My background is in mainstream social-personality psychology, but my current research interests fall into many areas.
Most of my current work is in the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts.
For creativity, we have focused on a few classic problems: (1) how do people come up with good ideas?, (2) what are individual differences in creativity like?, and (3) how can researchers assess creativity?
Along with some valiant graduate students and many great collaborators, I have been arguing that creative thought is deeply executive and requires the ability to control thought and attention. Creativity thus starts to look a lot like intelligence. We have published several papers in Intelligence and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts on the role of executive and strategic mechanisms in creative thought. A recent paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences gives a good snapshot of our approach.
In ongoing work, we are particularly interested in humor as an example of creative thought. We have been developing ways to measure creative humor production, studying how people judge the funniness of their own ideas, and exploring individual differences in the ability to generate humor on the spot. Humor looks to be a major direction in the coming years.
A related line of work is in the science of aesthetics. I have argued for bringing aesthetic experience under the umbrella of mainstream emotion science, and as part of this I have shown how appraisal theories of emotion extend and expand theories of aesthetics in useful ways. I won the Berlyne Award, an early career award given by Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, for this line of work. Of the emotions, my favorite is probably interest. I have published extensively on what makes things interesting, the role of interest and curiosity in models of motivation, and the role of interest in aesthetic experience.
More recently, I have become interested in aesthetic experiences that are off the beaten track, such as confusion, awe, chills, and feeling like crying, and in aesthetic experiences outside of the lab, such as museum galleries and virtual spaces.
Over the years, our work has become increasingly methodological and statistical.
I have a long-standing interest in experience sampling methods. My collaborators and I have used experience-sampling to study a range of topics, such as mind-wandering, social disinterest, and the expression of clinical and sub-clinical features in everyday life. Recent studies have used experience-sampling and daily-diary methods with clinical samples of adults with major depressive disorder, ADHD, or PTSD. Katherine Cotter and I wrote a didactic book on daily life methods for researchers curious in learning them.
More recently, much of our work has focused on psychometric methods and applications, particularly item response theory and exploratory graph analysis. Some of this work involves evaluating and refining old scales; other work develops new ones.
In our current work, we have been moving into "big data" methods associated with machine learning, with soft spots for tree models and text analysis.