Demographic and Emotional Risk Factors in Early Psychological Development Ross A. Thompson (Affiliate in Psychology) with graduate researcher Abby C. Winer (Psychology)
Prior research by Thompson has shown that intergenerational
processes are important to understanding the problems of emotion
understanding for young children in families experiencing
economic stress. This project examines the influence of mother’s
demographic and emotional risk on the content of mother–child
conversations about emotion, as well as young children’s emotion
understanding.
Summary:
In this project, data will be drawn from an ongoing study of an
economically diverse community sample. Measures of mother’s
depressive symptoms, feelings of personal distress, references to
negative emotions in conversation with their children, and the
quality of the family emotional climate will be included as
indicators of emotional risk. Children’s emotional
understanding will be indexed using their emotion language in
conversations with their mothers and their responses to an
age-appropriate, puppet-based affective-perspective taking task
(Denham, 1986).
In his lab by the freeway in Davis, Ross Thompson, a
developmental psychologist, pulls a plush monkey puppet onto each
hand and stands behind a cardboard “stage.” A red curtain hangs
across a cutout in the front.
“We would normally have animated voices and all the rest,” he
says. “If you do this in a way that is within the child’s
capabilities, you will find that they have a much richer sense of
themselves psychologically than we give them credit for.”
Ross A. Thompson’s research focuses on the applications of
developmental research to public policy concerns, including
school readiness and its development, early childhood
investments, and early mental health.
