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 cross-cultural collaborators, we study children's feelings of moral pride across contexts, how moral pride is socialized by parents, and how this emotion may contribute to children's prosocial repertoires.
Socialization Through Parent-Child Conversations
Children's moral development is propelled, in part, by conversations with their parents and peers. We aim to identify the mechanisms (e.g., message content, linguistic features, behavioral synchrony) within conversations that socialize children's moral-emotional capacities. Most recently, we have explored how parent-adolescent conversations during the pandemic shaped adolescents' 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 environments for refugee youth to be able to flourish to their full potential.
Emotional Development in the Digitial Age
Children learn from their environment, and what they are exposured to laregely influences how they behave. In this suite of projects, we will investigate how children's moral emotions, such as empathy, 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). The proposed project aims to understand when, how, and why adolescents may experience anger within the moral domain (i.e., moral anger), and 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.
Adolescents' Empathic 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 other (e.g., joy). Sharing in others' joy may be critical for enriching youths' socially connections and encouraging their motivation to contribute to others' experiences of joy (via kind actions). In this study, we examine how experiences of empathic joy may bolster youths' mental health through social connectedness and kindness.