The Personality Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire

John Mayer received his B.A. from the University of Michigan, his Ph.D. in Psychology at Case Western Reserve University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. Mayer's interests are in personality psychology and in emotional intelligence. He has served on the editorial boards of Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, among others.

Professor Mayer often teaches:

• Personality Psychology
• Personality Disorders (Abnormal Psychology), and
• Psychological Measurement

One area of Mayer's research interests is in hot intelligences -- and in particular, in emotional and personal intelligences, including their conceptualization and measurement. Through the 1990s, Mayer and his colleague, Dr. Peter Salovey -- and later joined by Dr. David Caruso -- have developed the concept of emotional intelligence, sought to improve its measurement, and to understand what it predicts.

More recently, with Dr. Caruso and Dr. A. T. Panter, of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Mayer has been examining personal intelligence, a broader intelligence that encompasses much of emotional intelligence but adds other aspects to it.

A second area of Mayer's interests concerns a systems approach to personality psychology. His systems framework joins together a consideration of many of personality's parts, such as the self-concept, sociability, and others, along with how those parts are organized together, and how they develop over the life span. The most recent overview of the systems framework was published in 2005 in the journal American Psychologist.