Laboratory Director
Seth Pollak, PhD
Vaughan Bascom Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Professor of Anthropology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin at Madison
I hold doctoral degrees in Clinical Psychology and in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and approach research on child development from both basic science and applied, public health perspectives. From the vantage point of basic science, my students and I explore the mechanisms of developmental change. Through our research, we address questions about the interpersonal, cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms that are responsible for the increasingly complex behaviors that children may acquire during infancy, early childhood, and into adolescence. My particular area of interest is in understanding how the quantity and quality of early experiences in children’s lives influences how children think about and process information. Members of our lab group hope to leverage an understanding of how developmental change occurs to develop effective prevention and intervention strategies for children most at risk for emotional, learning and behavior problems. Taken together, the goal of our research is to better understand the role that early experiences in children’s lives have on development of brain structure and function.
E-mail: ChildEmotion@waisman.wisc.edu
AWARD FOR DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIFIC EARLY CAREER CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY
In November 2006 Dr. Pollak received an award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. To read his biographical sketch, click here: Biographical Sketch
In September 2020 Dr. Pollak was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In April 2021 Dr. Pollak was named as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. To read a story about this, click here.
New perspectives on understanding child poverty: Q&A with Seth Pollak in Knowlable.
Laboratory Members
Anna Bechner, Research Laboratory Manager
B.S. Ed., Marian College (Early Childhood Education)
E-mail: ambechner@wisc.edu
My background includes teaching and research experience with families and young children in childcare, preschool, and the elementary school level. As a teacher I became very interested in understanding how children’s emotional experiences affect learning, behavior, and socio-emotional development. In my current role, I manage laboratory projects focused on examining early life stress and poverty, and the effects these emotional experiences have on child development, with the goal in mind of developing intervention strategies for at-risk children and families.
Aditi Hosangadi, Graduate Student
B.S., University of California, Davis (Psychology)
Email: hosangadi@wisc.edu
I am interested in the mechanisms behind how early experiences help children learn to understand and empathize with the people around them. Specifically, I’m interested in factors in a child’s early social environment (e.g. parent emotionality and emotion-language-use, or sibling and peer interactions) and in other experiences that provide a window into perspectives outside their own (e.g. narratives from books and other media). I hope that my work can help inform early social-emotional education.
Laura Jett, Graduate Student
B.S., 2021, University of California – Davis (Cognitive Science)
Email: ljett@wisc.edu
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 well-being.
Saideeka Jones, Research Specialist
BA 2022, Rutgers University (Psychology)
E-mail: srjones6@wisc.edu
I am interested in how children’s upbringing, socio-economic status, and culture play a part in their long-term outcomes in life. Most know that certain circumstances make it harder for some children to succeed than others, but what is less clear is what allows some to reach expected life markers versus others who seem to fail and/or develop mental disorders due to a lack of emotional wellness. I hope to work towards unearthing more information on this subject.
Hannah Kramer, Postdoctoral Fellow
B.A., 2013, University of California, Davis (Psychology)
Ph.D., 2021, University of California, Davis (Developmental Psychology)
Email: hkramer6@wisc.edu
I am interested in how people think about people with a particular focus on children’s and adults’ reasoning about emotion, mind, time, and social groups. In addition to being part of the Child Emotion Lab, I am also a postdoc working as part of the Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland team of the Developing Belief Network to study the development of children’s religious and scientific beliefs. To learn more about my research please check out my personal website!
Andrea Stein, Graduate Student
B.A., 2014, Yale University (Ethics, Politics & Economics)
M.A., 2015, Teachers College, Columbia University (Elementary Inclusive Education)
E-mail: agstein@wisc.edu
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.
Manjeri Senthilmurugan, Research Intern
B.S., 2024, University of Wisconsin – Madison (Psychology)
E-mail: msenthilmuru@wisc.edu
Through my background working with and researching children, I have developed a keen interest towards researching social media’s impact on children’s socio-emotional development, mental health, and well-being. With social media having such a large influence on children’s current cultural landscape, I am interested more broadly in understanding how it impacts their decision making and emotional well-being. I hope to eventually apply these findings to figure out how to promote a more positive social media landscape and better social media usage for children.
Yuyan Xu, Graduate Student
B.A., 2015, Jinan University (Applied Linguistics)
M.A., 2017, Teachers College, Columbia University (Developmental Psychology)
E-mail: yuyan.xu@wisc.edu
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.
SPRING 2025 UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
ERIC BIOLOS
ETHAN BLUM
WILL BUSH
MARISSA CHITWOOD
ZOE GAWLINSKI
JULIA GOURTZELIS
SASCHA KRAUSE
MICHAEL MONTGOMERY
LAUREN ROSMARIN
EMMA SOUTHARD
ALLAINA STRUVE
HAILEY SULLIVAN
GABRIELLA TORZEWSKI
AMBER WEISS
HANNAH WEISSMAN
CHONGJING ZHOU
JUDY ZHU
Child Emotion Lab Alumni
Erin Eatough, PhD
Assistant Professor
Baruch College/The Graduate Center
City University of New York
Joseph L. Flanders, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Jamie L. Hanson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Pittsburgh
http://www.jamiehanson.org
Madeline Harms, PhDAssistant ProfessorDepartment of Psychological ScienceUniversity of Minnesota
Lori M. Hilt, PhD
Milwaukee-Downer College and College Endowment Association Professor of Liberal Studies and Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Lawrence University
Jessica Jenness, PhD
Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington
Brian Leitzke, PhD
Clinical Health Psychologist
UW Health
Alyssa Lovely
Jennifer McDermott, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
http://www.umasslearninglab.com
Susan Perlman, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Washington University- St. Louis
Rista Plate, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Pennsylvania
Barb Roeber
Sarah E. Romens, PhD
Clinical Psychologist
The Psychology Center
Jessica Shackman, M.D., PhD
Emergency Medicine Physician
Howard County General Hospital
Katherine Shannon Bowen, PhD
Pediatric Neuropsychologist
Seattle Children’s Hospital
Elizabeth Shirtcliff, PhD
Research Professor
University of Oregon
Karen Smith, PhD
Assistant Professor
Rutgers University, Psychology Department
https://karenesmithphd.com/
Nicole M. Strang, PhD
Research Scientist
Center for Addiction and Mental Health
University of Toronto
Alison B. Wismer Fries, PhD
Infant, Early Childhood, and Family Mental Health Consultant
Waupaca County Department of Health and Human Services