Graduate Students and Postdocs

(2nd year student, 2021)

Alexis Hernandez is working with Dr. Santiago Morales. Her current research interests are in emotion regulation, psychophysiology, and psychopathology in early childhood.

(entered in 2020)

Alexandra Little is working with Dr. Henrike Moll. Alexandra got her Master’s Degree in Applied Behavior Analysis at USC. Her current research interests include social-cognitive development in toddlers and preschoolers, as well as how children identify others as potential sources of knowledge. 

(entered in 2019)

Elly Pueschel’s research interest is in the intersection of early social cognition and education. She is working with Dr. Henrike Moll in the Minds in Development (MIDLA) lab, examining how preschool-age children understand teaching and how they themselves take on the role of a teacher. She is also working with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education (CANDLE), investigating how pedagogy impacts the ways in which children monitor and react to their own errors.  

(2nd year student, 2021)

Gina Nadaya is working with Dr. Santiago Morales and Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Her research interests focus on how cultural factors and early life adversity impact the developmental outcomes (e.g., brain development, psychosocial adjustment, and academic outcomes) of ethnic minority students. 

(entered in 2019)

Helen Shiyang Lu is working with Dr. Toby Mintz in the USC Language Development Lab. Her current research interests are in statistical learning and language acquisition. She studies the cognitive mechanisms that support infants’ and toddlers’ language acquisition, as well as the similarities and differences between those that support learning in other domains.  

Jinsol is working with Dr. David Schwartz. Her current research interests are antecedents of adolescents’ prosocial and aggressive behaviors both in online and offline contexts and how they differ across cultures. Before coming to USC, she worked as a school counselor in South Korea.

Leslie is working with Dr. David Schwartz. Her research interests include adolescent social media use and influencer culture, online health and wellness misinformation, and social origins of depression and anxiety. She is also interested in the role of gender identity in social development and interpersonal communication.

(2nd year student, 2021)

Minci is working with Dr. David Schwartz. Her research interests are the construction of popularity and behavioral correlates of high-status youth in Eastern Asia, and the impact of bullying and victimization on youth’s mental health across cultures. 

(entered in 2020)

Vicky is working with Dr. Henrike Moll. She is interested in children’s social cognition. Specifically, she wants to explore how children understand others’ intentions and beliefs, as well as their influences on subsequent behaviors. 

(2nd year student, 2021)

Wani Qiu is working with Dr. Henrike  Moll. Her current interests are children’s social-cognitive development and their understanding of teaching. Prior to coming to USC, she was a Pre-K and Second-Grade classroom teacher.  

Echo is working with Dr. Santiago Morales. Her current research interests are exploring how children process social information, as well as finding predictors for childhood psychopathology. She hopes to intergrate behavior and neuroscience measures to understand the development of emotion and emotion regulation.

Xiaoye Xu is a Postdoctoral Scholar working with Dr. Santiago Morales. She received her Ph.D. in Family and Human Development, with specialization in Measurement and Statistical Analysis from Arizona State University, working with Drs. Tracy Spinrad and Nancy Eisenberg. Xiaoye received her M.A. in Social Psychology from San Francisco State University, and her B.A. in Psychology from Smith College. She is interested in examining the relations between parental behaviors and children’s self-regulation, potential mediators and moderators in the relations, and outcomes of self-regulation like children’s prosocial behavior or psychopathology. She is also interested in using a multi-method approach including questionnaire, behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging methods to study regulatory processes and related outcomes across development. Her dissertation was a meta-analysis on bidirectional relations between parenting behaviors and children’s effortful control.

Zoey is a Doctoral student working with Dr. Toby Mintz in the USC Language Development Lab. She graduated from Teachers College Columbia University with a Master’s degree in developmental psychology in 2021. Her research interests focus on child language development, especially the role of statistical learning in different aspects of early language acquisition, including word segmentation and object-word mapping.