Projects

Moral Pride Across Cultures

Moral pride is the warm glow you feel after helping, sharing, or including someone, and it contributes to character and virtue development. In this project, alongside international collaborators, we study children's feelings of moral pride across social contexts, how moral pride is socialized by parents, and how this emotion may contribute to children's prosocial repertoires. 

Socialization Through Parent-Child Conversations

Conversations are rich milieu for development during the childhood and adolescent years. Across our various studies, we examine how conversational features (e.g., message content, linguistic features, behavioral synchrony) contribute to children's moral development. Most recently, we have explored how parent-adolescent conversations during the pandemic shaped adolescents' empathy for vulnerable individuals and their COVID-19 health behaviors. 

Refugee Newcomers, Resettlement, Receiving Society

Global challenges, such as socio-political conflict and climate change, have contributed to the forced migration of children and families (i.e., refugees) across national borders. There are currently 27 million refugees in the world (half of whom are school-aged children) and about a quarter resettle in high-income countries (such as Canada). While refugees who resettle in high income countries tend to receive aid that fulfills their basic material needs, they lack social-emotional support from the community. Within this set of projects, we examine how refugee newcomer children and youth are doing as they resettle in their new environment and how receiving society children, families, and service providers create inclusive communities for refugee youth to thrive.

Critical Thinking and Kindness Online

In this suite of projects, we investigate how children's emotions, such as empathy, moral cognitions, and moral values develop alongside their interactions with screens and social media. We are also interested in how parents prepare children for independent use of social media.

How can parents foster kindness and critical thinking skills in their children to responsibly engage with others online?

Moral Anger

Anger has long been theorized to underlie ethical action. Yet, research on anger has mostly focused on its role in negative behavioural outcomes (i.e., aggression and violence). In this project, we are working with youth to better understand when, how, and why adolescents may experience anger within the moral domain (i.e., moral anger), how experiences of moral anger may change from mid-to late-adolescence as youth become more independent, deeply invested in their peer relationships, and involved in their community, and whether moral anger is a motivator of civic engagement. 

Adolescents' Empathetic Joy and Mental Health

Empathy is typically thought of in the context of sharing the negative emotions of others (e.g., sadness). Perhaps more commonly, however, we also share in the positive emotions of others (e.g., joy). Sharing in others' joy may be critical for enriching youths' social connections and in buffering their mental health challenges. In this study, we examine how experiences of empathetic joy may bolster youths' mental health through social connectedness and kindness.