Assessment of Motivational Processes

This PhD focuses on how ubiquitous motivational processes can be accurately captured, better understood, and ultimately predicted via text and language analysis methods. By applying current and innovative computational techniques to natural language data at both the individual and group level, the PhD seeks to understand how our personality and social psychological processes both reflect and are influenced by the core factors that drive human behavior. The key studies of this PhD focus specifically on the mapping of psychosocial processes that contribute to, or cause, personality disorder in daily life. This includes studies of individuals in support-seeking contexts, in-lab conversations, and verbal behavior in open-ended tasks.