Dr. Pamela Cole, Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies, investigates the emotional lives of young children. Her expertise in child clinical psychology and developmental psychology converge in her interest in how normal children regulate emotions like anger, and how children react to anger exhibited by others in their environments. Dr. Cole’s research and that of other scientists has documented that typically developing children first begin to exercise efforts to regulate their frustration- and disappointment-related anger, especially when caregivers are not present, around their third birthdays. But, hard-to-manage children do not show this same effort. Exposure to heightened levels of anger in the family, such as parental irritability, marital conflict, and child maltreatment are all associated with children having poorer skills at self-regulating anger, and Dr. Cole is interested in how young children’s brains process such experiences of others’ anger. Does hearing a mother’s angry voice, for example, help a child develop self- regulation skills or does it cause stress for the child? How do family context characteristics and children’s personal qualities, such as their temperaments, affect how children’s brains processes anger? Dr. Cole’s CYFC Faculty Fellowship supports her time to receive training in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her goal is to be able to apply fMRI to assess brain processes as a means of understanding how children process of anger. Ultimately Dr. Cole plans to address the questions of: when and how parental anger helps children regulate their own emotions and behavior; and when and how parental anger stresses children in ways that interfere with children’s development of anger regulation.
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