Paul Silvia
Department of Psychology
P. O. Box 26170
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27402-6170
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (336) 256-0007
Fax: (336) 334-5066
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Viewed broadly, my research explores cognitive influences on motivation and emotion.
My research on self-awareness examines how self-focused attention influences self-evaluation. Ongoing research explores (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.
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.
Regarding methods, I'm interested in experience-sampling techniques and ways of analyzing within-person data (e.g., mixture generalizations of multilevel models).
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.
- 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. (in progress). An untitled book on an undisclosed topic: Be afraid, be very afraid. 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). Cognitive appraisals and interest in visual art: Exploring an appraisal theory of aesthetic emotions. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 23, 119–133.
- 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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