New Directions in Emotional Development: Integrating Context and Culture into Theory and Methods

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Abstract

Recent decades have seen increasing interest in emotional development on the part of laypersons, mental health professionals, and academic researchers alike. Research in this area has provided a strong foundation for understanding emotional development, yet our appreciation of the role of the environmental contexts in which emotional development takes place is still limited. This Conversation Roundtable will engage participants in conversation about how we should conceptualize and measure contextual influences on emotional development, focusing on cultural and ethnic diversity in the environments provided to children, how and what children perceive of their emotion environments, and the joint influence of these factors on their emotional development. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Seth Pollak, with panelists including Linda Camras, Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Fantasy Lozada, and Lixian Cui (崔丽弦). The questions used to stimulate discussion will include:
1) How can we systematically identify and measure environmental and contextual factors influencing children’s emotional development? 2) How can we ensure that cultural and ethnicity contexts are meaningfully integrated into our measures? 3) How can we best understand how children from diverse backgrounds perceive and make meaning from the prompts and stimuli used in our studies? 4) How can we meaningfully integrate the adaptive value of various emotional behaviors within particular developmental contexts?
The focus of these discussions will be on proposing strategies for future research.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Moderator

• Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Panelists

• Linda Camras, DePaul University

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Fantasy T. Lozada, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Lixian Cui, NYU Shanghai