Education

Hollins University B.A. 05/2000 Clinical Psychology
Radford University M.A. 12/2002 Experimental Psychology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Ph.D. 05/2008 Developmental and Biological Psychology

Personal Statement

Dr. Kate Holland is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. During my tenure, I have supervised undergraduates in conducting research in the Behavioral Neuroscience lab as well as supervising internships. The courses I routinely teach are Research Methods and Psychological Statistics, as well as Survey of Learning and Memory, and Cognitive and Physiological Psychology. My goal as a teacher and researcher is to prepare and guide undergraduates to successfully obtain jobs and positions in graduate programs in psychology.

As a graduate student at Virginia Tech, I acquired skills in neuropsychological test administration as well as a broad knowledge of changes in brain activation as a function of stress in experimental settings. My skills in EEG data collection, artifacting, and analysis are the result of intensive training at Radford University, Virginia Tech, and my employment at Neuroscan LLC.

My research goals involve examining changes in left and right hemisphere activation as a function of exposure to cognitive and physiological stress. This is accomplished using a dual concurrent task approach. In 2012, I developed the capacity model of hostility, which states that hostility results from altered neural systems within the right hemisphere. I have found evidence to support this model with past projects that examined changes in the ability to process two stressors concurrently in a lab setting. Specifically, high and low hostile men under went cold pressor stress and stress induced from completion of a design task.

As PI on previous university funded grants, I laid the groundwork for current research projects by developing sound protocols relevant to functional cerebral systems with an emphasis on examining changes in right brain activation. During an academic year, I have active projects as well as several that are in the final stages of write-up. I routinely produce several abstract publications from each project. Moreover, I have produced several peer-reviewed manuscript publications that provide the foundation for the proposed research.