With a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Peter Salovey will continue his work one motion as a central organizing process in human perception, cognition, and action. Salovey's recent work has focused on the effects of mood on important human decisions: for example, he has shown that transient mood states influenced the manner in which people interpreted and evaluated physiological sensations. These evaluations had important consequences for decisions that had critical implications for their physical health. In other research, Salovey has shown how comparisons among individuals can give rise to envy and jealousy, and how these emotions can be influenced by aspects of the situation that appear to have little to do with them. Salovey's work is important for several reasons. Substantively, it heralds important new developments in the study of emotions. In terms of scientific progression, the work is a departure from the more simple information processing approaches, which conceptualized human decision making as little different from that of a computing machine. The new view, with Salovey as one of the major proponents, sees human information processing as closely influenced by such human features as mood and emotion. This is a more realistic, if more difficult, approach, which in the hands of a skilled scientist of Salovey's talent, will pay enormous dividends.
