The Personality Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire
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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 involves emotional intelligence, including its conceptualization and measurement. Through the 1990s, Mayer and his colleague, Dr. Peter Salovey -- and then joined by Dr. David Caruso -- have developed the concept of emotional intelligence, sought to improve its measurement, and to understand what it predicts. Over the past few years, members of Mayer's laboratory have been examining how people high in emotional intelligence differ from others in their life styles and life outcomes.

For more about his research in this area and laboratory reprints, please see http://www.unh.edu/emotional_intelligence.

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.

For more about his work in this area and corresponding reprints, please see http://www.thepersonalitysystem.org

In recent years, graduate students in his laboratory have been using the framework to assess the relationship between internal personality, on the one hand, and a person's expression of personality in the life space, on the other (see, for example, Mayer, J.D., Carlsmith, K.M., & Chabot, H.F. (1998). Describing the person's external environment: Conceptualizing and measuring the Life Space. Journal of Research in Personality, 32, 253-296). The framework is now serving as the basis of another empirical study examining alternative ways to measure personality.