Karen Akin is a PhD candidate in Experimental Social Psychology at The University of Alabama, where she works in the Self-Regulation Lab under Dr. Katie E. Garrison. Before her doctorate, she earned an M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Baltimore.

Her research examines self-regulation: how people manage their emotions, cognition, motivation, and effort, and how that regulation is interpreted, both by the people enacting it and the people watching. Her dissertation tests whether cognitive reappraisal helps people make real progress on personally meaningful goals, and whether executive functioning and working memory shape who benefits most. A second line of her work asks how self-control and emotion regulation are judged by observers, including when restraint reads as authentic rather than merely effortful or performative. Her work draws on multilevel and longitudinal modeling, large-scale replication and experience sampling methodology (including multi-site collaborations using EEG), and appears in or is under review at journals including Motivation Science, Computers and Human Behavior, and Scientific Reports.