Nicholas S. Holtzman, Ph.D.

Academic Biography. I attended the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, for my freshman year, declaring my major in psychology. Continuing in psychology, I transferred at Loyola University New Orleans ('04), and then I earned my Ph.D. ('11) at Washington University in St. Louis, under the mentorship of Professor Michael Strube, a specialist in social-personality and quantitative psychology. After teaching in St. Louis for a few years, I served as a tenure-track assistant professor and then tenured associate professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro from 2013-2022. My partner and I moved to the greater New Orleans metropolitan area in 2022 for family reasons, and since then I've been at Southeastern.

Teaching and Mentoring. I regularly teach both undergraduate and graduate courses, primarily in technical aspects of psychology, including Principles of Research Design (PSYC 2200) as well as Non-Experimental Design and Analysis (PSYC 6360). I am interested in training the next generation of scholars in psychology, and I aim to hone students' skills for the workforce. About half of the MA-level students whom I've mentored have gone on to Ph.D. programs (e.g., at Binghamton University, Oklahoma State University, Saint Louis University, University of Southern Mississippi, and Washington State University). I regularly begin to mentor one or two new MA students each fall; feel free to email me to inquire about funding, etc.

Research and Technical Interests. Broadly, I'm curious about what makes people different from each other. More specifically, I'm interested in individual differences in self-focused attention. We have tried to answer questions such as: Who talks/thinks/writes about themselves? And: What are the implications of this self-focused attention? Such questions have prompted my collaborators and I to study personality constructs like narcissism, depression, selfishness, and (more recently) solipsism. My technical and methodological interests include psychometrics, text analysis, R software, multiple regression, and data science. Visit the Research tab at the top of this page for more information on specific papers, or check out Google Scholar or ResearchGate.

Achievements and Editing. As of May 2025, my collaborators and I have published about 30 peer reviewed papers over the last 15 years. I've co-authored articles in outlets such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology as well as Social Psychological and Personality Science. I have received awards for excellence in peer reviewing. Previously, I served on the editorial boards at Journal of Personality as well as at Journal of Language and Social Psychology. From 2025 to 2028, I am serving as an associate editor at the flagship journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. I enjoy being a part of the field of psychology in this way--seeing the cutting edge research people are engaged in.