• Northwestern University
  • Chairman, Department of Psychology 1987 - 1993, 1998-2001
  • Professor of Psychology 1984 - present
  • Associate Professor of Psychology 1979 -1984
  • Assistant Professor of Psychology 1973 - 1979
• University of Michigan
  • Teaching Assistant, 1972-1973
  • Research Assistant, 1968-1970
• United States Peace Corps Volunteer Sarawak, Malaysia September 1965-December 1967

Recent work in the Personality, Motivation, and Cognition Laboratory has focused on the interactive effects of personality (e.g., impulsivity, trait anxiety) and situational determinants of motivation (e.g., time-of-day, caffeine, films, monetary incentives, exercise) as they combine to influence motivational states (energetic and tense arousal), and how these motivational states in turn affect cognitive processes (sustained attention, working-memory capacity, long-term memory) to determine cognitive performance. The long term goal is to develop a better understanding of how individual differences interact with situational moderators to affect efficient information processing.

Additional work in personality theory has focused on the personality characteristics associated with differential sensitivities to cues for reward and punishment. Current work is being done on the personality and situational determinants of affective state and dimensional analyses of affect.

I am also working on the Personality Project , an attempt to bring information about current personality theory and research to the readers of the World Wide Web. Suggestions for additions to this project are very welcome.

Computer programs that have been developed for research in personality and measurement are written in Pascal (using Lightspeed Pascal for MacIntosh computers) and are meant for ease of modification and use a set of standard units that have been found useful in the PMC lab. Source code as well as stand alone applications are available by ftp. More recently, I have become interested in using the statistical analysis package, R, as a powerful descriptive and analytical tool. As have many others faced with the problem of learning R, I have developed a short tutorial to help others. A shorter form of this tutorial is devoted to basic statistical procedures for doing personality research. I have started to convert many of my older programs into R. So far, the most useful conversion is the Very Simple Structure program for determining the optimal number of factors.

Recent publications and presentations

• Zinbarg, R.E., Revelle, W., Yovel, I., & Li. W. (2005). Cronbach's Alpha, Revelle's Beta, McDonald's Omega: Their relations with each and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability. Psychometrika. 70, 123-133. (pdf)
• Yovel, I., Revelle, W., Mineka, S. (2005). Who Sees Trees before Forest? The Obsessive-Compulsive Style of Visual Attention Psychological Science 123-129.
• Ortony, A., Norman, D.A. & Revelle, W. (2005): Effective Functioning: A Three Level Model of Affect, Motivation, Cognition, and Behavior. in J. M. Fellous & M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Machine. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Acton, G. S., & Revelle, W. (2004). Evaluation of ten psychometric criteria for circumplex structure. Methods of Psychological Research. http://www.dgps.de/fachgruppen/methoden/mpr-online/ 9, 1-27.
• Revelle, W. (2003) Emotions are to Personality as Weather is to Climate: Analogical reasoning as a tool for scientific investigation. Paper presented at the ETS conference on Emotional Intelligence. November, 2003.
• Revelle, W., Rafaeli, E, and Adler, J (2003) Personality within individuals: estimating individual differences in endogenous and exogenous affective responses: Measuring the dynamics of personality. Paper presented at the 2003 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Graz, Austria. July, 2003.
• Born, W. K., Revelle, W., & Pinto, L. (2002) Improving Biology Performance with Workshop Groups. Journal of Science Education and Technology. 11, 347-365.
• Baehr, E.K., Eastman,C.I., Revelle,W. , Olson, S.H.L, Wolfe,L.F., & Zee, P.C. (2003) Circadian phase-shifting effects of nocturnal exercise in older compared to young adults Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp 284(6): R1542 Ð 1550
• Acton, G. S. , & Revelle, W. (2002). Interpersonal personality measures show circumplex structure based on new psychometric criteria. Journal of Personality Assessment, 79, 456-481.
• Revelle, W & Rafaeli-Mor, E (2000) Within subject measures of affect and arousal: implications for the study of personality and cognition. Prepared as part of the symposium: Energetic Aspects of personality and cognition, E. Necka and G. Matthews, chairs. (Paper presented at the 10th Meeting of the European Association of Personality Psychology, Krakow, Poland, July, 2000.) (Abstract and Powerpoint handout)
• Baehr, E.K., Revelle, W., & Eastman, C.I. (2000). Individual differences in the phase and amplitude of the human circadian temperature rhythm: with an emphasis on morningness-eveningness. The Journal of Sleep Research, 9, 117-127 (pdf)
• Gilboa-Schechtman, E.; Revelle, W.; Gotlib, I. A. (2000) Stroop Interference Following Mood Induction: Emotionality, Mood Congruence, and Concern Relevance. Cognitive Therapy Research. 24, 491-502. (pdf)
• Revelle, W. Individual Differences. An entry for the Encylopedia of Psychology (A. Kazdin, editor).
• Dawood, K., Pillard, R. C., Horvath, C., Revelle, W., & Bailey, J. M. (2000). Familial aspects of male homosexuality. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 29, 155-163.
• Rafaeli-Mor, E.; Gotlib, I.A.; Revelle, W. (1999). The meaning and measurement of self complexity. Personality and Individual Differences. 27 341-356. (Abstract)
• Rogers, G. and Revelle, W. (1998) Personality, mood, and the evaluation of affective and neutral word pairs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1592-1605. Abstract (pdf) .
• Revelle, W. (1997) Extraversion and Impulsivity. In Nyborg, H. (Ed.) The scientific study of human nature: Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck at eighty. Elsevier Science Press.
• Revelle, W. (1995). Personality Processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 46, 295-328.
• Anderson, K. J. & Revelle, W. (1994) Impulsivity and time of day: is impulsivity related to the decay of arousal? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology., 67,334-344. Abstract (pdf)
• Gilboa, E., & Revelle, W. (1994). Personality and the structure of emotional responses. In S. Van Goozen, N. E. Van de Poll, & J. A. Sargent (Eds.), Emotions: Essays on current issues in the field of emotion theory (pp. 135-159). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Revelle, W. (1993). Individual differences in personality and motivation: Non-cognitive determinants of cognitive performance. In A. Baddeley & L. Weiskrantz (Eds.),Attention: Selection, awareness and control: A tribute to Donald Broadbent (pp. 346-373). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• A more complete list and some abstracts of recent publications.

Educational Activities

• Students supervised

• Teaching

  • 205: Research Methods in Psychologica Research :
  • 301: Personality Research:
  • 405: Psychometric Theory:
  • 442: Experimental Approaches to Personality:
  • 460: Affect and Cognition in Humans and Machines
  • 498: Cognition, Personality, and Motivation:
  
  

Professional societies

• Federation of American Scientists (board member, 1998-2003)
• Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (President, 1984-1985)
• International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID) (President-elect)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (fellow)
• American Psychological Association
• American Psychological Society (fellow)
• European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP)
• Society of Personality and Social Psychology
• Association for Research in Personality
• International Society for Intelligence Research
• American Statistical Society

Although a long time resident of Evanston, I was raised in La Jolla where I tended to spend too much time on the beach or racing Flying Dutchmen. I now like to sail Lasers and Laser IIs on (and sometime in) Lake Michigan as well as kayak along the Lake Michigan shore. Eleanor and I have just finished a house on Lakeside Court to capture the feeling of water that we had associated with California and to demonstrate the possibilities of building an energy efficient house. I have been known to visit the occasional Ultimate Frisbee match when it is convenient.

I also spend some time browsing the The Source, the San Diego Daily Transcript's information source of San Diego and the world. I am interested in exploring the ways that the web can increase citizen participation by increasing public access to information using projects such as that of the League of Women Voters or the Federation of American Scientists, or the Borneo Project, which is affiliated with the Friends of Malaysia, an organization of Returned Peace Corp Volunteers. For a discussion of the way that the web can used for informing the public, see the Cyberstrategy[tm] discussion by John Pike, formerly of the FAS. Other examples of use of the web for encouraging active citizen involvement are also available. (Note that some of these are very ancient pages that are kept mainly to remind us all how far the web has progressed since 1995.)

Another use of the web is in linking distant relatives together through genealogical research.