Current Research
Explore my ongoing research at the intersection of developmental psychology and children’s media.
Animated Bridges: Scaffolding Parent-Child Conversations About Death
Children encounter the concept of death early through media and personal experience. This project investigates how parents can use animated films to scaffold their 4- to 6-year-old children’s understanding of death. By observing families during online interviews and shared viewing of short animated films, we explore how media acts as a tool for navigating complex conversations.
Findings: Our current data suggests that most families mentioned death in their conversations after watching an animation. However, these conversations are often brief, with parents assuming an active role and focused primarily on the affective aspects of death. This focus on emotional aspects of death might suggest parents desire to prepare their children with socioemotional skills.
The Cultural Ecology of Death: How Culture Shape Parent-Child Conversations
Expanding on the previous methodology, this project examines how cultural context influences the way parents and children navigate the concept of death. By recruiting participant populations from Brazil and Colombia, we aim to identify cross-cultural variations in scaffolding strategies and conceptual emphasis. The goal is to determine how cultural values and narratives shape the interactions between parents and children during co-viewing.
Heroes, Villains, and Loss: Emotional Attribution and Empathy in Fictional Death
From heroes to villains, animated characters provide a playground for moral development. This study explores how characters’ morals influence children’s perception of death. Children (ages 4-10) evaluate morally “good,” “bad,” and “mixed” characters (e.g., characters that did good and bad stuff). We specifically investigate how a character’s moral status informs a child’s emotional attribution and empathy following the character’s death.
Preliminary Findings: Our initial data reveals that children view heroes as “good” and villains as “bad,” while morally “mixed” characters are also evaluated as fundamentally good (less so than heroes, but significantly more than villains). Additionally, a character’s relationships heavily influences how children attribute grief after a death. They understand and expect that a villain’s mother will still be sad over the villain’s death.
The Architecture of Learning: How Animated Features Shape Early Science Comprehension
Animation is a powerful tool for public health communication. In this project, we analyze how specific features of animated media, such as visual representations (e.g., anthropomorphism), affect how children (ages 5-8) understand viruses and illness. By testing child comprehension after viewing different educational animations about COVID-19, we aim to identify if the way the information is presented to children (i.e., in a realistic or animistic model) influence children’s learning about COVID-19 and transfering to other viruses.
Preliminary Findings: Older children learned more with the realistic or anthropomorphic animation than with the control. Learning was equivalent from the realistic and anthropomorphic animations. Older children transferred equally to other viruses from the realistic and anthropomorphic animations but not the control animation. These preliminary results show that animation can scaffold how children learn about invisible biological mechanisms, regardless of anthropomorphism.
Mapping the Silence: A Needs Assessment of Parental Challenges and Strategies in Death Conversations
This project utilizes a parental survey to assess the current landscape of parent-child conversations regarding death. By documenting families’ past experiences, the specific strategies used, and the challenges faced, we aim to explore the need for external support in navigating these discussions.
Research Goals: The data gathered will serve to identify successful naturalistic strategies used by parents and pinpoint common conceptual or emotional roadblocks. These findings will directly inform the development of a research-based guide designed to support parents in managing these challenging conversations and provide them with the tools they have identified as most beneficial for their family dynamics.