Current Developmental Area Graduate Students

Becky Brooker rjb345@psu.edu	Becky is in her third year of graduate study with Dr. Kristin Buss. She is interested broadly in the development and use of emotion regulation and the exploration of psychophysiological and genetic correlates of individual differences in the expression and regulation of emotion. Becky is additionally interested in the influence of sex and of parent behaviors on these individual differences in social-emotional development. She's currently working on her master's thesis, entitled Individual differences in toddlers' regulatory abilities: Evidence for links between systems.
Cynthia Cambell cxc671@psu.edu	A returning adult-learner, Cynthia has bachelor degrees in both business administration (University of Phoenix) and psychology (University of Utah). In 2006, she completed her master's degree at PSU and is currently working toward her dotorate degree. Her recent research has focused on aspects of the self that lead to vulnerabilities in the social world of adolescents. However, her new research interests are focused more on the development of the self-concept and the changes in identity that arise out of important social transitions. She is also interested in new statistical methodologies focused on person-specific data analysis.  Ergodic theorms in the mathematical-statistical field suggest that population findings cannot be validly applied to individual cases when the subjects are not homogeneous, nor in instances where the phenomenon of interest is non-stationary in time. Accordingly the purpose of her new work is to promote person-specific time series analysis while examining the development of the self and identity during adolescence and early adulthood.
Adam Christensen aec187@psu.edu	Adam is in his third year and has worked with both Dr. Lynn Liben and Dr. Rick Gilmore. His broad interest is in the development of spatial cognition. He recently completed his master's thesis, entitled Locomotor Experience and Reaching Ability in Early Infancy. Adam has also been involved in work that has investigated the skills necessary to be successful at various geography tasks in adults. He hopes to extend this study to younger populations as part of his dissertation work.
Carmen Culotta cmc451@psu.edu	Carmen is currently in her first year of graduate studies in Developmental Psychology at Penn State. She is a member of Dr. Lynn Liben's lab and manages a team of undergraduate coders.  In 2006, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of New Orleans.  Research interests include the development of racism and racial stereotyping.
Amy Dribin - dribin@psu.edu	Amy is a second year student in the child-clinical PhD program working with Dr. Kristin Buss.  She is interested in understanding how biobehavioral differences in social and emotional development relate to risk for psychopathology in early childhood.  More specifically, she is interested in how relationships between behavioral reactivity, sympathetic and parasympathetic cardiovascular activity, and child outcomes relate to both risk and resilience.  She graduated from Grinnell College, in Grinnell Iowa in 2004 with a B.A. in psychology and art history.
Lacey Hilliard ljh195@psu.edu	Lacey is in her 2nd year of graduate work under Dr. Lynn Liben. Her research focus broadly includes the development of gender and stereotypes. She is interested in the social cognitive development of gender attitudes, specifically child characteristics and parental influences, as well as how children learn and deal with prejudice and unfair treatment.
Kiren Khan kxk953@psu.edu	Kiren is a first-year graduate student in Dr. Keith Nelson's lab. Broadly, her research interests include language acquisition in both language-delayed and language-typical children. More specifically, she is interested in new intervention techniques that would boost vocabulary acquisition and narrative skills in preschool children.
Thuy Luong tluong@psu.edu	Thuy is a first-year graduate student in developmental psychology.  Her research interests include cognitive development in general, and symbolic functioning and spatial cognition in particular.  She is exploring these interests in Dr. Lynn Liben's lab.
Lauren Myers ljm229@psu.edu
Lisa Vance Trup emv131@psu.edu	Lisa is currently interested in studying language disorders in autistic children, and how deficits in language relate to deficits in other abilities such as Theory of Mind and emotion recognition. Her current projects in Dr. Nelson's lab include implementing a syntax and grammar intervention with autistic children, and designing a study for examining autistic children's comprehension of figurative language (phrases such as "its raining cats and dogs"). She is also working on a study examining memory in adults and typically developing children. In the future, she hopes to be involved in neuroimaging work to examine how differences in the functions of the brain are related to the language abilities of typically developing and language disordered children.