Assistant Professor, Psychology

Affiliations: Trinity College Dublin

Claire is a psychology researcher interested in identifying the long-term impact of music and visual arts engagement on lifelong health and wellbeing using controlled experimental designs and evidence synthesis from large international datasets. Central to Claire’s research is understanding how music and arts engagement can facilitate personal agency, identity development, and self-efficacy, which are key determinants of mental health and psychological wellbeing.

Claire is currently an assistant professor in psychology in Trinity college Dublin. Previously Claire was a post-doctoral researcher in the Autism Research Centre in the university of Cambridge where she was the lead researcher on the Autism-CHIME study and held a junior research fellowship in Wolfson college and a creative health research fellowship from University College London. She is currently a committee member of a special interest group for arts and health in the Royal Society of Public health.

Previous research projects have included music and pain, community arts for social inclusion, art viewing for psychological wellbeing, music therapy for autism, and socio-emotional reasons for music engagement in times of Covid.

For a full list of publications please see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claire-Howlin

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