About

Dr. Nicole Henniger is an Associate Professor in the department of Counseling & Psychology at Tennessee Tech University. She earned her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. While completing her graduate studies, she worked on large-scale applied behavioral health research with the Naval Health Research Center in Point Loma. She is originally from St. Louis, Missouri, and she joined the faculty at Tennessee Tech in 2017.

Dr. Henniger’s research focuses on social emotions such as envy, jealousy, shame, and guilt. She uses experimental, psychophysiological, and survey research methods to assess emotional and motivational responses in health-related social contexts such as patient-physician interactions, organ donor registration, behavioral health, and addiction treatment decision-making. She directs the Social Emotion Lab and supervises undergraduate and graduate student research projects, including multiple student-led studies examining envious responses to social media posts. Dr. Henniger is also working with Dr. Derrick Edwards and his Responder Health Lab team on the development and evaluation of a Firefighter Cancer Prevention Toolkit. 

For the undergraduate psychology major at Tech, Dr. Henniger teaches classes in Social Psychology, Experimental Psychology research methods, Senior Thesis, Emotion & Motivation, Consumer Behavior, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology.

Degrees and Certifications

• PhD, Experimental Psychology, University of California, San Diego
• MA, Experimental Psychology, University of California, San Diego
• BA, Psychology and Neuroscience, Knox College