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POSITION: Assistant Professor of Psychology

DEPARTMENTS:
School of Sciences, Engineering, Art and Nursing
Psychology

LOCATION: Main Campus, Harrisonburg | RLN 312

PHONE: (540) 432-4169

EMAIL: kathryn.howard@emu.edu

About: Kathryn received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023. She is currently an Assistant Professor at EMU and runs the Identity and Morality in Action Lab (IMA Lab). Kathryn and the members of IMA Lab investigate how identity impacts how people perceive and navigate their social worlds. Although Kathryn is interested in many facets of identity, much of her work examines how ideological and political identity shape peoples’ understandings of politics, morality, and other cultural processes.

Interested in joining IMA Lab? Kathryn is currently recruiting students for Fall 2024! Information and interest forms for IMA Lab can be found here:

https://forms.gle/7Eo1Vh8ZjT6ffvpt5

Current Research Projects:

IMA Lab currently investigates how political and ideological identity impact how people respond to the morally transgressive behavior of political candidates and other societal elites. For example, when people learn that their favored political candidate has engaged in morally transgressive behavior, how does this information alter a person’s attitude toward the candidate? What is the extent of morally transgressive behavior that voters tolerate before withdrawing support from favored candidates? Kathryn and the IMA lab investigate how socio-political characteristics of the individual, features of the candidate, and the social context of the transgressive behavior interact to impact voter response to candidate transgression.

Another project investigated by IMA Lab explores how political and ideological identity shape peoples’ understandings of socio-cultural constructs, such as diversity. Her work has found that people perceive diversity to possess multiple meanings, and that political party membership impacts not only attitudes towards diversity but also what social groups people consider to be diverse. Current projects investigate the motives and outcomes behind such beliefs.

Kathryn and the IMA Lab use a multi-method approach, including in-person experimentation, reaction-time paradigms, and survey-based instrumentation, to pursue these lines of research.

Education

MA, Wake Forest University (Psychology)
BA, James Madison Univeristy (Psychology)
PHD, University of Illinois Chicago (Psychology)

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