Michael D Robinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 93391 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael D Robinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael D |
| FAMILY NAME | Robinson |
| SIGNATURE | ROBINSON M D |
| AFFILIATIONS | North Dakota State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1429-9069 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 140 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 340 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 139 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What Do Happy People Think About? A New Paradigm for Assessing Self-Generated Thoughts in the Laboratory
Tuning into Experience: Self-Location Flexibility and Experiential Ability
Conceptual metaphors for the head and the heart implicate distinct modes of processing, each of which may be advantageous in some circumstances but not others. By representing the self as an entity that can migrate between head and heart bodily regions in a strategic manner, some individuals may be capable of modulating the self to succeed in both rational and experiential domains. In three studies involving five samples (total N = 798), particip…
Portraits in Misery: A Bottom-Up-to-Prototype Approach to Personality Assessment
The present investigation endorses the premise that each person can be understood in terms of particular ways of responding to particular situations. In two studies (total N = 353), participants indicated how they would respond to a wide variety of mundane and consequential life situations. These person-in-situation units were used to understand variations in miserable functioning, defined in terms of degree of match to a miserable person prototy…
Behavioral Tendencies of Happiness: A Person‐In‐Context Approach to Construct Measurement
INTRODUCTION: Situations figure prominently in people's lives, but extant approaches to assessment rarely model situational specificity. METHODS: Using a situational judgment base, the present studies (N = 356) created a behavioral tendency of life test that sought to simulate person-specific responses to a wide variety of life situations. Behavioral tendencies thought to be conducive to happiness were quantified by linking each participant's 160…
Should I use my brain or my heart? Brain-heart dualism and its advantages in intellectual and experiential domains
Dual process theories contend that the self has at least two distinct processing modes. One prominent theory describes these modes as rational and experiential, which is a formulation that overlaps considerably with conceptual metaphors for the head (rational) and heart (experiential). Because the two processing modes operate in distinct manners, the self could, potentially, recruit processing modes in a strategic manner. Such considerations led …
Where is the self? Relations between head-heart dualism and social judgment
The flow and flux of feeling: Relations between attention to emotion and emotion reactivity dynamics
Emotional awareness, which consists of individual differences in attention to emotion and emotional clarity, is likely to matter with respect to dynamic components of emotional reactivity. Attending to emotions, in particular, could give rise to emotional reactions that are more reliable, quicker, and/or more intense at peak amplitude. Such components of emotional reactivity were investigated in two studies (total N = 193) in which participants w…
Behavioral tendencies of hostility: A new approach to personality assessment based on person-in-context units
What do agreeable people think about? spontaneous thoughts as a component of personality
Feelings as a currency of care: A role for agreeableness in emotional reactivity
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 more receptive to emotional events and more responsive to them for this reason. METHOD: Potential link…
Choosing the dark path: Preferences for darkness and interpersonal antagonism
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 as abstract perceptual concepts. Preferences for darkness were non-normative as well as informative c…
Open‐hearted: Preferences for openness in the agreeableness domain
OBJECTIVE: 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 to that which is closed is more compatible with an agreeable mode of interacting with others. METHOD: …
Evaluation experts: Relations between ability emotional intelligence and attitude strength indicators
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, and behavioral reactions to a diverse set of attitude objects. In addition, attitude certainty rat…
Neuroticism’s link to threat sensitivity: Evidence from a dynamic affect reactivity task
The personality trait of neuroticism has been theoretically linked to threat sensitivity, but this perspective of neuroticism has resulted in mixed findings, arguably because mood states, rather than emotional reactions, have been examined. The present studies (total N = 519) administered a task capable of assessing emotional reactions-to appetitive versus aversive images-in a nearly continuous manner, parsing threat sensitivity in terms of emoti…
Feeling up or feeling down: Verticality preferences in personality, pathology, and well-being
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 verticality metaphors are frequently used to conceptualize states related to emotion and well-being. Up-pref…
God is up? Replication and extension attempts of Meier et al. (2007)
Romantic competence in established relationships: Perceptual, behavioral, interactive, and assortative components
Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney
Reviewed by: Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney Michael D. Robinson (bio) Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy. By William L. Barney. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past five decades, William L. Barney has written extensively on secession, the Old South, and the Confederate experience, richly enhancing …
Happy and Engaged: Synergies Among Mindfulness and Ability-Related Emotional Intelligence
Seeking Protection, Finding Despair: Closed Preferences as a Model of Neuroticism-Linked Distress
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 linked to variations in personality, emotion, and psychopathology. Results: Individuals endorsing cl…
Aligning the self and reaping the benefits: Ego effectiveness in romantic relationships
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 romantic relationship domain, using scenarios involving the self and a hypothetical romantic partner, with al…
A psychological flexibility perspective on well-being: Emotional reactivity, adaptive choices, and daily experiences
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 paradigm were applied in understanding variations in happiness and adaptive behavior. Consistent with …
An ego effectiveness perspective of successful self-control: An individual difference and its links to social functioning and well-being
Ego effectiveness: A novel individual difference approach to health behavior and coping
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 effective individuals engaged in a greater frequency of health-protective behaviors as well as a lesser f…
Attention to emotion and reliance on feelings in decision-making: Variations on a pleasure principle
Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report
This review organizes a variety of phenomena related to emotional self-report. In doing so, the authors offer an accessibility model that specifies the types of factors that contribute to emotional self-reports under different reporting conditions. One important distinction is between emotion, which is episodic, experiential, and contextual, and beliefs about emotion, which are semantic, conceptual, and decontextualized. This distinction is impor…
Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: Evidence for two judgment processes
Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and primi…
The educational attainment of young women: Role model effects of female high school faculty
To test for the presence of role model effects of female high school faculty and professional staff on young women in high school, we estimate several models of educational attainment for young women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Exposure to female high school faculty and professional staff has a positive impact on the educational attainment of young women. This result, combined with our finding that female faculty an…
What's "up" with God? Vertical space as a representation of the divine
"God" and "Devil" are abstract concepts often linked to vertical metaphors (e.g., "glory to God in the highest," "the Devil lives down in hell"). It is unknown, however, whether these metaphors simply aid communication or implicate a deeper mode of concept representation. In 6 experiments, the authors examined the extent to which the vertical dimension is used in noncommunication contexts involving God and the Devil. Experiment 1 established that…
Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors
It is striking that prosocial people are considered "sweet" (e.g., "she's a sweetie") because they are unlikely to differentially taste this way. These metaphors aid communication, but theories of conceptual metaphor and embodiment led us to hypothesize that they can be used to derive novel insights about personality processes. Five studies converged on this idea. Study 1 revealed that people believed strangers who liked sweet foods (e.g., candy)…
Agreeableness and the prolonged spatial processing of antisocial and prosocial information
Is it emotion or is it stress? Gender stereotypes and the perception of subjective experience
The epistemic benefits of trait-consistent mood states: An analysis of extraversion and mood
One must consider both trait and state affect to predict individual differences in emotional processing. The present results document a novel trait-state interaction that is consistent with proposals concerning the epistemic functions of affect (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Four studies tested the effects of extraversion and mood on motivation-relevant processing. Study 1 measured naturally occurring mood, whereas Studies 2-4 manipulated mood. Extravert…
Neuroticism as Mental Noise: A Relation Between Neuroticism and Reaction Time Standard Deviations
Those higher in neuroticism are often more variable in their behavior and experience. On the basis of this observation, the authors hypothesized that the trait of neuroticism might be correlated with the variability of performance pertaining to relatively basic cognitive operations. Three studies involving 242 college undergraduates supported this prediction in that neuroticism correlated positively with the variability of performance across tria…
Are sociable people more beautiful? A zero-acquaintance analysis of agreeableness, extraversion, and attractiveness
Tracking the evil eye: Trait anger and selective attention within ambiguously hostile scenes
Does “feeling down” mean seeing down? Depressive symptoms and vertical selective attention
Knowing Good From Bad: The Paradox of Neuroticism, Negative Affect, and Evaluative Processing
There are pragmatic benefits to trait-consistent mood states, especially when people are evaluating new objects within the environment (M. Tamir, M. D. Robinson, & G. L. Clore, 2002). The present studies, involving both naturally occurring (Studies 1 and 2) and manipulated (Study 3) mood states, demonstrated such trait-consistent interactions within the context of neuroticism and negative mood states. Individuals high in neuroticism were faster t…
Inferences About the Authentic Self: When Do Actions Say More Than Mental States
Three studies involving 478 undergraduates examined the perceived importance of observable actions versus mental states in revealing the "true self"-the authentic and fundamental nature of a target person. Results suggest that when people have only limited information about a target, they believe that an action is more diagnostic of the individual's true self than the accompanying mental state. When participants have knowledge concerning chronic …
The scope and consequences of metaphoric thinking: Using individual differences in metaphor usage to understand how metaphor functions
People often think, feel, and behave metaphorically according to conceptual metaphor theory. There are normative sources of support for this theory, but individual differences have received scant attention. This is surprising because people are likely to differ in the frequency with which they use metaphors and, therefore, the frequency with which they experience the costs and benefits of metaphoric thinking. To investigate these ideas, a 5-study…
How does cognitive control reduce anger and aggression? The role of conflict monitoring and forgiveness processes
It is well-established that superior cognitive control abilities are associated with lower levels of anger and aggression. However, the precise emotion regulation operations underlying this relationship have been underspecified and underexplored in previous research. Drawing on neuropsychological models of cognitive control, the authors propose that limited capacity resources can be recruited within a hostile situation to promote a process of for…
Sociology research at liberal arts colleges
Do you use your head or follow your heart? Self-location predicts personality, emotion, decision making, and performance
The head is thought to be rational and cold, whereas the heart is thought to be emotional and warm. In 8 studies (total N = 725), we pursued the idea that such body metaphors are widely consequential. Study 1 introduced a novel individual difference variable, one asking people to locate the self in the head or the heart. Irrespective of sex differences, head-locators characterized themselves as rational, logical, and interpersonally cold, whereas…
Bringing out the agreeableness in everyone: Using a cognitive self-regulation model to reduce aggression
The person in context: Using situational judgment to gain insight into social functioning
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 scale the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of different ways of responding to vignettes involving protag…
Boys don't cry: Cognitive load and priming increase stereotypic sex differences in emotion memory
The Mind Versus the Body in Political (and Nonpolitical) Discourse: Linguistic Evidence for an Ideological Signature in U.S. Politics
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 content-coding texts using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program and its cognitive and bodi…
Can one’s temper be cooled? A role for Agreeableness in moderating Neuroticism’s influence on anger and aggression
The implications of increasing economic openness for real wages in developing countries, 1973–1990
The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration
The writings of polar explorers, those fur-clad figures of lithographs and daguerreotypes, have attracted much attention from scholars for the past twenty years. While explorers described the polar world as a place of solitary adventure, scholarship has shown something different. The high latitudes were alive with plants, animals, and—in the Arctic—peoples with complex cultures adapted for extreme conditions. Far from being solitary figures, expl…
Union-nonunion compensation differentials across plant sizes: Evidence from CPS 1983
Employer Size and Dual Labor Markets
Recently developed effort regulation models argue that labor markets are segmented because of differences in the technology of supervision across firms. primary jobs pay above market clearing wages because these jobs are difficult to monitor. Secondary jobs, in contrast, pose no monitoring difficulties and therefore pay a market clearing wage. If, as the literature suggests, increases in employer size make supervision more difficult, we should ob…
Visual artists in New York: What's special about person and place?
Scholars and Mentors: Research in Psychology and the Production of Ph.D.S
For the 161 national liberal arts colleges, there is a positive correlation between number of research publications in psychology and number of students going on to earn Ph.D.s in psychology
Is it emotion or is it stress? Gender stereotypes and the perception of subjective experience
The implications of increasing economic openness for real wages in developing countries, 1973–1990
The educational attainment of young women: Role model effects of female high school faculty
To test for the presence of role model effects of female high school faculty and professional staff on young women in high school, we estimate several models of educational attainment for young women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Exposure to female high school faculty and professional staff has a positive impact on the educational attainment of young women. This result, combined with our finding that female faculty an…
Why divine foreknowledge
Christian theism has traditionally claimed that God knows the future. But why is divine foreknowledge important? In this essay, I argue that divine foreknowledge is valuable to Christian theism and that a hefty theological price must be paid if it is rejected. I also attempt to show that the range of knowledge available to God in theological models that deny divine foreknowledge is significantly less than claimed by proponents of these views. In …
Simulation, Scenarios, and Emotional Appraisal: Testing the Convergence of Real and Imagined Reactions to Emotional Stimuli
Appraisal research has relied heavily on vignette- and recall-based methodologies in theory construction; however, the validity of these methodologies in capturing the concomitants of online experience is unknown. To assess the convergence of online and simulated accounts of emotion, the authors assigned undergraduate research participants to either online or simulated conditions. Those in the online condition reported on their appraisals and emo…
Is a Cause Conceptualized as a Generative Force: Evidence from a Recognition Memory Paradigm
Sociology research at liberal arts colleges
Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: Evidence for two judgment processes
Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and primi…
The epistemic benefits of trait-consistent mood states: An analysis of extraversion and mood
One must consider both trait and state affect to predict individual differences in emotional processing. The present results document a novel trait-state interaction that is consistent with proposals concerning the epistemic functions of affect (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Four studies tested the effects of extraversion and mood on motivation-relevant processing. Study 1 measured naturally occurring mood, whereas Studies 2-4 manipulated mood. Extravert…
Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report
This review organizes a variety of phenomena related to emotional self-report. In doing so, the authors offer an accessibility model that specifies the types of factors that contribute to emotional self-reports under different reporting conditions. One important distinction is between emotion, which is episodic, experiential, and contextual, and beliefs about emotion, which are semantic, conceptual, and decontextualized. This distinction is impor…
Trait as Default: Extraversion, Subjective Well-Being, and the Distinction Between Neutral and Positive Events
On the basis of prior work suggesting that trait self-knowledge serves a "fill-in" function when event-specific information is missing (M.D. Robinson & G. L. Clore, 2002a), we sought to demonstrate that extraversion is a more reliable predictor of subjective well-being (SWB) judgments among certain individuals than among others. Four studies involving a total of 260 participants revealed that the extraversion-SWB relation was relatively weaker am…
Why Good Guys Wear White: Automatic Inferences About Stimulus Valence Based on Brightness
Affect is a somewhat abstract concept that is frequently linked to physical metaphor. For example, good is often depicted as light (rather than dark), up (rather than down), and moving forward (rather than backward). The purpose of our studies was to examine whether the association between stimulus brightness and affect is optional or obligatory. In a series of three studies, participants categorized words as negative or positive. The valence of …
Why the Sunny Side Is Up: Associations Between Affect and Vertical Position
Metaphors linking spatial location and affect (e.g., feeling up or down) may have subtle, but pervasive, effects on evaluation. In three studies, participants evaluated words presented on a computer. In Study 1, evaluations of positive words were faster when words were in the up rather than the down position, whereas evaluations of negative words were faster when words were in the down rather than the up position. In Study 2, positive evaluations…
Divine guidance and an accidentally necessary future: A response to Hunt
In his reply to my original essay, David Hunt maintains that I do not discuss how his defence of providentially useful simple foreknowledge violates the Metaphysical Principle. Further, he claims that I try to force him into both affirming and denying the accidental necessity of future events and their role in explaining divine advice-giving. In this response, I attempt to articulate more fully why Hunt's defence of simple foreknowledge implies t…
Divine providence, simple foreknowledge, and the ‘Metaphysical Principle’
In this essay, I challenge David P. Hunt's defence of the utility of simple foreknowledge for divine providence against the ‘Metaphysical Principle’. This principle asserts that circular causal loops are impossible. Hunt agrees with this principle but maintains that so long as the deity does not use simple foreknowledge in such a way that causal loops unfold, the Metaphysical Principle in not violated. I argue that Hunt's position still allows fo…
Why are materialists less satisfied
Knowing Good From Bad: The Paradox of Neuroticism, Negative Affect, and Evaluative Processing
There are pragmatic benefits to trait-consistent mood states, especially when people are evaluating new objects within the environment (M. Tamir, M. D. Robinson, & G. L. Clore, 2002). The present studies, involving both naturally occurring (Studies 1 and 2) and manipulated (Study 3) mood states, demonstrated such trait-consistent interactions within the context of neuroticism and negative mood states. Individuals high in neuroticism were faster t…
Inferences About the Authentic Self: When Do Actions Say More Than Mental States
Three studies involving 478 undergraduates examined the perceived importance of observable actions versus mental states in revealing the "true self"-the authentic and fundamental nature of a target person. Results suggest that when people have only limited information about a target, they believe that an action is more diagnostic of the individual's true self than the accompanying mental state. When participants have knowledge concerning chronic …
The Metaphorical Representation of Affect
Philosophers and psycholinguists have argued that abstract concepts like affect are represented via the mechanism of metaphor. This review investigates this contention, specifically within the context of social-cognition and clinical psychology research that has studied the link between affect and brightness, vertical position, and distance between the self and an object. The review will be particularly concerned with automatic and incidental lin…
Extraversion, Threat Categorizations, and Negative Affect: A Reaction Time Approach to Avoidance Motivation
The authors sought to measure a component of the avoidance self‐regulation system, specifically one related to object appraisal functions. Participants performed a choice reaction time task (Studies 1 & 2) or a go/no go task (Study 3) in which they were asked to categorize words (e.g., knife ) as threatening in nature. In a series of three studies involving 236 undergraduates, the authors found that introverts who were skilled at categorizing eve…
Trait self-report as a “fill in” belief system: Categorization speed moderates the extraversion/life satisfaction relation
The present studies pursue the premise that self-reported traits such as extraversion can be viewed in terms of beliefs about the self that may be used as a default, particularly when encoding skills are poor. Encoding skills were measured by several choice reaction time tasks. Study 1 supported the hypothesis that individual differences in categorization speed predict abilities to assign self-relevant meaning to events as they occur. Studies 2 –…
Psychology (123 works) · Social Psychology (109 works) · Developmental psychology (73 works) · Cognitive psychology (69 works) · Personality (54 works) · Cognition (43 works) · Social Psychology (40 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (38 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (38 works) · Big Five personality traits (32 works)