Faculty Department of Psychological Sciences

Dr. Amy Posey received her B.S. from Missouri State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Kansas. She has been at Benedictine College since 1995, and is currently chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences. In recent years, she has worked with students on research projects involving gender and persuasive messages, conveying emotion through text messages, and the psychological consequences of perfectionism among college students. Dr. Posey resides in Kansas City with her husband, daughter, and dog.

Eva (Chian-Hui) Chen received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2011 and joined Benedictine College as a faculty in the same year. She is committed to bringing diversity into our understanding of human development via undergraduate teaching, advising and mentoring, as well as collaborative research.

She teaches General Psychology, Developmental Psychology I &II, Lifespan Development, Cultural Psychology, and Research Seminar. Collaborative learning is essential to her teaching philosophy as it makes the classroom a place where everyone can cooperate, challenge, contribute, encourage, and support one another. In her teaching, she strives to inspire students to be self-directed lifelong learners.

Her research seeks to take an interdisciplinary approach to studying human development in cultural contexts. One area of her research focuses on understanding Vietnamese-Taiwanese transnational marriage families in Taiwan. Another area of focus is on examining teaching effectiveness in developmental psychology.

Dr. Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez earned an MSc in Research Methods (2002) and a PhD in Experimental Psychology (2005) from The University of Bristol, in England. Upon graduation he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Bristol and then at Bangor University, in Wales. From 2012 to 2022 he was at The University of Southern Mississippi, most recently as a tenured associate professor in psychology. In 2019 he earned a Graduate Certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis from Ball State University. He joined Benedictine College in the fall of 2022. Dr. Stadthagen-Gonzalez’s main area of research is in the psychology of language, including work on bilingualism, language and emotion, word recognition, and categorization of meanings. More recently he has also started conducting research on the topic of financial infidelity. He teaches General Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Biopsychology, and Research & Statistics in Psychology.

Sharon M. Houlahan completed her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She went on to earn an M.A. in Clinical Counseling at The Citadel while serving in the United States Marine Corps. Her M.A. in Pastoral Ministry and Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology are both from Boston College. She also completed an APA accredited pre-doctoral internship in clinical psychology in remote Alaska before coming to Benedictine College in 2020. She currently teaches: General Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Introduction to Counseling, Health Psychology, Tests and Measurement, and will be teaching a Research Seminar next year. Her research interests include exploring how spirituality, ability, culture, and housing status each impact mental health and identity.

Dean Elmore earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Social Psychology from the University of Alabama in 2017 and began working at Benedictine College in the fall of that year. He received his M.A. from the University of Alabama, as well, and completed his undergraduate degree in Sociology-Psychology at Birmingham-Southern College. Dr. Elmore teaches General Psychology, Research and Statistics in Psychology, Learning and Cognition, and Biopsychology. His research interests are in the area of social psychology with a focus on psychological processes related to victimization and justice.