Rosemary Al-Kire

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Psychology

Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies are divisive issues in American politics. These attitudes are influenced by factors such as political orientation and religiousness, with religious and conservative individuals demonstrating higher prejudice toward immigrants and refugees, and endorsing stricter immigration policies. Christian na...

Christian Americans are on track to become a minority of the U.S. population by mid-century. Research on racial demographic shifts shows majority-group members experience status threat when reminded of similar demographic changes. Public debate about religious freedom and the role of Christianity in America suggest that fast-changing religious demo...

In this article we review the most recent empirical research about the psychology of religion and intergroup prejudices based on race/ethnicity or religious identification. We highlight how social identity fusion, intergroup emotions, perceived value-conflict and threat, and system-justification contribute to degrees of prejudice. We also review co...

Although self-reports suggest that religious individuals consider themselves universally prosocial, behavioral measures suggest a more limited prosociality and priming studies suggest a small causal relationship. Recent research has uncovered new moderators, with religiousness being more strongly related to prosociality under self-image threat, and...

The primary aims of this project were to estimate levels of agreement or opposition with immigrant family separation at the U.S.–Mexico border and to identify psychological variables that account for variability in attitudes toward immigrant family separation. In Study 1, a sample designed to be representative of Americans in the United States resp...

Four preregistered experiments ( N = 4,307) explored whether anti-Christian bias claims can discreetly signal White allyship among Christian American adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, reading about anti-Christian bias led White, but not Black, Christians to perceive more anti-White bias. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate the connection between Christia...

Encounters with art elicit changes in basic emotions. However, little attention has been paid to how art can elicit changes in self-transcendent emotions such as awe or states such as spiritual transcendence. Moreover, few studies in psychology and empirical aesthetics have tested whether the formal qualities of art matter in eliciting changes in e...

Using cross-sectional data from N = 4274 young adults across 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) scale and tested the hypothesis that the association between PVD and fear of COVID-19 is stronger under high disease threat [that is, absence of...

Using cross-sectional data from N = 4274 young adults across 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) scale and tested the hypothesis that the association between PVD and fear of COVID-19 is stronger under high disease threat [that is, absence of...

Is there a connection between loving oneself, knowing oneself, and mental well-being? Self-compassion—a construct that consists of self-kindness, acknowledgment of common humanity, and mindfulness—is associated with numerous positive outcomes including indicators of mental well-being. However, little research exists exploring the mechanism(s) by wh...

This article synthesizes and evaluates the current state of research within the overlapping domains of the psychology of art and the psychology of religion. In doing so, it identifies the most promising avenues that psychological scientists might pursue to operationalize, quantify, and analyze the psycho-social-spiritual effects of art. Framed by t...

Although psychologists were certainly not the first to study flourishing, virtues, spirituality, and religiousness, one of their key contributions has been to examine these constructs using the scientific method. Complex concepts such as gratitude, humility, spirituality, and religiousness present unique challenges to researchers, requiring them to...

The present study uses a person-centered approach to examine personality profiles of religious variables and the dark triad traits in relation to intellectual humility, prosociality, and mental health cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Undergraduates at a religious university completed assessments across two timepoints (Time 1: N = 1,006; Time 2...

Well-known predictors of prejudice toward Muslims include social dominance and authoritarianism. However, a gap exists for variables reflecting a rejection or mitigation of ideological motivations associated with prejudice toward Muslims. We examined if quiet ego was related to positive attitudes toward Muslims, and whether this could be explained...

Much of the recent work on prejudice emphasizes individual differences, which focuses on the strength of relations between variables on specific instances of prejudice such as racial–ethnic or sexual prejudices. However, the relations between religiosity and prejudice variables are inconsistent and sometimes even paradoxical (Allport, 1954). In thr...

**IN PRESS AT THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY** Christian Americans are on track to become a minority of the U.S. population by midcentury. Research on racial demographic shifts shows majority-group members experience status threat when reminded of similar demographic changes. Public debate about religious freedom and the role of Chri...

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 20...

This article provides a case study of a student-focused research experience that introduced basic data science skills and their utility for psychological research, providing practical learning experiences for students interested in learning computational social science skills. Skills included programming; acquiring, visualizing, and managing data;...

Although world religions extol the virtue of forgiveness, psychological research has uncovered a religion-forgiveness discrepancy in which individual differences in religiousness are positively related to valuing forgiveness, but less strongly related to forgiveness on transgression-specific, state forgiveness measures. The current study examines t...

Posttraumatic growth theory posits that when life circumstances are perceived as stressful, secondary appraisal processes can be recruited in ways to facilitate both coping efforts and personal growth. Using a mixed-methods approach, we found mothers’ most challenging experiences involved child behavior (e.g. aggression, communication, and social i...