Dr. Astrid Carolus

Vita

Astrid Carolus graduated in psychology at Saarland University, Germany with a focus on media and organizational psychology, diagnostics and evaluation as well as clinical psychology with a minor subject business studies. During her studies, she began to work in business consultancy. After her graduation she continued consultancy as a freelancer and became a research assistant at Saarland University. 2010 she went to Wuerzburg to work at the back then newly founded Institute for Human-Computer-Media at Julius-Maximilians-University. Here, she obtained her doctorate about social communication within social networking sites with honors. 2016 she became an assistant professor at the chair of media psychology.

Currently she heads the project “Teaching Digital Literacy” focusing on children and adolescents as well as teachers and their media literacy. Further, Astrid Carolus leads the project “Normalization of Intelligent Voice Assistants” analyzing users interacting with embodied artificial intelligence.

As a researcher and as a teacher Astrid Carolus is interested in humans interacting with media devices and media content. She analyzes humans’ motivation to use them, the process of usage itself as well as its effects. Two fundamental questions are: What are humans doing with media? And: What does the media do with humans?

• From a psychological perspective she analyzes the usage of digital devices with an emphasis on smartphones and voice assistants which she postulates to constitute “digital companions”.
• To provide an understanding of media research and to impart media and digital literacy is part of the project “Teaching Digital Literacy”.
• Analyzing computer mediated communications is her third main topic. She studies image-based social media applications (focus: body-related content), the underlying psychological needs as well as the effects of the usage.

Astrid Carolus is a certified coder in Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to analyze facial expressions.

 

Interests and research focus

Psychological perspective on human thinking, feeling and acting when using media

Smart Devices as digital companion

Interacting with Voice Assistants

Digital Literacy 

Image-based social media applications

 

Publications