Current research interests include studying the influence of affective state on individual decision making, group decision making, and mental workload assessment; personality characteristics and individual differences in perception and preference for workload levels; and the examination of the effects of workload and stress on situation awareness in a dynamic decision making task.

Ongoing research projects include: The role of risk taking in pilot decision making with an emphasis on pilots' perception and assessment of the multidimensional components of risk (supported by NASA), Individual differences and personality traits in risk-taking and mental workload perception and preferences: Assessing the predictive validity of SWAT as an individual differences measure of preferences for mental workload levels, The effects of framing of task performance strategies on performance in a multiattribute dynamic decision making work environment and on situation awareness (supported by NASA), The influence of positive affect, perceived threats, and opportunities on the decision rule in risk situations (partially supported by the Mershon Center).

Selected Publications

Reid, G. B., Shingledecker, C. A., Nygren, T. E., & Eggemeier, F. T. (1981). Development of multidimensional subjective measures of workload. Proceedings of the International Conference on Cybernetics and Society, 403-406.

Reid, G. B., Eggemeier, F. T., & Nygren, T. E. (1982). An individual differences approach to SWAT scale development. Proceedings of the 1982 Human Factors Society Meeting, 639-642.

Nygren, T. E. (1995). A conjoint analysis of five factors influencing heavy vehicle drivers' perceptions of workload. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 39th Annual meeting, 1102-1106.

Nygren, T. E. & Jones, L. E. (1977). Individual differences in perceptions and preferences for political candidates. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 182-197.

Nygren, T. E. (1977). The relationship between the perceived risk and attractiveness of gambles: A multidimensional analysis. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 565-579.

Nygren, T. E. (1979). A theoretical framework for testing the additive difference model for dissimilarities data: Representing gambles as multidimensional stimuli. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 20, 53-77.

Nygren, T. E. (1980). Limitations of additive conjoint scaling procedures: Detecting nonadditivity when additivity is known to be violated. Applied Psychological Measurement, 4, 367-383.

Nygren, T. E. (1985). An examination of conditional violations of axioms for additive conjoint measurement. Applied Psychological Measurement, 9, 249-264.

Nygren, T. E. (1986). A two-stage algorithm for assessing violations of additivity via axiomatic and numerical conjoint measurement. Psychometrika, 51, 483-491.