Exploring the psychology of interest

Exploring the psychology of interest

Economic
Economic Behavior

Psychology has always been interested in interest. Theories of interest, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation appear in historical classics and in far-flung areas of modern research. The study of interest currently has a home in the psychology of emotion, education, development, personality, motivation, vocations, aesthetics, gerontology, and text processing, to name a few. But despite this—or perhaps because of it—the psychology of interest is a scattered field. Many areas within the psychology of interest have proposed the same ideas and struggled with the same problems.
Sometimes one area has solved another area's problem, but researchers in neither area knew it. The central goals of this book are to review research on interest from diverse areas of psychology, to reveal similarities between seemingly different areas, and to stimulate new research by critically evaluating current theories and proposing untested hypotheses. It's hard for me to tell how well the roles of impartial reviewer and motivated critic were balanced—fortunately, two wrongs make a right if they're multiplied rather than added

Paul J. Silvia

Oxford University Press,

2006

Novita

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English

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