Christopher Holland, PhD
Assistant Professor, Psychology

A native of the Great Planes, Dr. Holland hails from the greater Kansas City area and is entirely brand new to the East Coast.  As a first-generation college student, he earned his B.A. in Psychology from Knox College, a small liberal arts college very similar to Cabrini University. There, he worked with an amazing set of psychology mentors and experienced what would become the foundation for a greater career focused on teaching and undergraduate success. After graduating from Knox, he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a focus on social psychology and statistics, from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.  

In a nutshell, Dr. Holland is focused on student academic success, exposure to new ways of thinking about human behavior, and empowering students to find and build their own knowledge, whether through class or through their own research. In the classroom, he is also finding an increasing focus on contemporary issues such as sex and gender, and sexuality-based equality, environmental issues such as climate change, and issues of social need such as radicalization and isolation. However, despite serious topics, Dr. Holland is still most interested in giving students the kind of rigorous and enthusiastic experience that he received from his psychology undergraduate faculty. The experience should be personal, compassionate, and intellectually stimulating. 

Dr. Holland’s research has focused on motivation, attitude formation, mate selection, and topics related to both social and evolutionary psychology. Future research will continue to incorporate these topics, examples of which can be found in publish work with titles such as Attitudes: An evolutionary perspective, or Individual differences in the effects of baby images on attitudes toward getting married. Integration of topics related to LGBTQ+ populations, climate change and isolation in society are expected to develop as well.