Professor Larsen’s research focuses on personality and emotion, with an emphasis on understanding why people differ from each other in terms of emotions, including daily moods, reactions to pleasant and unpleasant events, and emotional variability, and other specific emotions like happiness, life satisfaction, and attraction.
Larsen also studies how people manage their emotions both in laboratory studies and in studies of daily life. His more recent research explores how emotions influence cognition, for example, perceptual thresholds for identifying emotional stimuli, attentional capture by emotional stimuli, and how emotions influence memory.