Research

Current Projects and Research Focus

Learning about emotions, experieces, and parenting (LEEP)

Collaborators:

• Professor Christin Camia, Zayed University Abu Dhabi

Project Summary

Developing social-emotional competencies in early childhood is critical for children's later success. The family environment is an important social context for children to learn social-emotional skills. Exploring family dynamics, such as parent-child interactions, helps researchers understand which parental behaviors support healthy regulatory systems. To date, most research exploring family dynamics involved samples from the United States, Western European and East Asian countries. Little is known about developmental processes and mechanisms in families with an Arab cultural background. In pursuit of exploring cross-cultural variations in developmental psychology, our lab utilizes an interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach to learn about the various factors that promote social-emotional competencies in early childhood. Using a psychophysiological approach to research, we get "under the skin" to identify regulatory functioning variations and how these are associated with particular family processes.

Investigating the impact of a reading intervention on parental and early childhood outcomes on Syrian refugee families

Collaborators:

• Professor Selcuk Sirin, New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
• Dr. Rana Dajani, Founder and Director of We Love Reading

Project Summary

This project proposes to explore the effect of a parental reading intervention on both parent and child outcomes, using various measures of key processes related to child developmental outcomes. Book-sharing activities between the parent and the child are critical predictors of academic success in early childhood education. However, reading activities are not given much value or attention in the home. Furthermore, the lack of materials and effort given to reading exacerbates the academic gap between children who read at home before kindergarten and children who do not. This research will add to the limited research that examines the impact of an at-home parental reading intervention as a predictor of parental outcomes (i.e., parent stress, beliefs, and goals about reading) and early childhood academic outcomes (i.e., academic readiness, executive function, and social-emotional skills).