Mentor: Dr. Luis de
PhD student
Project Description
: People believe that emotions can be helpful or harmful for successful goal pursuit (e.g., “anger makes you lose concentration”). Understanding these beliefs is important, as they influence how individuals manage their emotions in situations where performance matters—be it in academic, professional, or interpersonal contexts. For instance, those who view anger as helpful often harness it to negotiate or compete. However, the origins of these emotion beliefs remain largely unexplored. This project investigates how children’s reasoning about the impact of emotions on performance changes with age, thereby deepening our understanding of the developmental mechanisms that give rise to beliefs about the utility of emotions. The student will learn how to design, preregister, and set up studies using Qualtrics. They will also be trained to run studies with children and to analyze data following a preregistered analysis plan.
Does this project require the SROP Student to be in-person or remote? Either one
Mentorship Statement
Mentoring statement: As your mentor in this project, my job is to support your learning journey. I plan to do this by understanding who you are as a person, and what you want to achieve from this experience. Our weekly meetings will cover task-specific training (like setting up Qualtrics experiments, writing a preregistration, running analyses in R, etc.), article discussions, and brainstorming sessions. My mentoring philosophy is inspired by the values of the ChiLD lab, where we seek to develop professional scientists who are curious and kind. While it is impossible to do rigorous science without being critical to each other’s work and ideas, we always want to do that in a way that is kind, helpful, and specific. I am excited to support your research journey and to collaborate on advancing our understanding of cognitive development.