61. Kane, M. J., Brown, L. H., Little, J. C., Silvia, P. J., Myin-Germeys, I., & Kwapil, T. R. (2007). For whom the mind wanders, and when: An experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychological Science, 18, 614-621. Phillips, A. G., & Silvia, P. J. (2005). Self-awareness and the emotional consequences of self-discrepancies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 703-713. Silvia, P. J. (2008). Interest, the curious emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 57-60. Silvia, P. J. (2005). Emotional responses to art: From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion. Review of General Psychology, 9, 342-357. Silvia, P. J. (2005). What is interesting? Exploring the appraisal structure of interest. Emotion, 5, 89-102. Silvia, P. J., & Brown, E. M. (2007). Anger, disgust, and the negative aesthetic emotions: Expanding an appraisal model of aesthetic experience. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1, 100-106. Silvia, P. J., & Duval, T. S. (2001). Objective self-awareness theory: Recent progress and enduring problems. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 230-241. Turner, S. A., Jr., & Silvia, P. J. (2006). Must interesting things be pleasant? A test of competing appraisal structures. Emotion, 6, 670-674.

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