INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGY

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2053-7935

Senior Researcher     Otto-von-Guericke Universität     Institut für Psychologie     G24, R311     Postfach 4120     39106 Magdeburg     Tel: +49 391 67 57447     Fax: +49 391 67 41963     E-Mail: Karen.Kastner@ovgu.de

Career

Karen Kastner (formerly Krause) has been a research assistant in the Department of Environmental Psychology at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg since March 2015. She conducts research into various areas of human-environment and human-technology interaction, such as sustainable lifestyles, energy efficiency and sustainable mobility.

As part of her doctoral project from 2016 to 2021, Karen Kastner investigated the psychological understanding of solidarity and its links to different areas of sustainable behaviour and solidarity-based quality of life.  In December 2021, she completed her doctorate with the dissertation "Solidarische Lebensqualität -
On the psychological understanding of solidarity and its role in transformation commitment and quality of life".

In addition, Karen Kastner was or is involved in various externally funded research projects. In the project GLAMURS - Green Lifestyles, Alternative Models and Upscaling Regional Sustainability, funded by the 7th EU Research Framework Programme, she helped to develop a theory-based and empirically sound understanding of the opportunities and obstacles to a social transformation towards a sustainable lifestyle and green economy in Europe. Later, in the joint project ECHO - Energy Efficiency and CO2 Savings at Universities, funded by the BMU's national climate protection initiative, she focused on user-focused intervention techniques for energy saving in organisations. Since 2018, she has been researching sustainable innovative mobility services, initially in the BMBF-funded TRANSFORMERS project, and from 2020 to 2022 also in the ERDF-funded AuRa - Autonomes Rad project, which she helped to acquire, with a focus on acceptability and human-technology interaction. In the AuRa project, Karen Kastner dealt with the acceptance and acceptability of such autonomous micromobiles by other road users such as pedestrians and drivers, as well as the human-centred design of this technological innovation.

She completed her Master's degree (specialising in environmental psychology/ human-technology interaction) at OVGU and successfully completed it in 2015 with her Master's thesis "Potentially saving the world - perceived and actual potential for saving electricity in German private households". In her thesis, she analysed the perceived and actual potential for saving electricity. During her master's degree, she also worked as an assistant researcher at the Fraunhofer IFF and collaborated on studies in the field of virtual realities and their perception and acceptance.

During her Bachelor's degree at the University of Leipzig, she worked as a student assistant in the Department of General Psychology and completed her Bachelor's thesis on the topic of empathy research in childhood and adolescence.