FABB Lab News:

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

Welcome!

Welcome to the Family Affect Beliefs and Behaviors web page. Currently our lab includes 14 undergraduate students and 6 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 is anger in the family organized, and to what degree is anger in the individual versus embedded in the relationship itself?
4. What are some of the components of sibling jealousy, and how do children’s implicit theories impact their jealousy frequency, intensity, and duration, and their strategies for dealing with their own jealousy?

With regard to the topic of socialization processes within the family, we have two kinds of foci:

• How are emotional experience, emotional expression, and emotional competence socialized within families? (This overarching focus is well represented in the questions just described above in b. through d.)
• How is the understanding of, and indeed, the construction of gender socialized in young children through language?

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