A seven-year-long study by Judith Harackiewicz of the University of Wisconsin and her colleagues found that college students’ interest in an introductory psychology course taken their freshman year predicted how likely they were to enroll in additional psychology classes and to major in the subject. Interests powerfully influence our academic and professional choices. When we're interested in a task, we work harder and persist longer, bringing more of our self-regulatory skills into play. When we're interested in what we're learning, we pay closer attention we process the information more efficiently we employ more effective learning strategies, such as engaging in critical thinking, making connections between old and new knowledge, and attending to deep structure instead of surface features. As for its effects on cognition: interest effectively turbocharges our thinking. Interest is at once a cognitive state and an affective state, what Silvia calls a “knowledge emotion.” The feelings that characterize interest are overwhelmingly positive: a sense of being energized and invigorated, captivated and enthralled. In a world too full of information, interests usefully narrow our choices: they lead us to pay attention to this and not to that. As Silvia puts it, interest “diversifies experience.” But interest also focuses experience. Interest pulls us toward the new, the edgy, the exotic. Why do we have it? Paul Silvia of the University of North Carolina speculates that interest acts as an “approach urge” that pushes back against the “avoid urges” that would keep us in the realm of the safe and familiar. So what is interest? Interest is a psychological state of engagement, experienced in the moment, and also a predisposition to engage repeatedly with particular ideas, events, or objects over time. Interest has the power to transform struggling performers, and to lift high achievers to a new plane. They are finding that interest can help us think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. In recent years researchers have begun to build a science of interest, investigating what interest is, how interest develops, what makes things interesting, and how we can cultivate interest in ourselves and others.
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