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Research Interests
The study of personality is the last refuge of the generalist in psychology. As such, my interests in personality theory include the biologicalbasis of personality and motivation, psychometric theory, the structure of daily mood and models of attention and memory.
Recent work in the Personality, Motivation, and Cognition Laboratory has focused on the interactive effects of personality (e.g., impulsivity, trait anxiety) and situational determinants of motivation (e.g., time-of-day, caffeine, films, monetary incentives, exercise) as they combine to influence motivational states (energetic and tense arousal), and how these motivational states in turn affect cognitive processes (sustained attention, working-memory capacity, long-term memory) to determine cognitive performance. The long term goal is to develop a better understanding of how individual differences interact with situational moderators to affect efficient information processing.
Additional work in personality theory has focused on the personality characteristics associated with differential sensitivities to cues for reward and punishment. Current work is being done on the personality and situational determinants of affective state and dimensional analyses of affect.
I am also working on the Personality Project , an attempt to bring information about current personality theory and research to the readers of the World Wide Web. Suggestions for additions to this project are very welcome.
Recently, I have become interested in using the statistical analysis package, R, as a powerful descriptive and analytical tool. As have many others faced with the problem of learning R, I have developed a short tutorial to help others. A shorter form of this tutorial is devoted to basic statistical procedures for doing personality research. I have started to convert many of my older programs into R. So far, the most useful conversion is the Very Simple Structure program for determining the optimal number of factors.
Selected Publications
Zinbarg, R.E., Revelle, W., Yovel, I., & Li. W. (2005). Cronbach's Alpha, Revelle's Beta, McDonald's Omega: Their relations with each and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability. Psychometrika
Yovel, I., Revelle, W., Mineka, S. (2005). Who Sees Trees before Forest? The Obsessive-Compulsive Style of Visual Attention Psychological Science
Revelle, W. (2003) Emotions are to Personality as Weather is to Climate: Analogical reasoning as a tool for scientific investigation. Paper presented at the ETS conference on Emotional Intelligence. November, 2003.
Ortony, A., Norman, D.A. & Revelle, W. (2004): Effective Functioning: A Three Level Model of Affect, Motivation, Cognition, and Behavior. in J. M. Fellous & M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Machine. New York: Oxford University Press.
