My Journey:

I was born in Litchfield, Minnesota. Shortly after being born, we moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota, where I was raised and attended Saint Cloud State University. After receiving a B.A. in psychology, I was accepted into the Social/Health Psychology PhD program at North Dakota State University, in Fargo, North Dakota. Since then, I have earned a M.S. and, more recently, a Ph.D. In July of 2013, I am moving to Tübingen, Germany, where I have secured a postdoctoral position at the Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC). I am also a consulting editor for the Journal of Research in Personality. 

Psychology Interests:

My research focuses on an intersection of social, cognitive, and personality psychology. I borrow priming methods and embodied manipulations from social psychology, and basic perceptual and reaction time tasks from cognitive psychology. My main area of focus is on metaphor representation theory. This theory holds that metaphors are not just fanciful speech used by poets, but reflect the way we think. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980; 1999), metaphors are used to communicate and understand abstract concepts (i.e., target domains) by likening them to seemingly dissimilar concrete experiences (i.e., source domains). From this theory, I have studied how the color red influences cognitive processes related to anger concepts. In addition, I have most recently been studying metaphors related to the head and heart, as locations of the self, and what individual differences in this self-location predicts about one's personality and thought processes. This work has recently been accepted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Lately, as part of my dissertation, I have been investigating what I think is a serious gap between one of the main claims of conceptual metaphor theory and the body of empirical evidence. Namely, that metaphors are said to facilitate the actual understanding of abstract concepts. Here, again, I am taking an individual differences approach and have some interesting findings.

Along with these main areas of research, I have numerous other interests that I intend to pursue later in my career. Mainly, I would like to bring a metaphoric perspective into more applied research areas. Other areas of interest include social cognitive views of evolutionary psychology, rational thinking and superstition, and the processes of admitting to errors. Each of these areas can be considered separately, but I am mostly interested in them in combination. 

Non-Psychology Interests:

I have many interests outside of psychology. I enjoy debating and reading about topics related to evolution, free will and consciousness, religion, politics, general science and the philosophy of science. Aside from these more knowledge increasing activities, I enjoy reading novels (murder mystery & sci-fi), watching TV and films, music, snowboarding, playing and watching most sports, video games, and hanging out with friends and family.