Keynote Speaker - Professor Robert Wood

This year's keynote address will be delivered by Professor Robert Wood and is entitled: Understanding Emotions in Dynamic Personality Process.

Understanding Emotions in Dynamic Personality Processes
The experience and expression of emotions are a core component of an individual’s personality. They influence self-evaluations and others’ perceptions of the person. Within organizations, the study of personality is dominated by a trait based view of personality, in which emotions are treated as typical, context free expressions of the person without any consideration of the role of situations, time or development processes. In this talk, I will outline alternative views of personality that analyze emotions as responses to situations and as themes within a person’s identity. These two alternative perspectives are linked in their common view that emotions are socially and culturally learned expressions that are stored in long term memory. They differ significantly in time frame and methods of measurement. Emotions as responses to specific situations are immediate, short–lived and best assessed using Experience Sampling Methods. Emotions as identity themes can run across multiple life stages and are assessed through the life stories that make up a personal narrative. I will present data from studies that examine the links between emotions as traits, contingent responses to situations and as themes in personal identity and discuss both the research and practical implications for these alternative approaches to the study of emotions in work organization.

Robert Wood is Professor and Director of the Accelerated Learning Laboratory at UNSW. He is Editor of Applied Psychology: An International Review and serves or has served on the editorial boards of JAP, OBHDP, AMR, AMJ and O&M.  He is a Fellow of APA (SIOP, Div 14), ASSA, IAAP and ANZAM. His research has focused on social cognitive processes, including affective reactions that link situational variables such as task complexity, goals and feedback to strategies and performance in problem solving and learning.  He is currently working learning processes for complex tasks and dynamic views of personality.

For further information on Professor Wood's research please Click Here to visit his website.