Identity and Success Research Lab

Our Mission

The Identity and Success Research Laboratory is a narrative personality psychology lab that conducts both basic psychological science and applied research.  The mission of ISRL is to achieve the following:

  1. Develop theories and methods to expand understanding of narrative identity, success, health, and well-being within the lives of individuals who live in racialized societies.
  2. Design models that specify how dimensions of human personality (e.g. personality traits, motivation, narrative identity) inform the development of computational thinking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence (e.g. machine learning) theories and methods.
  3. Design and deploy apprentice and team science training models to cultivate research skills and harness the personal development of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.
  4. Design research intensive undergraduate courses and advanced graduate courses that engage students in learning experiences that equip them to conduct high quality research projects within a semester long course.
  5. Translate knowledge from basic research and narrative personality psychology theories to transform the identity and success within both organizations (i.e. academic, corporate, and government) and individual lives (e.g. African American students, women in the workplace).

Questions?

Dr. Cynthia Winston-Proctor
Director
Department of Psychology
CB Powell Building 
525 Bryant Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20059

Phone:(202)806-6805
Email: cewinston@howard.edu

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Meet Our Director

Dr. Cynthia Winston-Proctor is a widely respected and accomplished narrative personality psychologist.  She is Professor of Psychology at Howard University, as well as the founding Principal Investigator of the Identity and Success Research Laboratory (ISRL).  Dr. Winston-Proctor draws on multiple disciplines of psychology such as personality, developmental, health, cognitive, educational, cultural, and neuro-psychology to explore the role of narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning in the development of narrative identity and the psychology of success across the life course.   Her narrative personality psychology work includes applications for education, leadership development, social justice, health, behavioral cyber-security, African ancestry tracing, computational thinking, and artificial intelligence (e.g. machine learning).   Dr. Winston-Proctor is committed to the education, training, and personal growth of the next generation of psychologists and research scientists who can solve complex problems throughout the world.

Learn More

New Publications

Patterson, W. & Winston-Proctor, C. E. (2019).  Behavioral Cybersecurity: Applications of Personality Psychology and Computer Science. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press (Taylor & Francis).

Jeffers, S.L., Hill, R., Krumholz, M. F. & Winston-Proctor, C. (in Press). Themes of Gerotranscendence in Narrative Identity through Structured Life Review. The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry.