Research Interests

Reinhard Pekrun holds the Chair for Personality and Educational Psychology at the University of Munich and is Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney. His research areas include achievement emotion and motivation, personality development, and educational assessment and evaluation. He pioneered research on emotions in achievement settings and originated the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. Pekrun is a highly cited researcher (see Web of Science, Essential Science Indicators) who has authored 23 books and more than 250 articles and chapters, including numerous publications in leading journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Child Development, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, and Emotion. Pekrun is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Educational Research Association, and the International Academy of Education. He is a member of the editorial boards of top journals such as Educational Psychologist and Journal of Educational Psychology. He also served as President of the Stress and Anxiety Research Society, Dean of the Faculty for Psychology and Education at the University of Regensburg, and Vice-President for Research at the University of Munich. In an advisory capacity, Pekrun is active in policy development and implementation in education. In 2015, he received the John G. Diefenbaker Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, which acknowledges outstanding research accomplishments across fields in the humanities and social sciences. He is also the recipient of the Sylvia Scribner Award 2017 (American Educational Research Association), the EARLI Oeuvre Award 2017 (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction), and the Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 of the German Psychological Society.