Category: Researcher’s Window

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Dr. Cynthia García Coll, a former President of SSHD, the Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor Emerita at Brown University, and an adjunct professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Puerto Rico. 

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

I explored Medicine, Sociology, and Clinical Psychology. Just by chance, I ended up in a Developmental Program...and fell in love! I love the metaphor of development, of trying to explain continuities and discontinuities over a lifetime. I have always been intrigued about how experiences become part of our biological embedding and vice versa, creating our own individuality. The complexity of developmental processes and outcomes is fascinating!

2. Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work?

I have many mentors: Barry M. Lester at the University of Florida gave me the initial tools and freedom of exploration. At Harvard, I was influenced in Psychology by Jerome Kagan and Dante Cicchetti in profound ways of thinking about development. From Robert Levine and John Whiting, I learned about how to conceptualize and measure cultural context and its intricate ways of shaping development from day one.

3. Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey?

Being the first Puerto Rican to be admitted in what was called Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard, changed my life trajectory. I was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action. And I am proud to say that because AA only gives you admission. One has to do the work at the level of everybody else to graduate! Who would have predicted that the daughter of a single mother who worked three jobs to maintain a low middle-class household would graduate from one of the best universities in the world...unthinkable. My mother indeed made it possible by ensuring that I would be exposed to the best education possible from kindergarten on and at the University of Puerto Rico as an undergraduate in the honors program, where I was exposed to the best professors and thinkers of that time. Still...

4. You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief.  What might be the cultural, inclusion or global significance of your work?

My dissertation with Jerry Kagan was the first study to establish Behavioral Inhibition as a temperamental dimension of infant behavior. My purpose at that point was to liberate mothers from all that happened to their children! The zeitgeist was dominated by attachment theory. I saw the detriment that this was causing to mothers who might have been thought of as incompetent when their babies were extremely shy. For the next ten years, I was working as the first research psychologist in a Pediatric Department. My work turned into trying to document the sociocultural contexts of adolescent mothers (my grandmother had been one!) and how it entered in the equation of the long-term sequelae of prematurity, intrauterine growth retardation, and other prenatal and perinatal complications. At that point, most of the understanding was that these events would have predictable negative consequences. With long term follow-ups, we documented the potential for recovery, given potentiating sociocultural contexts.

Moving into a feminist environment, at The Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, I started working in articulating new theoretical models to understand, what has become my most important work, the developmental pathways for now called minoritized populations in the USA. Up to that point, I was proposing that these groups as any other social group have cultural habits that remain even if they are third generation or recent immigrants. With a group of colleagues and Dr. Gontram Lamberty, from the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, we created the Integrative Model for the Study of Competencies in Minority populations! It just turned 25 years, and now It is finally, could I say mainstream? Not really, but well cited.

5. Your current project and/or key projects? 

I just published with students a revision of Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological model that I think it is crucial to adopt. I have a couple of books in my mind that I hope will come to fruition, but I have great distractions from my grandchildren, and studying neuroscience, mindfulness, and yoga. Who knows what will come out of that!

6. Contributions of your projects/research to the study of human development?

If my work has contributed something, I hope it is the recognition by mainstream developmental sciences that we can’t have separate works of literature: the normative narrative based on white middle-class populations and then the deficit oriented model used to study BIPOC populations. When the normative, empirical knowledge includes us all, we will have a truly representative science. I have studied teenage mothers, children with extreme inhibition, with biological risk, born to BIPOC populations of many generations in the USA or just recently arrived as refugees, documented or undocumented. With that range of populations, I feel like I finally understand development: its nuances, its complexities.

7. If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be? 

STOP BEING WEIRD!

8. A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing.

One student once said to me: "You do not only open doors for us, you push us through it!” Not sure if that was a compliment or not...

About the researcher

Cynthia García Coll, Ph.D. is the Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor Emerita at Brown University and an adjunct professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Puerto Rico. She was a former editor-in-chief of Child Development. She received the Cultural and Contextual Contributions to Child Development Award from Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) in 2009 and the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society from APA in 2020. Dr. García Coll has researched a number of topics, including the resilience of children born to teen mothers and of immigrant children.

Edited and launched by Yoko Yamamoto & Deborah Johnson

SSHD Diversity Science Initiative & Publicity Committee

Taking a closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Denis Gerstorf, a professor of Psychology at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

I always knew that I wanted to do “something with psychology” but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then in one of the first lectures on developmental psychology some scatterplots of older adults were shown: On the left, those for performance on cognitive functioning and on the right, those for well-being. The cross-sectional age gradients, of course, vastly differed, but what the graphs had in common was the spread of individuals across the entire range of both scales. What a picture! It changed my way of thinking. And of course, I wanted to understand HOW COME? I still vividly remember it. How could this heterogeneity be better understood? By the interplay of more normative processes such as primary aging, secondary aging (morbidities), and tertiary aging (mortality), one of the nomenclatures back then? How is this interplay shaped by the contexts people live, such as their spouse and how he or she is doing? I am still intrigued by these questions. The individuality of age and aging is simply fascinating!

2. Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work? Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey?

I received doctoral training in lifespan theory at the Max Planck in Berlin from Paul Baltes and Jacqui Smith and post-doctoral training in lifespan methodology at the University of Virginia from John Nesselroade. Out of many formative experiences, two stand out. First is the comprehensive training integrating conceptual thinking and a profound foundation in developmental and aging theory and skills and competence in quantitative methods. This broad foundation made my peers and me realize the importance of aligning theory, data, and methods as best as possible. Even now, almost 15 years after Paul died, I find myself often wondering and brainstorming with my collaborators how to apply and adapt recent advances in longitudinal methods to articulate, operationally define, and test predominant and often long-standing notions of developmental and aging inquiry more precisely than in previous research. Such a process, in turn, prompts the need for further refinement of these conceptual perspectives.

Second is how to think about developmental and aging sciences. Interdisciplinarity, lifespan orientation, and institution-building are the three key concepts our mentors have instilled in us and that we try to actively bring to life. I would like to provide just one example. To test questions about the role of historical change in adult development and aging, we need data sets – and each of these data sets took an entire (academic) lifetime of many different scholars to collect. In our field, we are now in a position to reap the benefits of these kinds of data. We are thus, deeply indebted to the foresight of scholars like Paul Baltes, Jack Block, Dorly Deeg, Ravenna Helson, Richard Suzman, Warner Schaie, and many others who helped to position us in this fortunate situation. We can harvest fruits from the seeds these scholars planted and have nurtured over many decades. I started as a student assistant in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) co-founded by Paul Baltes in the late 1980s, and used a tiny portion of these data for my diploma thesis and dissertation studies. It is an interesting turn in history that I feel extremely grateful for and also obligated as well as committed to serve as a chairperson of the Berlin Aging Study II to walk in the footsteps of and expand upon what we have learned in the original BASE.

3. You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief. What might be the cultural, inclusion or global significance of your work?

Old age is getting younger! The literature on the role of historical change for adult development and aging (to which my coworkers and I have contributed) provides a pretty consistent picture –– at least in Western Europe and North America –– that people in their 60s and 70s today do in part substantially better on a myriad of behavioral measures and in their own perceptions than their age peers several decades ago. For example, 75-year-olds nowadays are cognitively fitter and happier than 75-year-olds 20 years ago. They also report, on average, feeling less lonely and perceiving their lives to be determined less by powerful others. This has tremendous societal implications such that, for example, the needs of older adults today are presumably different, let alone conceptual implication about the malleability and probably even opportunities to optimize adult development and aging. At the same time, we know little about how this success story could be generalized to non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. We also know that patterns of historical change appear to be considerably less favorable for midlife and for very old age, at least in countries like the US. So it stands to reason that the pattern we see today is not necessarily the pattern that we may see tomorrow.

4. If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be? How would it advance the field?

Bring lifespan to life! I was fortunate to have gotten my first faculty position in HDFS at Pennsylvania State University – an entire department full of lifespan scholars who study questions of development from the cradle (if not neonatal) to the grave. Despite my lifespan orientation and training, I have exclusively examined older adults, admittedly in recent years also middle-aged adults. Still, young adults are used only as a comparison group, and people younger than that are not considered. I have the impression that I am not the only one who is caught in that trap. This is a pity because there is so much scholars interested in adult development and aging can learn from the study of children and adolescents, their paradigms and insights, to name just two. Vice versa, there is a lot that we can bring to the table to better understand questions about the how and the why of what we see in the first 20 years will remain stable or change in the remaining 40, 50, or even 60 years. It is thus great to see initiatives such as those by the Michigan group geared toward that end. But many more steps are needed to move from a state of friendly and peaceful co-existence to real collaboration.

5. A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing

“Don’t aspire to be a big fish in a small pond, but aim for becoming a tiny fish in a big pond” – what does that mean? The ONE key constituent of my work is to collaborate with others (who are often much smarter than me). Except for my dissertation, I do not have a single solo-authored paper. I wholeheartedly believe that this circumstance will not change. What a blessing! The active and critically-constructive exchange of ideas and perspectives and the contribution of complementary skills and sets of expertise is what brings projects (and me) to life and to sparkle. Over and above numerous other collaborations which I cherish and have considerably benefitted from over the past 20 years, I am particularly thankful for the projects conducted with Christiane Hoppmann and Nilam Ram. Thank you both for the conjoint ride! Onwards and upwards! (another important mentoring statement – my peer group knows …). These extensive international collaborations are also a great venue to foster the next generation of developmental science scholars by providing opportunities to learn from diverse sets of expertise, perspectives, and skills.

About the researcher

Denis Gerstorf is Professor and Chair of Developmental Psychology at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Denis also holds appointments as Adjunct Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University and as Research Fellow at the German Socio-Economic Panel, one of the longest-running national surveys worldwide. He serves as (Associate/Section) editor for various journals, such as Psychology and Aging and Gerontology. He is Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and considerably enjoys being the chairperson of the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional Berlin Aging Study-II consortium.

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity & Diversity Science Initiative Committee

Taking closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Fatima Varner, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and Faculty Research Associate at the Population Research Center at University of Texas at Austin.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

When I was a teenager, my Dad took a few social science courses. After reading his textbooks, I became interested in the social sciences and enrolled in a short psychology course the summer before my junior year of high school. I loved it so decided to major in psychology in college. I worked with a developmental psychologist, Lynne Baker-Ward, conducting memory research when I was an undergraduate at NC State. I enjoyed conducting research but as I was applying to graduate school I knew I wanted to focus on research that could help Black families support the academic achievement and well-being of their children.

2. Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work?

My graduate advisor at Northwestern, Jelani Mandara, was very influential. He was always very honest but caring as a mentor and increased my interest in examining how the intersections of race, gender, and socioeconomic status influenced African American parents and adolescents. Completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context at University of Michigan also was a key point of my trajectory as a scholar. It was an honor to have the opportunity to work with several of the nation’s premier psychologists and educational researchers researching Black youth including Stephanie Rowley, Robert Sellers, Tabbye Chavous, Robert Jagers, and Carla O’Connor. I was impressed with their focus on mentoring scholars who are conducting quality research on positive development of Black youth and their goal to develop scholars that will eventually surpass them in excellence. Working with them as well as my postdoctoral fellow colleagues, Noelle Hurd and Sheretta Butler-Barnes, helped me to refine my interests in exploring the role of race-related stressors in family processes.

3. You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief. 

My research focuses on the role of race-related stressors in family processes and adolescent development among Black Americans. One major finding was that Black parents’ concerns or fears about their adolescents experiencing racial discrimination in the future were related to lower academic and behavioral expectations (Varner & Mandara, 2013).  In addition, the combination of parents’ and adolescents’ racial discrimination experiences, as well as child characteristics such as gender, can shape parenting in Black families (Varner et al., 2020). Parents of boys were more reactive to their children’s racial discrimination experiences when the parents had fewer experiences with racial discrimination. The next step for this research is to understand the mechanisms by which these changes in parenting occur. This work is important because focusing solely on an individual’s personal racial discrimination experiences tends to underestimate the impact of race-related stressors in their lives. Others’ racial experiences can influence individual well-being and our individual experiences in a racially stratified society influence interactions with family members, friends, and others. For example, the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd reverberate across our society and have implications for the conversations, interactions, cognitions, emotions, and health outcomes of Black parents and children.

I am also currently conducting a meta-analysis with Aprile Benner and Tasha Beretvas examining the role of school-based marginalization in the development of academic achievement and social-behavioral competencies of school-aged children. The goals are to understand the mechanisms by which different types of marginalization are linked to academic outcomes and whether the strength of the associations differs by social position (e.g., race, ethnicity, sexual minority status, gender, etc) and developmental timing. This work could eventually inform school policies and practices.

4. If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be? How would it advance the field?

I would wish for more support for applied research with underrepresented populations. This work can take longer and underrepresented populations often can be more difficult to access. Yet, this work is important for our society, especially as it diversifies. The less that research on underrepresented populations is seen as specialized but is valued as integral to the advancement of our society and field, the more we can broaden our knowledge of developmental processes and develop effective interventions.

5. A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing.

“We must desire to see people rising in life, rather than looking for ways to contribute to their fall.” ― Bamigboye Olurotimi

About the researcher

Dr. Fatima Varner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and Faculty Research Associate at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is on the editorial board at Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. Her program of research examines the role of race-related stressors in family processes, adolescent development, and health among Black Americans. She is also conducting research funded by the Institute of Education Sciences on the links between school-based marginalization and students’ academic achievement and social behavioral competencies. She earned her B.A. in Psychology at North Carolina State University, her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan at the Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context.

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto, SSHD Publicity Committee

Taking a closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Desiree Baolian Qin, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

I grew up in a small village in Northern China and then moved to the provincial capital and completed my MA degree in English Linguistics there before coming to the US to pursue graduate degrees in education and human development. I first became interested in human development when I was teaching high school students who failed their college entrance exam ( “gao kao”) and noticed that they appeared very depressed in class. That was in the 1990s, and psychology was a very new discipline in China. Very few universities offered psychology or human development studies. After I came to the US, I majored in School Psychology at University of Massachusetts Boston and then got my degree in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard Grad School of Education. In graduate school, I worked for my mentors, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Carola Suarez-Orozco’s project, the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Project. I think my personal experiences and my research experiences in graduate school working closely with recently arrived immigrant families and children both contribute to my current research interests on culture, parenting and adolescent development.

2. Did you have a mentor or researcher who had substantial influence on your path or on your work?

I had two great mentors in grad school, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, an anthropologist, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a cultural psychologist. This interdisciplinary training gives me a broader perspective in culture and various ecological contexts that influence human development, which is central to my work.

3.  You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief.

When I started my research on Asian American students, most research focused on their model minority status and superior educational achievement. My work on psychosocial challenges experienced by Asian American adolescents highlighted a new pattern in child development, an achievement/adjustment paradox, i.e., while Asian American students tend to have higher educational outcomes as compared to students of other ethnic-racial backgrounds, they also tend to report lower levels of mental health outcomes. In my mixed-method research project, at a prestigious high school in a Northeastern US metropolis, I found tremendous levels of pressure, stress, and struggles experienced by students and their families, Asians and non-Asians alike. My work shifts the model of educational and psychosocial developmental outcomes go hand in hand in children’s developmental trajectories and provides both evidence and explanation for this achievement/adjustment paradox when it does occur.Similarly, earlier research on Asian American families tended to focus on the contributions they have made to their children’s exceptional educational outcomes. My work highlighted the challenges experienced by immigrant parents and their children behind the façade of perfect Asian American families. My findings, drawing on mostly qualitative longitudinal data, uncovered important and understudied issues and struggle in parent-child relations resulting from developmental, immigration-related, and cultural reasons in Asian American families, e.g., emotional alienation, parent-child conflicts, communication challenges. My findings also point to negative effects of “tiger parenting”. Through the use of rigorous qualitative data from longitudinal, in-depth interviews, my findings have highlighted many nuanced, complex family processes overlooked in quantitative work on immigrant and minority families.Our most recent project focuses on academic and psychosocial adaptation of Chinese undergraduate students.

4.  Your one wish for the study of human development

That we would pay more attention to the central role of culture and not automatically apply models and measures developed in the US or other Western countries onto studies of other populations around the globe. 

5.  A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing. 

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ~  Toni Morrison

About the researcher

Dr. Desiree Baolian Qin is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University. After completing her doctorate degree at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she conducted postdoctoral research at New York University and Teachers College. Her research, funded by the William T Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, focuses on understanding how immigration, culture, gender, and ecological contexts, especially family, impact adolescent and emerging adult development. Drawing on mostly qualitative, longitudinal data, Dr. Qin’s research has highlighted many nuanced, complex family processes that have been overlooked in quantitative work on immigrant families, especially struggle in parent-child relations, e.g., emotional alienation, parent-child conflicts, communication challenges, and parent-child separation. Her findings also point to negative effects of “tiger parenting” in child/adolescent development. Dr. Qin’s most recent project examines academic and psychosocial adaptation challenges of Chinese international students. She enjoys meditation, traveling with her family, and reading and writing (in Chinese and English) about wellbeing and healing. 

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto, SSHD Publicity Committee

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Taking a closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Ciara Smalls Glover, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University.

1.  What drew you to do work in human development? 

My mother was a passionate public school educator in a neighborhood high in economic need. I saw families of all economic, ethnic, family structure, and geographic backgrounds succeed despite the odds and became fascinated with how families contribute to the development of healthy children. My observations were also based on my own upbringing. I wanted to know if there were specific mechanisms that were increasing the likelihood of positive development.

2.  Did you have a mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work? Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey?

There are two groups really. The first is the dedicated mentors that I have worked with from Morgan State University (Terra Reid, Warren Rhodes, Carrol Perrino, Robert Smith), University of Michigan (Robert Sellers, Stephanie Rowley, Tabbye Chavous, Chris Peterson), and UNC-Chapel Hill (Vonnie McLoyd). My mentors taught me the importance of examining racial-ethnic identity, family socialization, discrimination, and coping. Equally as important, as I age, is that many of them modeled how to address race and/or gender-related adversity in the academy. In addition, my colleagues are amazing models in their roles as professional counselors, administrators, and scholars in the field. They continue to remind me that there are many avenues to strengthening communities of color.The second are the talented graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have the privilege of working. Most of my undergraduate team has volunteered their time while balancing full academic loads, family obligations, and employment. I admire their tenacity to pursue research, usually as the first in their families to do so.  It is rewarding to play a role in their development and to celebrate as they receive awards and honors for their research projects in our lab. The community of students that I mentor and collaborate with, has also inspired the line of research dedicated to understanding factors (e.g., identity, familial, institutional) that bolster academic persistence for students exposed to adversity. 

3.  You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief.  What might be the cultural, inclusion or global significance of your work? 

One main line of work examines family climate as a context for messages about race/ethnicity. Latent profiles allow me to examine patterns of family socialization and relational quality. In this way, the approach identifies the role of family socialization in multifaceted contexts and how those patterns are associated with mental health and academic success.Another line of work examines risk and protective factors on STEM persistence and overall health of adversity-exposed college students. My research uses a strengths-based approach to examine the roles of culturally-relevant family messages, and an examination of adversity- structural and interpersonal- that are associated with student retention. The experience of students fleeing their home country or those adjusting to group stigmatization and intergroup discrimination in the US are included in adversity-exposure. Students also report being impacted by structural inequalities in the United States. My work identifies the key mechanisms that aid in buffering those experiences at the individual, collective and institutional levels. 

4.  Your one wish for the study of human development 

My one wish would be that we continue to appreciate the complexity of development across populations. Further, I wish that our appreciation would result in dissemination to broader audiences that include those from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. I recently reported the strategies that were most effective for recruiting an under-voiced community, non-college attending young adults (forthcoming in Emerging Adulthood: Sexuality in Emerging Adulthood [Morgan and van Dulmen Eds, Oxford series). That work serves as a reminder to me that there are under-voiced communities whose development we need to better understand. Doing this work will benefit the field as we refine theories, develop tailored interventions, and inform public policies that are transformative.

5.  A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing. 

"It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…"--Theodore Roosevelt

About the researcher

Dr. Ciara Smalls Glover is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and has affiliations with the Partnership for Urban Health Research, the Department of African American Studies, Resilient Youth, and Transcultural Violence and Conflict. She is on the editorial board at Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. Her program of research examines family dynamics and cultural strengths that mitigate interpersonal and institutional adversity. Dr. Glover uses a strengths-based approach to identify factors that buffer emotional, academic, and physical health declines. An emerging line of work applies this strengths-based approach to STEM persistence at economically and ethnically diverse institutions. She earned her B.S. at Morgan State University, her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and her postdoctoral studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee

Taking closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Yoko Yamamoto, a faculty member of the Department of Education at Brown University and a steering committee member of the Society for the Study of Human Development.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

My strong interest in researching socialization and education grew from my experiences of being exposed to cross-national educational environments as well as beliefs and practices centered on diversity as I grew up. Attending pre-primary schools in Japan and England made me keenly aware of variations in school environments, expectations, and approaches to learning between the two countries. During my primary school years in Japan, I enjoyed playing and chatting with other children from various socioeconomic backgrounds while walking to a local school each day (walking with all neighborhood children as a group was required at the school I attended!). I learned about diverse beliefs, unique socialization experiences, and different family expectations through my peers’ stories. Learning about various local practices and differences in dialects by living in both rural and urban areas in Japan and working at a daycare serving children in buraku, a historically oppressed community, during a practicum made me question the homogeneity and egalitarianism highlighted in the Japanese educational system and society. These experiences, along with many others, built the foundations of my passion to examine families and education, especially learning-related socialization in varying sociocultural contexts.

2.        Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work?

I have been extremely fortunate to have met many incredible scholars and mentors who had a substantial impact on my life as a scholar and a person. If I had not met my adviser and mentor in my Ph.D. program, Dr. Susan D. Holloway, my path could have been different. It was Susan’s cross-cultural research on parenting that inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in human development. When I joined a doctoral program in 2000, socioeconomic status was still considered a sensitive topic to examine in Japan. Susan encouraged me to pursue my passion to integrate sociological theories and approaches (I received an M.A. in sociology) into developmental studies and examine diverse family socialization within cultures. Coming to the U.S. and pursuing a Ph.D. without any family members could have been more challenging, if I had not had a supportive and caring mentor like Susan. I was also fortunate to have Dr. Mary C. Brinton, a sociologist at Harvard University, who specializes in gender and education in Japan, as my mentor near the end of my doctoral candidacy. We collaborated and worked on a research project examining cultural capital and educational processes depending on socioeconomic status and gender in Japan. Mary repeatedly talked about the importance of developing theories to generate richer knowledge in addition to conducting rigorous research. Dr. Jin Li, who was a mentor for my postdoctoral training, brought me to the world of researching Asian Americans and immigrants extending my previous research focused solely on Japan. Being involved in a longitudinal project on Chinese immigrant families expanded my interest in examining immigration, race, and ethnicity in family socialization. Immersion in this research and conversations with Jin also allowed me to identify similarities and differences within Asian populations. This cultivated my desire to understand cultural origins, institutional arrangements, and immigrant issues that interactively influence parenting beliefs, practices, and subsequent children’s developmental and educational experiences.

3.     You have a range of important work, select findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief. 

In my research on Japanese families, I found significant socioeconomic differences in parents’ educational expectations and ways of supporting their children’s learning from preschool years. My qualitative findings demonstrated various ways through which parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds support their children’s education by using their knowledge and available resources while constructing and reconstructing their ideas based on past and current experiences and interactions with children and others. These findings extend insights from previous cross-cultural studies that tended to highlight culturally shared norms and practices in Japan. Interestingly, my most recent research that examined first-grade children’s beliefs about school learning in relation to SES and culture demonstrated no socioeconomic differences in their perceptions of school learning (e.g., purposes and benefits of school learning) within Japan unlike in the U.S. (Yamamoto, 2020). As children’s beliefs related to learning has been found to become a foundation for their later learning motivation, it is critical to examine institutional arrangements (e.g., teaching practices and classroom arrangements) and cultural values in their possibilities of reducing socioeconomic gaps.

Perhaps, my most influential work so far is a theoretical paper that provided conceptual models explaining different degrees of parents’ educational expectations and associations between parental expectations and children’s academic performance depending on racial and socioeconomic groups. By conducting extensive reviews of research and examining sociocultural contexts of various racial/ethnic groups, we proposed moderating and mediating models that explain weak associations between parental expectations and children’s academic performance among racial/ethnic minority groups. Moving beyond ethnic and racial categories, these models provided a nuanced view of interpersonal and intrapsychic processes by which parents in various racial and ethnic groups construct their ideas and respond to immediate contexts (Yamamoto & Holloway, 2010).

4.        Your one wish for the study of human development

I hope to see more multiculturalism in studies of human development. Cross-cultural studies in human development have helped us understand variations in socialization and development across cultures. Cross-national and cross-disciplinary collaborations have increased. We have paid increasing attention to global contexts, inequalities, and justice in human development. But I think that important research and theories conducted by researchers in non-English speaking countries are still buried in their own countries and have been rarely appreciated in English-speaking academia. I have met many inspiring and admiring researchers who conduct unique research using indigenous perspectives and theories developed from their countries or communities. I hope to see more ways through which scholars can exchange their research, ideas, and discussions. I believe that such processes are necessary to truly advance our understanding of human development within and across contexts.

5.        A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful.

It is important to contribute to communities and societies by bringing “warm knowledge” and not “cold knowledge.” And researchers need heart in addition to brain to do so.

This is a quote from Dr. Kokichi Shimizu, my collaborator and a Japanese sociologist who has conducted effortful community-based research on schools serving low-income minority students in Japan. He talked about the importance of bringing knowledge and research findings that could help, support, and empower people in the communities rather than knowledge that will separate people or create distance from those people.

About the researcher

Yoko Yamamoto is a faculty member at the Department of Education at Brown University. She has also been an invited summer scholar at the Department of Human Sciences in Osaka University, Japan since 2013. She has examined parental socialization and children’s educational processes in diverse sociocultural contexts. Integrating theories and research in developmental psychology, education, and sociology, she is especially interested in understanding how families from diverse backgrounds, especially concerning socioeconomic status, culture, and minority/immigrant status, support their children’s development and education. She received B.A. in child development and M.A. in sociology at Kobe College in Japan and Ph.D. in human development and education from University of California, Berkeley.  Yoko was a 2012 Abe fellow and a recipient of the Mayekawa Foundation grant in 2017 and 2018. 

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee

Taking closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Barbara Thelamour, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

Before I thought about it as a “research interest,” I often found myself thinking about Black immigrant young people and how they fit in the world as Black and relatively foreign. My foundation in educational psychology has focused my interest in the realm of schools, and human development has expanded my research through its multidisciplinary nature and emphasis on contextual factors. This field offers a lens for me to deeply engage with my research questions pertaining to immigration, culture, identity, and school outcomes. I am afforded a flexibility in my human development research that is rewarding to me.

2. Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work? Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey?

There have been several mentors who have helped to shape my scholarship and professional journey. Since graduate school, Deborah Johnson has been the consummate mentor who has helped me to navigate my educational psychology and human development interests. Gail Ferguson’s tridimensional acculturation framework has been critical in my thinking about Black immigrant adjustment. Sue Chuang, through her On New Shores conference has helped me to see the practical implications of my research on immigration.

3. You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief.  What might be the cultural, inclusion or global significance of your work?

I’ve been most engaged in research focusing on the ethnic diversity within the American Black population, most recently in college students. From our dataset of 345 Black college students attending school in the United States, we found that Black students have an affinity for friendships with their same ethnic peers (e.g., Caribbean students preferring friendships with other Caribbean students over African and African American peers). Those friendships were found to mediate the negative relationship between racial identity and campus connectedness, particularly in predominately white institutions. This research on college students can support institutions of higher education to recognize and support the increasing ethnic diversity on their campuses. Beyond colleges and universities, research taking immigration into account continues to push against the notion that Blackness as it exists in the U.S. as monolithic.

4. If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be? How would it advance the field?

That human development continues to be outward facing in its emphasis on using our findings to educate the public and provide services to those who seek them. There are policy and law enforcement decisions that counter robust findings in human development and are actually endangering lives. I see our field as being a voice of reason and support beyond academia to create and sustain effective and, perhaps, life-saving change.

5. A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing.

Not specific to mentoring, but has shaped my interactions nonetheless—

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –Maya Angelou

About the researcher

Barbara Thelamour is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA. Her research is grounded in human development and educational and multicultural areas of psychology. Her research in these related areas focuses on the identity development of Black immigrant adolescents and emerging adults, particularly in relation to Black American culture as the receiving culture. In the second line of research, the emphasis is on the interplay between identity and educational experiences and outcomes of immigrants and other students of color. Across these research endeavors, she has highlighted how relationships with others, particularly parents and peers, and school environments facilitate or hinder these identity, acculturation, and learning processes. 

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee

Taking closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Alan Meca, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Old Dominion University.

1.         What drew you to do work in human development? 
As the child of immigrant parents, education has always been emphasized as a doorway by which I can succeed. Indeed, as is often the case, having had limited opportunities, my parents emphasized the importance of education resulting in constant pressure to succeed. This is probably the reason why growing up, I have always had an interest in trying to answer the big questions (e.g., Who are we? Why are we here?). 

Although engineering and physics were my original focus, as I excelled in my high school studies, I noticed some others did not. During my introduction to psychology, I began asking the question “why?” regarding the individual differences behind motivation, personality, and drive. Subsequently, I knew I wanted to play a role in helping youth succeed and thrive. At Florida International University, this focus was solidified into an interest focused on human development.  I then became involved with Dr. William Kurtines at the Miami Youth Development Project (YDP), an outreach research-based intervention that aims at empowering adolescents in voluntary alternative high schools, where these interests were furthered.

Under Dr. Kurtines’ mentorship, I learned about relational metatheory, developmental systems, and positive youth development.  As one who portrays development as complicated, contextualized, and multifaceted, I became more and more enthralled with the underlying conceptualization of humanity. My parents had limited opportunities to engage in their own identity process, what Marcia (1966) would refer to as foreclosed, and my brother struggled with figuring out his identity.  This led to my own fascination with the topic of identity.

2.        Did you have any mentor or a researcher who had substantial influence in your path or work? Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey? 

I have been fortunate, in my career, to have had a number of important mentors who have played a substantial role in my life. Mrs. Dianne Holmes, my High School psychology teacher was one of the first teachers that not only recognized my potential but allowed me to be myself and introduced me to a whole new field of science. Dr. Kyle Eichas, then a doctoral student gave me the opportunity to work in the Miami YDP and was my direct supervisor under Dr. Kurtines. Dr. Eichas not only exposed me to developmental science and identity theory but he spent a substantive amount of time mentoring me in statistics and how to work with AMOS and Mplus. Concurrently, as I noted previously, Dr. Kurtines played a central role in introducing me to developmental science; first as my instructor in Theories of Personality and Psychology of Adolescence, and then as my research mentor, modeling what an academic should look like. Dr. Dionne P. Stephens also served as an important role model by being a constant advocate for me, and also by exposing me to methodological and theoretical orientations that expanded my early training. She also modelled success as a person of color (POC) in academia. Finally, I do not think I would be where I am today if not for the generosity of Dr. Seth J. Schwartz who gave me opportunities to work and publish utilizing his various datasets, and also greatly facilitated the development of my statistical, methodological, and professional development.

3.        You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief.  What might be the cultural, inclusion or global significance of your work?

Although my research has focused on identity development across various domains, the majority of my research has focused cultural identity, acculturation, and sociocultural stressors that contribute to mental health among Latinx populations, and more broadly, among ethnic/racial minorities. Exemplifying this work, my colleagues and I recently published in Emerging Adulthood a manuscript focused on identifying individual differences in the relationship between ethnic identity and US identity-belonging with well-being within a daily diary conducted with Hispanic emerging adults. Our findings not only identified day-to-day variability in ethnic and US identity developmental processes, which had not previously been investigated, but also identified significant variance in the strength of the within-person association – indicating that for some, ethnic and US identity was negatively associated with well-being. 

In another study published in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, utilizing a sample of recently immigrated Hispanic adolescents, we examined the unique effects of acculturation (i.e., heritage and US identification and practices) and sociocultural stress (i.e., discrimination, bicultural stress, and negative context of reception) on alcohol initiation and whether sociocultural stress moderates the effects of cultural practices and identifications on alcohol initiation. This study was also innovative given the joint examination of the unique effects of acculturation and sociocultural stress, the decomposition of sociocultural stress into its component parts, and the exploration of the role of sociocultural stress as a moderator of the relationship between acculturative processes and alcohol initiation. As a whole, this study emphasized the need to take on a more nuance understanding of how acculturation-related factors contribute to psychosocial functioning.

a. Your current project and/or key projects

Although the bulk of my research has focused on cultural identity, my research has broadly focused on identity development and the links between identity and psychosocial functioning and health risk behaviors. Most recently, this focus has extended to the topic of parental identity and how parents establishing a sense of self and identity rooted in ones’ role as a parent. As a first step, we have an ongoing cross-sectional study with parents and expectant parents focused on parental identity processes, general adaptation, and parenting stress. If you are a parent or an expectant parent, and wish to participate, please click here: https://odu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4Sm4aHUr6yPJiol

b. Contributions of your projects/research to the study of human development

As noted above, the broader goal of this project is to understand how parents come to view themselves as parents and integrate parenthood into their existing sense of self. Identity serves as a foundation for meaningful interactions and motivation for identity relevant behaviors. Indeed, behavior and performance aligned with ones’ identity serves to verify existing identity commitments whereas divergence between behavior and one’s identity triggers negative emotions that result in either behavioral modification of the relinquishing of one’s existing identity commitment. As such, parenting identity represents the internalized ideals about how parents ought to parent and direct the adoption and engagement in parental behaviors. Thus, it is likely that individuals’ who are able to establish a positive identity during the transition into parenthood, within a timely manner, will be most apt for taking on the role of a caregiver.

4.        Your one wish for the study of human development 

a.        If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be?

I would wish that developmental science as a field move to the forefront of the discipline marked by equity, diversity, and justice. A key tenant of developmental science rests on the importance of diversity, and although the field of developmental science has made great strides, research is all too often largely constrained to Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) populations or conducted by individuals from these groups. 

b.        How would it advance the field? 

Our understanding of human development will always be limited if there is a lack of diversity in either our researchers or our participants. A lack of diversity among our researchers limits the questions that are asked and the methods that are utilized. At the same time, a lack of diversity of our participants limits the answers we get.

5.        A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life changing

“You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years, and get pats on the back as you pass, but your final reward will be heartache and tears, if you’ve cheated the man in the glass.” From The Man in the Glass by Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr. 

About the researcher

Alan Meca is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, VA. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Science from Florida International University in 2014 under the mentorship of Dr. Dionne P. Stephens and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Miami under Dr. Seth J. Schwartz. Broadly, his expertise is in identity development, longitudinal methods, positive youth development, and knowledge of immigrant and Latinx youth and families. More specifically, his research agenda has focused on identity development and cultural stressors and their effects on health risk behaviors, mental health, and educational achievement. In pursuit of this research agenda, he has published over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts focused on personal, ethnic/racial, and national identity and on the cultural dynamics among Latinx families. In addition to understanding the role identity plays in youth’s lives, he has also participated in the development and validation of one of the few personal identity-focused interventions (Meca et al., 2015; Eichas, Meca et al., 2017). Currently, his research agenda is focused on refining measures of cultural identity and understanding the processes that govern how ethnic/racial minority navigate their cultural environment (e.g., code-switching, cultural-frame switching).

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee

Visit our website for more information! www.sshdonline.org

Taking closer look at research and experiences of SSHD members

～Researcher’s Window～

This month we are getting better acquainted with the research of Toni Antonucci, Program Director and Research Professor in the Life Course Development Program of the Institute for Social Research, and the Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

1. What drew you to do work in human development?

I was always intrigued as a young person when people said 'psychologically speaking' even when I was too young to know what it really meant.  In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I took a non-matriculated course in psychology at a local college.  Fortunately, I grew up in Brooklyn (NY) so that any university was only a train ride away.  After that course, I was definitely hooked. Early on, I became interested in a new field called 'life span developmental psychology'.  I did my masters' thesis on older men, so it seemed natural to do my dissertation on infants.  I thought that would show real commitment to life span human development.

2. Did you have any mentor or a researcherwho had substantial influence in your path or work? Is there a significant moment or story that capsulizes the nature of that influence on your scholarship or professional journey?

In graduate school I had two mentors, Robert Kastenbaum and Carolyn Shantz.  One was a pioneer in the field of aging, the other a classic Piagetian.  They were both important and very positive influences on me.  Kastenbaum was a brilliant and unusual scholar who took a winding path to academia.  Shantz was among the few successful female academics and willingly took me on as a Ph.D. student even though my topic area, infancy, wasn't really her field.  Turns out I was her first Ph.D. student.  We both learned a lot.

Regarding moments in my professional journey.  Bob included Death and Dying in his research portfolio - and once was featured in The Enquirer.  He laughed it off and never thought much about it.  That taught me, not to sweat the small stuff….and years later when I was quoted in the Enquirer (a fact one of my mother’s neighbors pointed out), I did the same thing.

Carolyn helped me through some trying times - especially in how to navigate in the male world of academia.

3. You have a range of important work, select 1-2 findings that you feel are key contributions to human development and describe those in brief. 

One of my favorite papers is our first paper on the Convoy Model with Robert Kahn. In reflecting on it, I benefitted from Bob’s background in social and organizational psychology and I believe he felt the same about my background in lifespan developmental psychology. The Convoy Model benefits from both perspectives and, in my opinion, is better for it.

Another paper that I am fond of is a paper with Kristine Ajrouch and Mary Janevic examining the association between Social Relations and Health.  There is a well-known finding in the field that people with higher socioeconomic status have better health. Using wave 1 data from our Detroit area study, we were able to demonstrate that middle-aged men who were not highly educated (a proxy for socioeconomic status) but had children with whom they could confide were as healthy as highly educated men of the same age.

a. Your current project and/or key projects?

We now have a third wave of the Detroit area Social Relations, Age and Health (SRS) SRS which is a community based, life-span study of people from 8 to 93, and additional waves about to be collected of specific subgroups being collected now and in the near future.

We are proposing another wave on the original complete sample with the addition of a new parallel sample.  We are expanding our research to include cognitive functioning so that we can examine how social relations both cross-sectionally and longitudinally are associated with AD risk and resilience.  This is a new direction for me and I am very excited about.

We are also just completing an examination of race and ethnic differences in Forgiveness, Humility and Health which has yielded some intriguing findings.

b. Contributions of your projects/research to the study of human development.

It is my hope that my work contributes to our understanding of social relations and how social relations influence other aspects of life. The finding I noted above about how low educated middle-aged men who can confide in their child have the same level of health as higher educated peers is a case in point.

4. Your one wish for the study of human development

a. If you had just one wish for the study of human development, what would it be?

For the one wish volume I wished for respectful interdisciplinary team science.

I still believe this is important but given recent events I would also add a wish that human development perspectives be recognized as fundamental across the life span and that there be norms of reasonable, kind and caring behavior.

b. How would it advance the field? 

As we care for others, we care for ourselves.  This makes us better people and creates a better world.

5. A mentoring statement or quote you find most meaningful or life-changing.

Seek advice from those close and far and always try to include people you know disagree with you.

 

About the researcher

Toni Antonucci has a Ph.D. in life-span developmental psychology.  She is Program Director and Research Professor in the Life Course Development Program of the Institute for Social Research, and the Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology all at the University of Michigan.  She has been the recipient of a Research Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging as well as several research awards from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations. She has been President of the  Society for the Study of Human Development and Gerontological Society of America.  She’s also been President of the American Psychological Association’s Division 20 on Adult Development and Aging and is Past Program Chair for Division 9, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.  She is Past-Editor of the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and Associate Editor for Developmental Psychology.  She served as Chair of the Board of Scientific Affairs, Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest and the Committee on Aging-  all of APA, and is currently Secretary-General (Vice President) of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics and is President-Elect of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development.  She is an elected fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science and Phi Kappa Phi. And finally, she has mentored undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral scholars at the University of Michigan, received the APA Division 20 Master Mentoring award, an APA Presidential Citation in recognition of her mentoring and is currently the Director of the ISSBD\Jacob Foundation International Mentored Fellowship Program which includes fellows from the developed and developing world.

Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee

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Edited and launched by Deborah J. Johnson & Yoko Yamamoto

SSHD Publicity Committee