Laura Jett, Graduate Student
B.S., 2021, University of California – Davis (Cognitive Science)
I am interested in how adverse experiences and contexts shape the development of cognition-emotion interactions and emotion regulation; specifically, how children’s experiences and environment impact the way they attend and react to emotional information, and how they then understand and regulate their emotions. I aim to shed light on how such reciprocal interactions between an individual’s cognition, emotion, and environment may confer risk for, or resiliency to, the development of psychopathology, and ultimately, how we may leverage this knowledge to inform targeted interventions and policy to improve children’s wellbeing.
Email: ljett@wisc.edu
Abbie Klein, Graduate Student
B.A., 2020, University of Chicago (Psychology & Comparative Human Development)M.A., 2021, Northwestern University (Clinical Psychology)
My goal is to bridge the gap between developmental-clinical research and policy application. I am interested in translating knowledge about the mechanisms and socio-contextual factors that influence adverse mental health outcomes and resiliency into trauma-informed interventions for at-risk youth. Specifically, I aim to engage in research that optimizes the way children and their families interact with welfare agencies and the justice system.
E-mail: aeklein6@wisc.edu
Andrea Stein, Graduate Student
B.A., 2014, Yale University (Ethics, Politics & Economics)
M.A., 2015, Teachers College, Columbia University (Elementary Inclusive Education)
We all experience and encounter emotions in diverse, complicated ways. Sometimes we smile in happiness, while other times we might cry; in some contexts, a frown suggests anger, while in others it merely suggests concentration. Yet even in the face of this complexity, we somehow develop distinct understandings of a number of emotion concepts, which we use to construe our own and others’ emotions. My interests are in the social, cognitive, and linguistic mechanisms by which children learn such emotion concepts from a complex environment, as well as how representations of these concepts change across the lifespan.
E-mail: agstein@wisc.edu
Yuyan Xu, Graduate Student
B.A., 2015, Jinan University (Applied Linguistics)
M.A., 2017, Teachers College, Columbia University (Developmental Psychology)
After graduating from Jinan University in 2015 with a BA in Applied Linguistics, I altered my path to pursue a master’s degree in Developmental Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. I then worked as a research coordinator in Dr. Katie McLaughlin’s Stress and Development Lab testing a hippocampus-dependent associative learning model of PTSD in adolescents. There, I developed a research interest in how different dimensions of early life adversity might shape children’s environmental expectations and influence their associative learning, decision-making, and emotion processing, which in turn underlies various forms of psychopathology. I am eager to learn more about the behavioral and neuroimaging methods so as to explore these questions in graduate school.
E-mail: yuyan.xu@wisc.edu