About

Kristen Harrison is the Richard Cole Eminent Professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She runs the Family and Media Laboratory (FaMLab) and studies media content, uses and effects on children, adolescents and families, with an emphasis on body-related issues like health, the self-concept and social cognitions. Since the 1990s, she and her students have studied topics including media violence and aggression, body image and disordered eating, body mass and dietary intake, obesity, nutritional knowledge, healthy eating schemas, child feeding practices, sexual objectification, sexual behavior, AIDS stigma, media literacy and health literacy, self-esteem, problematic child media use, family media conflict, media and sleep, “empowerment” advertising, media and race, and typical and neurodivergent children’s use of media devices and content for sensory regulation. Her work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Illinois Department of Human Services and the William T. Grant Foundation, among others. Harrison was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in early adulthood and has a keen interest in working to help her colleagues at UNC, and institutions of higher education in general, better accommodate the executive function needs of neurodivergent learners.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Communication
• Environmental health
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Digital media, children, and mental health.

  American Psychological Association eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “Actually an ED and not just a quirky aspect of autism”: TikTok as a forum and mediator of autistic food issues and eating disorders

  New Media & Society · 2025-06-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Restrictive eating disorders (EDs) have among the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. To date, little research has investigated the role of digital media in sharing ED experiences and promoting recovery for autistic individuals, despite high autism rates among those with EDs and the potential for social media (SM) to provide resources and support for adolescent girls and young women living with EDs. Given this gap, we undertook an exploratory study to assess content pertaining to autistic people’s difficulties with food and eating on the leading SM app TikTok. We identified four main themes: (a) EDs and autism; (b) cognitive, sensory, and behavioral dimensions of autistic eating and body issues; (c) social, cultural, and economic aspects of autistic people’s food challenges; and (d) self-reported role of TikTok in autistic individuals’ coping with food/eating difficulties. Our study contributes several novel findings to research on digital media, mental health, and marginalized populations.

  PublisherDOI

• Helpful or harmful? A qualitative analysis of young adults’ perceptions about the body positivity movement on social media

  Research Square · 2025-05-08

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring Gaze: Women’s Visual Processing of Empowerment and Objectification Messages in Empowerment-Themed Advertisements

  Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly · 2024-01-04 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Empowerment-themed advertisements (ETAs) often pair ostensibly empowering narratives with objectification imagery. Existing research demonstrates that women do not report feeling empowered after viewing ETAs but cannot confirm why. In this study, 186 female participants were randomly assigned to view captions and/or photos from ETAs while their eye movements were recorded. The empowerment-themed captions increased women’s felt empowerment when presented alone but failed to empower when paired with photos. However, captioning photos with empowerment-themed text did lead to lower self-objectification than captioning them with objectification-themed text. Thus, while the visuals used in ETAs limit their effectiveness, self-objectification may not be responsible.

  PublisherDOI

• Digital Media and Neurodevelopmental Differences

  2024-12-05 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen access

  Abstract “Screen media” guidance is not a one-size-fits-all, and this is especially true for young people whose development occurs outside the window of “typical” development. Given the wide range of neurodevelopmental differences, the review of children’s digital media use research in this chapter focuses on those diagnosed with autism and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—conditions that differ but share many underlying cognitive and clinical characteristics. While the evidence base is uneven and incomplete, existing research reviews indicate that screen media use by children and adolescents with an autism and/or ADHD diagnosis can be not only high-risk but also high-reward. The current chapter organizes the major findings into (1) developmental domains for media use and (2) ecological contents for media engagement. We recommend future research directions and provide recommendations for stakeholder groups such as clinicians, policymakers, educators, and technologists. It is now a given that neurodivergent children engage with digital media at least as much if not more than neurotypical children do but often for different reasons. As such, it is important to move conversations toward practical concerns about effective, personally meaningful, and healthy usage.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring Gaze: Women’s Visual Processing of Empowerment and Objectification Messages in Empowerment-Themed Advertisements

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2024-11-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Empowerment-themed advertisements (ETAs) often pair ostensibly empowering narratives with objectification imagery. Existing research demonstrates that women do not report feeling empowered after viewing ETAs but cannot confirm why. In this study, 186 female participants were randomly assigned to view captions and/or photos from ETAs while their eye movements were recorded. The empowerment-themed captions increased women’s felt empowerment when presented alone but failed to empower when paired with photos. However, captioning photos with empowerment-themed text did lead to lower self-objectification than captioning them with objectification-themed text. Thus, while the visuals used in ETAs limit their effectiveness, self-objectification may not be responsible.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Media, Body Image, and Eating Disorders

  2022-04-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Research on ideal-body media use and body image and eating disorders among child and adolescent media users has been ongoing for approximately 30 years. Although media content, formats, and technologies have changed dramatically, the relationship between exposure to thin-ideal media and body image and disordered eating has stayed remarkably consistent, with average standardized effect sizes tracking in the modest to moderate range (about .20 to .40). Heredity, gender, age, and race/ethnicity moderate these relationships in meaningful ways. Social media have introduced new ways beyond exposure that engagement with media may be consequential for youth body image. Theory-building must attend to family, peers, and media as overlapping influences in the ecology of everyday life when conceptualizing modern media influences on body image.

  PublisherDOI

• Parent Reports of Children’s Fright Reactions to News of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results from a National U.S. Sample

  Media Psychology · 2022-01-05 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Between April 17 and 29, 2020, we conducted a nationwide online survey of parents of children between the ages of 3 and 17 years (N = 1560). A majority of children were reported to be negatively emotionally affected (frightened, disturbed, or upset) by news coverage of COVID-19. Every stress symptom asked about (including nervousness, crying, and sleep problems) was dramatically more prevalent among children frightened than not frightened by the coverage. Open-ended questions illustrated the emotional depths of some responses. Developmental differences occurred in elements of coverage seen to influence fright. Most parents of frightened children tried to help their child cope, but their choices of strategies were only partially consistent with developmental expectations. Children with digital devices in their bedroom showed greater fear; more hours of COVID news were transmitted in homes with frightened than unfrightened children; and the relationship between media access and children’s fear intensity and stress symptoms remained after controlling for parents’ own fear and parents’ closeness with people diagnosed with COVID. Parents are encouraged to monitor children’s exposure to media-conveyed catastrophes, to be mindful of potential age differences in child responses, and to be available to help children cope.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Critical Voice to Critical Mass: An Examination of the Current State of Architecture Criticism and Role of the Popular Critic

  2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The foremost intention of this research is to establish a more scholarly understanding of the academic, professional, and public significance of popular architecture criticism, and to re-imagine the role of the popular critic within a contemporary context. The thesis does so through the defining of its practice, an analysis of its current state, a review of its theoretical groundings, the analysis of contemporary and critical discussion, and an overlaying of these findings to establish the value and future potential of a democratized popular architecture criticism. It will answer the question: What is the current state and contemporary role of the popular architecture critic within the context of a democratized critical media landscape? K. Harrison, 2022 vii "For architecture, everybody actually is [a critic]. We are always in and around architecture and cannot escape its influence [] You don't need to be an architect to hit your head against the wall. Nor, one might add, to be a critic in order to shout 'ouch!'" 1 "The duty of the critic, therefore, is [] to empower his or her readers with an analytical tool with which to the make the environment more comprehensible and tractable -to make the public more critical." 2 "Architectural criticism is obliged to support the primary duty of architecture itself: making life better. This is the lamp that should illumine every building we make and every sentence we write."

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Empowerment-Themed Advertising Effects: Activation of Empowerment and Objectification Schemas in Women Age 18-35

  Media Psychology · 2022-11-13 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Advertisements that ostensibly serve to empower women have become popular in recent years, but recent research calls into question the psychological effectiveness of these advertisements. While seemingly progressive, empowerment-themed advertisements (ETAs) often pair empowerment-themed narratives with objectifying visuals despite the established harmful effects of objectification in media. Though empowerment and objectification intuitively seem incompatible, this relationship has not been empirically tested. The current study used experimental design to examine the relationship between empowerment and objectification schemas following exposure to ETAs. U.S. women age 18–35 (N= 273) were randomly assigned to view advertisements from one of five conditions displaying combinations of high/low empowerment and objectification themes. They then completed a lexical decision task (LDT) to measure schema activation. While ETAs were perceived as significantly more empowering than other advertisement types in the manipulation check, no advertising condition exhibited greater activation of empowerment schemas than the control group as measured by the LDT, suggesting that ETAs were largely ineffective at activating empowerment schemas. Contrary to initial expectations, there was no evidence that objectification content suppressed priming of empowerment schemas, though interpretation of the objectification schema findings is complicated by the likely impact of cognitive load on LDT response times.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Amelia C. Couture Bue

  13 shared

• Mericarmen Peralta

  Loma Linda University

  10 shared

• Halie Wenhold

  8 shared

• Janet M. Liechty

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  7 shared

• Jessica D. Moorman

  Wayne State University

  7 shared

• Diana S. Grigsby‐Toussaint

  Brown University

  7 shared

• Barbara H. Fiese

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  7 shared

• Sarah E. Domoff

  Albany State University

  6 shared

Labs

• Family and Media Laboratory (FaMLab)PI

Awards & honors

• Richard Cole Eminent Professor