Personality and motivation

I study how people react to reward and threat (Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, or RST). Jeffrey Gray proposed that personality reflects brain systems for approaching reward, for avoiding threat and for resolving conflict between the two. When Gray and McNaughton revised the theory in 2000, the questionnaires then in use no longer matched it.

With Luke Smillie and Alan Pickering I set out what the revision meant for measurement (Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006). Luke and I also built the Appetitive Motivation Scale, which treats the approach system as sensitivity to reward and keeps it apart from impulsivity. A later revision with Andrew Cooper, tested on 1,366 students, tightened it into a single clean dimension.

In 2009 I published the Jackson-5 scales in the Journal of Research in Personality. They measure reward approach, goal conflict, and the fight, flight and freeze responses to threat. In students, the revised theory gave a different explanation of delinquency and psychopathy from the original theory.

More recently, Michael Collins, Ben Walker, Peter O’Connor, Elliroma Gardiner and I combined RST with a model of attention to propose a general account of how personality works as a process (Psychological Bulletin, 2017).