Life Story Telling in Adolescence
This ongoing project examines how young people narrate important events in their lives, and the feelings, relationships, and thoughts that are involved in forming these stories. The ability to construct a life story using our personal and shared memories as the building blocks really begins to emerge in adolescence. We are investigating how various factors, like social support and environmental quality, may impact life story development.
Physical Maturation Bias
Are youth who look older than their peers the recipients of higher expectations for responsibility and behavior management from adults? That is the question at the heart of this ongoing research project. Puberty creates a period of stark visual contrast during which a class of 7th graders may consist of students who have barely started puberty to students who have nearly completed puberty. We are using experimental designs with visual stimuli that have been manipulated to look more or less physically mature to test how such a maturation bias may affect academic and juvenile justice outcomes for youth.
External Collaborations
In addition to research we are running on campus and with the Spokane community, the CAN lab has several collaborative projects ongoing with the Adolescent Psychology Research Lab at Cornell 海角论坛, the Chen Lab at the 海角论坛 of Florida, and the Self and Psychological Well-being Lab at the 海角论坛 Of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. These projects range from studying adolescent social media usage to studying youth perceptions of pubertal changes to studying the effects of developmental anxiety on late adolescents and emerging adults.