Michael D Robinson

North Dakota State University | NDSU · Department of Psychology

This conceptualization describes how positive and negative mood states, information processing, cognitive processing strategies, and group interaction combine to influence group judgment and decision making. The crux of the conceptualization is a dominant cognitive processing strategy. Positive moods inform group members that the situation is benig...

Projective tests, which were thought to provide key insights concerning motivation, have largely disappeared from personality psychology. Participants in the present studies (total N = 924) were presented with a Revised Animal Preference Test (RAPT) that quantifies desires to be predator animals in a reliable manner. Drawing from several literature...

The field of ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) could benefit from new perspectives concerning dynamic operations. According to a recent perspective, variations in ability EI are likely to be linked to variations in skills related to evaluation. This perspective contends, perhaps counterintuitively, that higher levels of ability EI...

Objective and Background The personality trait of agreeableness is linked to a number of core tendencies (e.g., empathy, warmth) that operate in a feeling‐based manner. Following considerations of this type, it is proposed that the motivations and characteristics of agreeable individuals, relative to disagreeable individuals, should render them mor...

New efforts to understand the processes involved in ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) could reinvigorate this area of scholarship and research. It is proposed that participants with higher levels of ability EI are evaluation experts, which should be evident in the attitude domain. Study 1 (n = 148) probed for affective, cognitive,...

Why do human beings exhibit enduring personality differences, and to what extent are these differences shaped by biological and cultural evolution? Despite ongoing efforts, a consensus framework remains elusive. This paper introduces the Diversity Advantage Theory, partially shifting the focus from how personality impacts individuals to its influen...

Background: The practices described in Buddhist philosophy are essentially a suite of non-theistic cognitive and behavioral interventions designed to induce nonattachment (N-A), which can be defined in terms of the absence of a need for one's personal reality to be other than it is. Although meditative practices have received attention in multiple...

This conceptual integration addresses how positive and negative mood states influence information processing in groups. In addition to the impact of mood on attention and arousal, the review develops the notion of dominant cognitive processing strategies that mediate the influence of positive and negative moods on information processing in groups....

When people are asked to locate the self within the body, they most frequently point to the head or upper torso, which contains the heart. The head and the heart also figure prominently in conceptual metaphors for the self, with the head linked to cold rationality and the heart linked to warm emotionality. Three studies involving four daily diary s...

Theories of mental functioning have suggested its metaphoric basis. Drawing from theories of this type as well as from recent extensions of such theories to the personality processing realm, participants in three studies (total N = 452) were asked to indicate their relative preferences for the spatial concepts of up versus down, given that vertical...

Image schemas, such as those contrasting open and closed objects, are thought to play a fundamental role in self-regulation. Open objects encourage interactivity, which should contribute to well-being according to theories that emphasize processes such as engagement, exploration, and personal growth. On the basis of such reasoning, participants in...

When people are asked to locate the self, they frequently choose the head and heart regions of the body. These bodily regions, in turn, are linked to an extensive set of metaphors, including those that conceptualize the heart as the locus of authenticity, love, and passion. Based on such considerations as well as frameworks within the self and well...

The question of whether ability-related emotional intelligence (ability EI) predicts important life outcomes has attracted considerably more attention than the question of what ability EI consists of. In the present paper, the authors draw from the attitude and emotion literatures to suggest that the evaluation dimension of meaning is likely key in...

Introduction: Open objects encourage interactivity and closed objects discourage it. Repeated experiences with open and closed objects are thought to give rise to spatial concepts that can be used to represent a variety of entities such as societies, others, and the self. The present investigation pursues the idea that preferring that which is open...

Introduction Efforts to link ability-related emotional intelligence to organizational behavior have resulted in modest findings. Methods The present three studies examine whether a work-contextualized form of emotional intelligence (W-EI) may have greater predictive value, particularly in the organizational citizenship domain. Because W-EI should...

Two distinct literatures have evolved to study within-person changes in affect over time. One literature has examined affect dynamics with millisecond-level resolution under controlled laboratory conditions, and the second literature has captured affective dynamics across much longer timescales (e.g., hours or days) within the relatively uncontroll...

Classic views of stress emphasize its links to fight or flight motivation, but very few studies have attempted to model these relationships among human beings and the relevant connections have been challenged. The present two studies (total N = 257) used a scenario-based method to examine relations among stress-related thoughts, feelings, and behav...

According to psychological flexibility theory, fully experiencing one's emotions, even when they involve negative reactions, can enhance psychological well-being. In pursuit of this possibility, procedures capable of disentangling reaction intensities from reaction durations, in response to affective images, were developed and variations of this pa...

The positive psychology literature has suggested that states of positive activation (high arousal positive affect) are broadly beneficial, but the clinical psychology literature has highlighted phenomena counter to this idea. By aligning a dual process model of self-regulation with functions ascribed to emotional intelligence, the present investiga...

Whether to engage with the environment or not is critical to self-regulation and individual differences figure prominently in this decisional realm. The present studies (total N = 695) pursue the premise that important clues to these dynamics can be found by asking individuals whether they prefer the spatial concept of something (e.g., the self or...

Introduction: Image schemas are perceptual-motor simulations of the world that are likely to have broad importance in understanding models of the self and its regulatory operations. Methods: Seven samples of participants (total N = 1,011) rated their preferences for unspecified entities being “open” or “closed” and scores along this dimension were...

Mindfulness, defined in terms of greater attention and awareness concerning present experience, seems to have a number of psychological benefits, but very little of this research has focused on possible benefits within the workplace. Even so, mindfulness appears to buffer against stress and negative affect, which often predispose employees to devia...

Social connectedness has been linked to beneficial outcomes across domains, ages, and cultures. However, not everyone receives these benefits, as there are large individual differences in the capacities required to create and sustain functional interpersonal relationships. A great deal of research has been devoted to assessing and understanding the...

Evolution-based theorizing has suggested that it may be more mandatory to respond to threatening than rewarding stimuli and considerations of this type are likely to influence the shape and time course of positive versus negative emotional reactions. Hypotheses of this type were examined in four within-subject experiments (total N = 573 undergradua...

Objective: There are components of self that recognize effective courses of action and there are components of self that enact behaviors. The objective of the research was to examine alignment between these different components of self. Method: The present research assessed degrees of alignment between these two components of self, in the romant...

Purpose This paper aims to examine whether work-related emotional intelligence (W-EI) benefits job performance among knowledge-intensive workers. Design/methodology/approach Postdoctoral researchers (Study 1) and industry researchers (Study 2) were recruited (total N = 304). These knowledge workers completed an ability-based emotional intelligence...

Recent theorizing has emphasized the need to develop new models of successful self-control. Using materials that describe friendship-related challenges, potential ways of responding to them, and distinct frames targeting the acting self as well as more abstract ideas concerning effectiveness, three studies (total N = 542) quantified friendship-rela...

Individuals are thought to differ in the extent to which they attend to and value their feelings, as captured by the construct of attention to emotion. The well-being correlates of attention to emotion have been extensively studied, but the decision-making correlates have not been. A three study program of research (total N = 328) sought to examine...

Most theories of embodiment emphasize processes that are thought to be normative in nature. However, a consideration of the relevant processes (e.g., perception, awareness of afferent inputs, simulation abilities, metaphor usage) suggests that substantial individual differences could constitute the rule rather than the exception. The present chapte...

Dark personalities are those that are malevolent and antagonistic. Underlying such tendencies may be some attraction to perceptual darkness, given that darkness has been symbolically linked to malevolence and evil throughout human history. In the present research (total N = 501), participants were asked to choose whether they prefer dark or light a...

Perceptual achievements would seem to require multiple skills related to collecting and organizing sensory input, comparing this input to categorical templates, and making decisions in accordance with current goals. Individual differences in such processes should be especially apparent under conditions of degraded input, even in simple tasks. A thr...

Succeeding within the friendship domain is likely to require skills related to both agency and communion. Based on such thinking, this study assessed variations in friendship competence (FC) using a recently developed test that conceptualizes FC in ability‐based terms. In addition, extensive information was obtained from participants (n = 188), the...

Individuals are thought to differ in the extent to which they attend to and value their feelings, as captured by the construct of attention to emotion. The well-being correlates of attention to emotion have been extensively studied, but the decision-making correlates have not been. A three study program of research (total N = 328) sought to examine...

Meier et al. (2007) examined relations between the concept of God and the vertical dimension of space. They found that God-related concepts were recognized faster if they were associated with words related to a high location (Study 1) or actually presented in a high location (Study 2). Additionally, participants recalled God-like images as appearin...

In society as well as science, it is often suggested that more intense or peaked emotional reactions to stressors are a sign of disordered and unhealthy emotional systems. Using self-reported emotional reactions collected with high temporal precision, the present work, instead, is among the first to show that self-reported emotional reaction intens...

Buddhist teachings are essentially a set of cognitive and behavioral interventions designed to induce a mind state called nonattachment. Although Buddhist meditative practices have received empirical attention, the cognitive analogs to these behaviorally-oriented practiceshave not. Methods. Two studies investigated whether a highly secular cognitiv...

Relationships between mindfulness and positive affect have been less robust than relationships between mindfulness and negative affect, suggesting that skills in addition to mindfulness may be necessary in transforming mindfulness into a positive psychological force. The present three study program of research (total N = 413) pursued the idea that...

According to cybernetic models of self-regulation, the success of one's overt behaviors may very well depend on how well one controls one's behaviors in more momentary terms. The present research applies such perspectives to the analysis of individual differences in impulse control difficulties, which are thought to constitute losses of control in...

Emotional responses to aversive stimuli may be more mandatory than emotional responses to appetitive stimuli and extant theorizing suggests that negative reactions may be more peaked at maximum intensity. Parameters of this type were investigated within two experiments (total N = 198) in which emotional images were presented and re-presented as par...

Sex differences in fear and pain suggest the possibility of sex differences in an underlying threat reactivity (or punishment sensitivity) system. This system would prime vigorous behavioral responses to threatening input and give rise to stronger, more quickly changing feelings within threatening contexts. Two studies sought to model such processe...

Background: Recent findings have suggested that we can gain new insights into health decision-making and behavior through the use of a scenario-based approach to health competence (HC). Methods: The present research sought to investigate whether and how such individual differences would matter in the conduct of daily life, within two daily diary s...

Taking care of one’s health can require trading current feelings for longer-term considerations of health and well-being. The present research (total N = 366) sought to assess ego operations of this type in terms of the extent to which the self would be capable of responding to health-challenging situations in ways deemed to be effective. Ego effec...

This edited volume seeks to integrate research and scholarship on the topic of embodiment, with the idea being that thinking and feeling are often grounded in more concrete representations related to perception and action. The book centers on psychological approaches to embodiment and includes chapters speaking to development as well as clinical is...

We applaud the goals and execution of the target article, but note that individual differences do not receive much attention. This is a shortcoming because individual differences can play a vital role in theory testing. In our commentary, we describe programs of research of this type and also apply similar thinking to the mechanisms proposed in the...

Theoretical perspectives of the attachment system emphasize the situation-contingent nature of its operations. The present investigation sought to model these dynamic components through the use of situational descriptions of relationship-related events and challenges. After several stages of scenario development, participants in Study 1 (n = 148) w...

Prominent emotion theories contend that feelings prime actions, but such links have been challenged. To investigate potential dynamics of this type in a relatively structured manner, participants in three studies (total N = 466) indicated their levels of felt anger as well as their likelihoods of engaging in an aggressive action (unlabeled as such)...

Individuals who are intelligent concerning their emotions should experience them differently. In particular, being conversant with the valence dimension that is key to emotions should reasonably result in emotional experiences that are more bipolar with respect to this dimension. Pursuant of these ideas, three studies (total N = 335) assessed emoti...

Individuals are likely to vary in their abilities to enact appropriate relationship behavior. With the aim of quantifying such differences, young adult participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they would respond to simulated relationship challenges in different ways and such responses were transformed into a Romantic Competence-Behaviora...

Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviors and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proxima...

Action-oriented theories of momentary stress and emotion are prominent, but relevant data are sparse. To investigate processes of this type, the present research (N = 172) paired a provoking induction of aversive noise with a subsequent go/no go task. Noise level was varied in a continuous manner and data were analyzed using multilevel modeling tec...

How people interpret and respond to simulated interpersonal events may provide insight into their values, beliefs, and personality. In pursuit of this possibility, a three-study program of research (total N = 576) applied a situational judgment method to the domain of friendship behavior. Specifically, consensus scoring techniques were used to scal...

Individual differences in social relationship competence (SRC) should have significant implications for social relationship success and well-being. Ability-based measures of SRC are scarce, though, particularly in social-personality psychology, and these considerations led to the present research. In specific terms, a situation judgment method was...

Objectives The present research had two objectives. It sought to examine whether traits related to mindful awareness and nonattachment could be distinguished. It also sought to compare both sets of traits with respect to their ability to dissociate relations between feelings and actions. Methods To examine processes of this type in a fine-grained...

Objective: An advantage of the trait approach to health is that it implicates common elements to multiple different health behaviors. An advantage of the social-cognitive approach, by contrast, is that it models the situational factors that are likely to elicit particular behavioral reactions. The present research sought to combine the advantages...

People are thought to differ in their abilities to perceive, understand, and manage emotions, a construct termed emotional intelligence (EI). North Dakota emotional abilities test (NEAT), a test of EI based on the situation judgment test method, assesses EI applied to work settings. Three survey‐based studies examined and found that NEAT scores cor...

Employees are thought to engage in deviant workplace behaviors (e.g., sabotage, theft) when they are stressed, frustrated, or angry. Given the emotional nature of these actions, individual differences in work-related emotional intelligence (W-EI) should, potentially, be consequential. Three studies (ns = 91, 198, & 147) examined this possibility by...

Metaphors linking the heart to warm intuition and the head to cold rationality may capture important differences between people because some individuals locate the self primarily in the heart (heart-locators) and others locate the self primarily in the head (head-locators). Five studies (total N = 2575) link these individual differences to religiou...

Romantic relationships vary in quality, and the purpose of the present investigation was to examine a wide scope of linguistic variables as possible markers of this variability. Ninety-six undergraduate students within committed romantic relationships were asked to write freely about their partnership, following which they reported on relationship...

Following biological and comparative perspectives, it was posited that acute stressors would activate more primitive modes of action control favoring gross motor actions (e.g., fight or flight) over behavioral precision. Influences of this type should result in more rapid changes in movement velocity subsequent to emotionally upsetting stimulation....

Eysenck’s (1983) personality paradigm was too narrow, but his goal of integrating personality trait studies with experimental psychology remains a laudable one. Personality traits are informative concerning the structure of personality, but a complete science will integrate traits with mechanisms of operation while accounting for both between-perso...

The military is a highly stressful career that requires one to work closely with others. These features of the military render it plausible that skills related to emotional perception and management—or emotional intelligence—would tend to benefit performance within this setting. Hypotheses of this type were examined in a panel study that presented...

Antagonistic people are hostile and prone to reactive aggression under conditions of provocation. It is useful to understand these dynamics in terms of social cognitive mechanisms, which can focus on questions of reactivity. Antagonistic people find hostile stimuli more compelling, but they are also prone to perceive hostility when it might not exi...

Objective Prominent theories of neuroticism emphasize its potential link to threat‐ or punishment‐sensitivity processes. Even in the absence of external threats, though, neuroticism may predispose people to a sort of “mental noise”, or cognitive instability, that creates problems for ongoing efforts after control. If this is the case, cognitive vie...

How do people decide how happy they are? In principle, a number of models are possible and the current chapter highlights three of them. People could subdivide their life into various domains, consider their progress in these domains, and then integrate the results of this bottom-up activity. Alternatively, people could omit such a systematic proce...

Metaphors frequently link negative affect with darkness and associations of this type have been established in several experimental paradigms. Given the ubiquity and strength of these associations, people who prefer dark to light may be more prone to negative emotional experiences and symptoms. A five study investigation (total N = 605) couches the...

A prominent class of metaphors depicts that which is sacred (God, a spiritual path) in terms of lightness rather than darkness. Metaphors of this type should have systematic implications for religious cognition according to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and a new extension of this theory termed balanced CMT. Five studies (total N = 761) derived...

At least some forms of interpersonal violence could follow from a vision of the self as a fierce, dominant creature. This should be particularly true when psychopathic (more proactive, less reactive) tendencies are involved. Possible relations of this type were examined in two studies (total N = 278) in which college student samples were presented...

In implicit personality theory, people with entity views or a fixed mindset perceive characteristics (e.g., intelligence) as uncontrollable, whereas people with incremental views or a growth mindset perceive characteristics as controllable. In addition to other benefits, the literature sometimes suggests that having a growth mindset will protect ag...

Negative feedback has paradoxical features to it. This form of feedback can have informational value under some circumstances, but it can also threaten the ego, potentially upsetting behaviour as a result. To investigate possible consequences of the latter type, two experiments (total N = 159) presented positive or negative feedback within a sequen...

Based on the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, we strengthened some of the main proposals of our framework to integrate research on personality structure, process, and development. Integration is an important, yet challenging goal for personality science, and we see considerable potential for it, theoretically and in empirical research. We...

In this target article, we argue that personality processes, personality structure, and personality development have to be understood and investigated in integrated ways in order to provide comprehensive responses to the key questions of personality psychology. The psychological processes and mechanisms that explain concrete behaviour in concrete s...

Men often score higher than women do on traits or tendencies marked by hostile dominance. The purpose of the present research was to contribute to an understanding of these gender differences. Four studies (total N = 494 U.S. undergraduates) administered a modified animal preference test in which participants could choose to be predator or prey ani...

Being happy consists of more than having the right things happen to us. It also depends on what we focus on, how we interpret the events of our lives, and what we are trying to achieve. Such considerations suggest that cognitive-emotional factors should play a fairly pronounced role in our levels of happiness and in changes in well-being over time....

This edited volume focuses on different views of happiness and well-being, considering constructs like meaning and spirituality in addition to the more standard constructs of positive emotion and life satisfaction. A premise of the volume is that being happy consists of more than having the right things happen to us; it also depends on how we inter...

Previous investigations have linked laboratory manipulations of physical warmth to momentary increases in interpersonal warmth. However, replication concerns have occurred in this area and it is not known whether similar dynamics characterize daily functioning. Two daily diary studies (total N = 235) suggest an affirmative answer. On days on which...

It is important, both theoretically and for applied reasons, to understand who is likely to engage in counterproductive work behaviors. It is known that such behaviors are more likely to be exhibited by unhappy employees (i.e., those high in job negative affect), but this should be particularly true for individuals low in work-related emotional int...

Metaphors often characterize prosocial actions and people as sweet. Three studies sought to explore whether conceptual metaphors of this type can provide insights into the prosocial trait of agreeableness and to daily life prosociality. Study 1 (n = 698) examined relationships between agreeableness and food taste preferences. Studies 2 (n = 66) and...

The strength model suggests that individual differences in the strength of self-control lead to benefits across many domains. In the current chapter, we review research that has employed an alternative cognitive control framework to understand these individual differences. This leads to three conclusions that would not be apparent from the classic...

Background When people think that their efforts will fail to achieve positive outcomes, they sometimes give up their efforts after control, which can have negative health consequences. PurposeProblematic orientations of this type, such as pessimism, helplessness, or fatalism, seem likely to be associated with a cognitive mindset marked by higher le...

Ideological liberals may focus on mental operations to a greater extent than bodily operations, whereas this pattern may be reversed among conservatives. Although there are suggestive sources of evidence, prior research has not directly examined relations between political ideology and this mind–body distinction. The present investigation did so by...

Existing measures of Emotional Intelligence (EI), defined as the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions for productive purposes, have displayed limitations in predicting workplace outcomes, likely in part because they do not target this context. Such considerations led to the development of an ability EI measure with work-related scen...

The approach-avoidance conflict is one in which approaching reward brings increased threat while avoiding threat means forgoing reward. This conflict can be uniquely informative because it will be resolved in different ways depending on whether approach (toward) or avoidance (away from) is the stronger motive. Two studies (total N = 191) created a...

Objectives: Agency has been conceptualized as a drive toward mastery, control, and effective self-management. Such an agentic approach to life and its challenges may be life-prolonging, a hypothesis not previously investigated. Method: In four studies, individual differences in agency were assessed in terms of the frequency with which agency-rel...