As a research scientist with the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, I work with state child welfare data. Here, I leverage statewide data to help better understand experiences and outcomes in the state's CPS, foster care, adoption, and juvenile justice systems. Ultimately, examining and interpreting these data can help to better understand the experiences of children and families in these systems, and to find areas for potential practice and policy improvement.
In my Ph.D. and postdoctoral work, I studied early emotional development. My research focused primarily on the development of emotion perception and emotion understanding from infancy through the preschool years. More specifically, I studied how children learn about emotions from such young ages, and how aspects of children's daily experiences impact emotion understanding early in life. To address this, I used a variety of methodologies including eye tracking, live action categorization tasks, EEG, corpus analyses, and behavioral coding. Some of the questions that I have examined in my research are below:
What facial configurations and emotion language do infants see and hear in their natural environments?
Does family emotional expressiveness relate to the development of emotion concepts in infancy and early childhood?
How does infant emotion perception relate to toddler emotion understanding?
Can infants discriminate the emotions associated with human walking motions?
How does language relate to infant emotion perception and early childhood emotion understanding?
How do emotion labels influence emotion categorization development in early childhood?
How may emotions impact preschoolers' word learning?