FABB Lab News:

The semester has gotten off to a great start as we welcomed a new graduate student into our lab, Calvin Sims!

Welcome!

Welcome to the Family Affect Beliefs and Behaviors web page. Currently our lab includes 18 undergraduate students and 5 graduate students, with Dr. Amy Halberstadt heading our collaborative ventures. Our research centers around two large topics: (1) developmental processes in emotional experience and expression, and (2) socialization processes in the family. Often these are intertwined. Click here for more details of the current projects.

With regard to the topic of emotional experience and expression, we have many projects, and they are best organized under four central questions:

1. What is affective social competence?
2. How do parental beliefs and behaviors regarding emotion affect a variety of outcomes for children, including their own beliefs and behaviors, and their coping skills and strategies?
3. How do children develop skill in emotion understanding?
4. How do culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender relate to all of the above? Children develop in social worlds, so we want to learn more about how their differentiated social worlds relate to parents' beliefs and behaviors and children's own emotion-related schemas for experiencing emotion, expressing emotion, and understanding the emotions of others.
5. How do children develope complex emotional selves including their experiences of pride, schadenfreude, self-compassion, gratitude and wonderment?

Please click on the underlined phrases above for links for more information about some of our specific areas.