Professional Bio

Bethany Ou is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology at Penn State, mentored by Dr. Kristin Buss in the Emotion Development Lab. Her research examines how children's social environments interact with temperament to shape social and emotional development. She is particularly interested in the structure and quality of children's social networks, including relationships with siblings, peers, and adults beyond parents. Her work seeks to understand how these relationships contribute to different developmental pathways and how children's temperament shapes their social experiences. She earned a master's degree in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, where her thesis examined social network size and temperamental fear in infants and toddlers, and bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Environmental Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.