Dr. Ciara Mahon (BA Hons, Sch., PhD) is an Assistant Professor at the DCU School of Psychology. Ciara received her Honours BA in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin and was awarded the prestigious Trinity College Foundation Scholarship.
She completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), which explored the impact of social media on adolescent body image and how self-compassion could reduce adolescent body image concerns related to social media use. She has subsequently co-led several multistakeholder, international projects involving the design and evaluation of school-based body image interventions. She was Principal Investigator on an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Enterprise Scheme at University College Dublin and worked with Jigsaw, The National Centre for Youth Mental Health to culturally adapt and evaluate, “Be Real’s BodyKind” - a novel body image programme for adolescents, in one of the largest school-based body image trials, involving 23 schools and approximately 1,200 students.
Ciara also has interests in youth mental health, from her first postdoctoral position at UCD, in partnership with Jigsaw, which involved analysing and communicating findings of My World Surveys, national mental health surveys of 33,000+ people in Ireland.
Ciara teaches a number of modules including Introduction to Psychology and Developmental Psychology for the BSc in Nursing and the MSc in Psychology at DCU. Ciara is on the editorial board for the Body Image Journal and is co-founder of the Body Image Research Network Ireland (BIRN), an interdisciplinary network to facilitate research in body image and body image-related disorders.
Ciara’s research interests include body image, self-compassion, intervention design and evaluation, eating disorder prevention, social media and youth mental health. Ciara is interested in understanding the factors that support positive body image, and how these can be harnessed in innovative ways to improve body image and psychological wellbeing across the lifespan.