'A Neat Thing to Do'

Professor Jack Mayer Photo by Doug Prince.

For as long as he can remember, Jack Mayer has been interested in the relationship of emotions and thought. As a boy, he was struck by Charles Dickens' description of David Copperfield's "educated heart." "Reading literature as a young person, I was captivated by how writers could elicit emotion," he says.

Born and raised in New York, Mayer read a lot of psychology and other subjects as a child, borrowing freely from the many books around the house. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he lived with engineers and took classes with writers and actors as he pursued a degree in dramatic theory and writing. "I remember thinking that it was unfair that engineers could prove their sophisticated thinking, but artists couldn't. However, if you could measure their intelligence, it would validate for writers and artists what they have. It seemed to me to be a neat thing to do."

Mayer was attracted to psychology because there was an artistic component to it-- "especially in psychotherapy," he notes, the area that he was initially attracted to--and he could indulge his love for mathematics. Working in the intelligence lab at Case Western, he became interested in an emerging field of psychology called "cognition and affect," or the study of how emotions and thoughts interact. "It was tailor-made for me," Mayer says. "I was able to study how personality influences intelligence, how emotions change thought and vice versa."

Mayer came to UNH in 1989. "When I interviewed, I remember being struck by how many energetic, intellectually active people there were in the psychology department," Mayer says. "I was also excited about the opportunity to teach graduate students, and to teach courses in personality psychology, abnormal psychology, statistics, and tests and measures. I was very happy to come here, and I'm still happy to be here." He lives in Durham with his wife, Deborah Hirsch Mayer, whose career as a social worker has included six years as the director of social work at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, N.H. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Sarah, who likes books and drawing.

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