John D. Mayer received his B.A. from the University of Michigan, his Ph.D. in psychology from Case Western  Reserve University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. Mayer's interests are in personality psychology and in personal and emotional intelligences. He has served on the editorial boards of Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, among others.

John D. Mayer's curriculum vitae

Professor Mayer most often teaches Personality Psychology and Psychological Measurement.

Mayer's research interests are focused in part on people-centered intelligences and in particular, emotional and personal intelligences, including their conceptualization and measurement. Through the present, Mayer and his colleague, Dr. Peter Salovey—later joined by Dr. David Caruso—developed the concept of emotional intelligence, sought to improve its measurement, and to understand what it predicts. 

More recently, with Dr. Caruso and Dr. A. T. Panter, of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Mayer has been examining personal intelligence, a broad intelligence that  addresses how people reason about both their own personality and the personalities of others.  

A further area of Mayer's interests concerns identifying useful general approaches to understanding personality psychology. His personality systems framework joins together a consideration of many of personality's parts, such as the self-concept, sociability, and others, along with how those parts are organized, and how they develop over the life span. One recent overview of the personality systems framework was published in 2015 in the Journal of Research in Personality.  More recently, this approach has been adapted by clinical psychologists for use in personality assessment.

For more on the theories and research conducted in the lab, please see the "Theories and Frameworks" page of the website.