Fretting Less, Writing More: Some Food for Thought with Paul Silvia
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Starts at 1:30 PM
Via Zoom
Register here
For any questions please contact humanities@ucmerced.edu
About the speaker:
Paul Silvia received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas in 2001, and has worked in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) since 2002. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2016 and is currently the Lucy Spinks Keker Excellence Professor. He's interested in the intersection of motivation and cognition, particularly how people guide their thoughts and how emotional states motivate thinking.His research on self-awareness examines how self-focused attention influences self-evaluation. Recent work has explored the role of conscious awareness in the self-evaluation process and how self-awareness influences the self-regulation of effort-related cardiovascular responses. This research has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).Another line of work concerns the emotion of interest, particularly the vexing problem of what makes things interesting, boring, and confusing. Most of this work is carried out in the domain of aesthetics and the arts, such as visual art, poetry, and film. His work on interest and aesthetic emotions received the Berlyne Award, an early career award given by APA Division 10. Additionally, he has published over 9 books.
