Primary Interests:
- Attitudes and Beliefs
- Emotion, Mood, Affect
- Judgment and Decision Making
- Life Satisfaction, Well-Being
- Neuroscience, Psychophysiology
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Jeff T. Larsen
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My primary research interests concern the structure of affect. Whereas affective processes have traditionally been characterized as falling along a single bipolar dimension, my research has examined the separability of positive and negative affect.
For example, my colleagues and I have demonstrated that in certain emotionally complex situations, people can feel happy and sad at the same time. Our research has also examined mixed emotional reactions to gamble outcomes. For example, we have examined how people can feel both good and bad about winning some amount of money when they could have won an even larger amount, an event we term a disappointing win.
Additional interests include affective influences on motor behavior, context effects on affective reactions, the role of effortful and controlled processes in affect, and psychophysiological indices of affect (e.g., event-related potentials, facial electromyography).
Journal Articles:
- Holroyd, C. B., Larsen, J. T., & Cohen, J. D. (2004). Context dependence of the event-related brain potential associated with reward and punishment. Psychophysiology, 41, 245-253.
- Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, N. K., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1998). Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887-900.
- Kitayama, S., Duffy, S., Kawamura, T., & Larsen, J. T. (2003). Perceiving an object and its context in different cultures: A cultural look at new look. Psychological Science, 14, 201-206.
- Larsen, J. T., McGraw, A. P., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2001). Can people feel happy and sad at the same time? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 684-696.
- Larsen, J. T., McGraw, A. P., Mellers, B. A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004). The agony of victory and thrill of defeat: Mixed emotional reactions to disappointing wins and relieving losses. Psychological Science, 15, 325-330.
- Larsen, J. T., & McKibban, A. R. (2008). Is happiness having what you want, wanting what you have, or both? Psychological Science, 19, 371-377.
- Larsen, J. T., Norris, C. J., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2003). Effects of positive and negative affect on electromyographic activity over zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii. Psychophysiology, 40, 776-785.
- Larsen, J. T., Norris, C. J., McGraw, A. P., Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2009). The evaluative space grid: A single-item measure of positivity and negativity. Cognition and Emotion, 23(3), 453-480.
- Larsen, J. T., & Norris, J. I. (2009). A facial electromyographic investigation of affective contrast. Psychophysiology, 46(4), 831-842.
- Larsen, J. T., To, Y. M., & Fireman, G. (2007). Children’s understanding and experience of mixed emotions. Psychological Science, 18, 186-191.
- Norris, C. J., Larsen, J. T., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). Neuroticism is associated with larger and more prolonged electrodermal responses to emotionally evocative pictures. Psychophysiology, 44, 823-826.
- Smith, N. K., Cacioppo, J. T., Larsen, J. T., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). May I have your attention, please: Electrocortical responses to positive and negative stimuli. Neuropsychologia, 41, 171-183.
- Smith, N. K., Larsen, J. T., Chartrand, T. L., Cacioppo, J. T., Katafiasz, H. A., & Moran, K. E. (2006). Being bad isn’t always good: Affective context moderates the attention bias toward negative information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 210-220.
Other Publications:
- Larsen, J. T., Berntson, G. G., Poehlmann, K. M., Ito, T. A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). The psychophysiology of emotion. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), The handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 180-195). New York: Guilford.
- Larsen, J. T., Hemenover, S. H., Norris, C. J., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2003). Turning adversity to advantage: On the virtues of the coactivation of positive and negative emotions. In L. G. Aspinwall & U. M. Staudinger (Eds.), A psychology of human strengths: Perspectives on an emerging field (pp. 211-226). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Courses Taught:
- Attitudes and Persuasion
- Emotion
- Introductory Social Psychology
- Introductory Statistics
- Psychophysiology
- Research in Personality and Social Psychology
- Seminar in Attitudes and Attitude Change
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Jeff T. Larsen
Department of Psychology
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-2051
United States
Phone: (806) 742-3711, ext. 234
Fax: (806) 742-0818