Child and Adolescent Socio-Emotional Development Lab
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We conduct research primarily focussed on emotional, cognitive and social development across childhood and adolescence.
The aim of the majority of the research is to better understand how children and adolescents experience and process social emotion information, what enables them to process and express their emotions, and how this processing relates to wellbeing and learning outcomes. Projects also explore the parameters of the benefits of verbal and nonverbal expression, verbal and nonverbal memory, and art practices on learning and wellbeing.
To find out more about the centre please contact Dr Esther Burkitt at e.burkitt@chi.ac.uk.
Current Projects and Available Participation Opportunities
Mapping mixed emotional development in childhood and adolescence: We are developing a model to describe cognitive and affective skills that underpin mixed emotion understanding and to identity wellbeing correlates of mixed demotion processing.
Comparative validity and benefits of verbal and nonverbal emotional measures of emotion: We are exploring how written, spoken and drawing expression of emotion benefits different children and examine the quantity and types of expression afforded by each mode.
Examining effects of audience authority on children’s drawn and reported expression: This work examines how and why children communicate affective information differently for different audiences.
Identifying influences of pictorial naming on children’s drawing routines: We are examining how children’s typical drawing routines maybe influenced by object knowledge and visual perspective.
Projects in Development
- Examining self-affirmation and self-esteem in childhood
- Assessing self-affirmation and STEM subject success
- Developing measures of gender identity in adolescence
- Exploring the effectiveness of encoding methods to support prospective
- memory across the lifespan
- Developing educational support for at risk students
- Exploring performance confidence in adolescent footballers
Recent Past Projects
We found that children’s mixed emotion experiences in middle childhood are more akin to those of adults that can vary by emotional intensity in multiple ways. For example, when thinking about a bittersweet experience for themselves or another child, children may experience single, sequential or various types of simultaneous mixed emotions which increase with intensity during mid adolescence.
Whilst emotional communication in drawing and people’s interpretation of children’s drawings is very subjective, we found that adults from a range of professional groups interpret children’s representations of single and mixed emotions very reliably in relation to children’s communicative intentions.
Our Members (including Faculty Staff, PhD Students and Research Volunteers)
- Dr Ruth Lowry
- Dr Sue Churchill
- Dr Antonina Pereira
- Dr Sue Bentham
- Dr James Galpin
- Dr Dawn Watling
- Dr Bruno De Oliveira
- Dr Daniel Connolly
- Professor Robin Banerjee
- Professor Iain Greenlees
- Professor Jason Low
- Robert Pulley
- Tanya Goosen
- Sophie Goodwin
- Sebastian Siemieniec
- Daisy Chipperfield
Our Publications
- Burkitt, E., Watling, D., & Cocks, F. (2019). Mixed emotion experiences for self or another person in adolescence. Journal of Adolescence, 75, 63-72. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2019.07.004
- Burkitt, E., Watling, D. & Message, H. (2019). Expressivity in children’s drawings of themselves for adult audiences with varied authority and familiarity. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, doi: 10.1111/bjdp.12278
- Burkitt, E. (2018). Children’s drawings, 2nd Ed. In Oxford bibliographies in childhood studies. Ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Burkitt, E. (2017). Assessing the concordance between child reports and adult observations of single and mixed emotion in children’s drawings of themselves or another child. Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Education, 38(1), 75-98. doi: 10.1080/01443410.2017.1390072
- Burkitt, E., Lowry, R., & Fotheringham, F. (2017). Children’s understanding of mixed emotions in self and other: Verbal reports and visual representations. Infant and Child Development, 27(3), e2076, doi:10.1002/icd.2076