Psychology| Graduate Training in Developmental Psychology
Graduate Training in Developmental Psychology
The Developmental area is one of four total areas of training emphasis in the department, along with Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology. Our graduate training area in Developmental Psychology is designed to link with our other established areas to prepare well-trained psychologists able to conduct methodologically rigorous and socially meaningful behavioral science in the service of understanding development. We aim to produce graduates with knowledge across the sub-disciplines of psychology and sensitivity to the practical significance and broad impact of developmental research.
Our developmental faculty offer training in behavioral, neural (fMRI, EEG, ERP), eye-tracking, physiological, longitudinal, and computational modeling techniques. Our developmental faculty members are involved in a variety of centers and institutes at Rutgers to facilitate multi-disciplinary inquiry related to developmental science. In addition, many of our research programs engage the greater Newark community to conduct applied research in a variety of areas including early child care, youth justice, and child health.
Currently our Developmental faculty includes:
Dr. Paul Boxer, Professor of Psychology (aggressive/violent behavior, developmental psychopathology, prevention/intervention). Dr. Boxer directs the Social Development Research Program and has active projects investigating the impact of violence in the social environment on psychosocial functioning, including a long-term study of children's development in the Middle East. He also has led a series of projects examining the impact of justice-system experiences on readjustment to the community for adolescents and adults, particularly those who are gang-affiliated. Boxer also partners with community-based youth service agencies such as the NJ Youth Justice Commission to investigate the effectiveness of interventions for reducing youth offending and the role of trauma in violent behavior. Boxer is a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and the Rutgers School of Social Work along with the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Vanessa LoBue, Professor and Chair of Psychology (emotional development, anxiety, emotion understanding). Dr. LoBue directs both the Child Study Center and Community and Rutgers Engaged Science (CARES). She primarily studies emotion understanding—or the set of abilities related to determining the emotions of others—is crucial for the development of healthy social interactions. Emotion understanding allows us to respond appropriately to others’ needs, make predictions about social interactions, and even regulate our own emotional responses effectively. Indeed, research has shown that children who have better emotion understanding are rated as more socially skilled by their teachers, more likable by their peers, and are better able to navigate aggressive interactions. Likewise, children who have poor emotion understanding tend to be more aggressive, present with more behavioral problems and internalizing issues like anxiety, and demonstrate lower academic achievement. Very broadly, her research program focuses on the development of emotion understanding, or the process by which infants and young children come to perceive, express, and regulate their emotions over the course of the lifespan.
Dr. Kimele Persaud, Assistant Professor of Psychology (working and long-term memory; semantic and episodic memory; emotion-enhanced memory effects; computational models of memory). Dr. Persaud directs the Memory and Computational Cognition (MC2) Lab. Her research program seeks to elucidate the processes and mechanisms that explain how the mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information from memory, while minimizing cognitive effort and error. Her work also evaluates the developmental origins of these mechanisms and explores how they contribute to developmental shifts in episodic memory performance. Using a combination of behavioral methods, computational modeling, and cognitive development, her work investigates: 1) the reconstructive nature of visual working and long-term memory, 2) the role of prior semantic knowledge and surprise in memory processes and 3) the processes and mechanisms that underlie the enhancing effects of emotions on memory.
Dr. Miriam Rosenberg-Lee, Associate Professor of Psychology (functional neuroimaging of mathematical cognition; cognitive development; learning and reasoning). Dr. Rosenberg-Lee directs the Mathematics, Reasoning and Learning Lab and has active projects investigating how children, adolescents and adults learn mathematical information. Combining functional neuroimaging with outside the scanner learning programs, she asks: what brain activity patterns do proficient learners display? What types of learning programs are most effective in producing these patterns? Rational numbers (fractions, decimals, and percentages) are the primary focus of our work.
Dr. Razia Sahi, Assistant Professor of Psychology, (emotion, emotion regulation, social support, relationships, affect-cognition interactions). Dr. Sahi directs the Social Interaction and Emotion Lab. Her research program examines how people regulate each others' emotions across a variety of contexts using a combination of behavioral experiments, naturalistic data, and multi-modal methods. She is interested in how these "social emotion regulation" processes develop and change across the lifespan and has several ongoing collaborations specifically targeting them in adolescence (e.g., a neuroscience study of social emotion regulation in teen friendships, an acoustic examination of parent-child interactions involving high-risk teens). She aspires to continue these developmental collaborations with the goal of uncovering social mechanisms that can be leveraged to improve emotion regulation in formative periods of early life.
Dr. Karen Smith, Assistant Professor of Psychology (stress, development, affective neuroscience, psychophysiology). Dr. Smith’s research seeks to understand why people respond differently to stress, with a focus on stress occurring in early childhood. In this work, she takes an integrative and multi-level approach, using methods and theories across fields including social neuroscience, developmental psychology, psychophysiology, neuroendocrinology, and genetics, to better understand the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying individual differences in stress responses. Her research integrates models of childhood stress with those from the broader adult and non-human animal literature, incorporating a role for children’s perceptions and interpretations of their environment in their responses to stress. Currently her research focuses on how factors that shape perceptions of safety, particularly loneliness and predictability, influence different areas of affective development, including how children understand and make inferences about others emotional states and emotional learning and decision-making processes.
Dr. Gretchen Van de Walle, Associate Professor of Psychology (conceptual development, language acquisition, bilingualism). Dr. Van de Walle directs the Infant Cognition Center and has active projects investigating language acquisition in young monolingual and bilingual children, as well as language processing in bilingual adults. She is also investigating infants' understanding of the distinction between animate agents and inanimate objects. In collaboration with a graduate student, she has recently launched a series of studies investigating the role of parent-child interaction in early conceptual development.