I study social cognition and emotion, with a particular focus on boredom, interest, and thinking, and why some thoughts are more engaging than others. I received my BA in psychology from Reed College in 2010, and my PhD from the University of Virginia in 2018.

I am broadly interested in the cognitive antecedents and social consequences of emotion, with a special focus on understanding when and why emotions contribute to destructive social behaviors. In particular, I am interested in the affective consequences of cognition, and why some cognitive processes are more intrinsically enjoyable than others. Much of my research has been on the conditions under which people enjoy or do not enjoy their own thoughts. I have extended that work to the larger question of why people become bored in the first place, developing a new model of boredom that explains what boredom is, why we experience it, and what happens when we do. According to this Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model of boredom, we feel bored when we can't successfully engage our attention in meaningful activities. We may not enjoy it, but boredom gives us important feedback about our lives. In short, it tells us whether we are able to (and want to) focus on what we are doing.

The MAC model integrates classic work from cognitive and social psychology to explain how ability and motivation jointly produce emotion via bottom-up and top-down construal processes. In other lines of work, I use a similar approach to understand other puzzling phenomena, like why people find hurricanes and natural disasters exciting, and why some cognitive processes, like categorization, are inherently rewarding. I am particularly interested in how these emotions help to explain destructive behaviors, such as procrastination, prejudice, and political extremism, as well as clinical outcomes such as drug and alcohol use.