The Building Early Emotion Skills Lab is comprised of an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students directed by Dr. Holly Brophy-Herb. Collectively with our community partners, we seek to identify and to understand the roles of behavioral, psychological, biological, and contextual processes that are related to the development of infants, toddlers, and very young children. Specifically, we study the ways in which parents, caregivers and teachers socialize very young children’s emotions. We are particularly interested in caregiver/parent/educator well-being and the ways in which emotion socialization practices vary across adult and child characteristics such as family climate, gender, culture, mental health, and reflective capacity. We examine how emotion socialization practices are related to children’s behaviors, such as emotion regulation, with the ultimate goal of developing effective programs and training models in family and child care contexts.
