Social Emotional Learning

Instructor(s): Tsu-Ming Chiang, Ph.D.
Instructor(s) home department(s): Psychological Science

Goals

Emotional competence serves a pivotal role in developing social competence and successful interpersonal relations. The abilities to understand and react to others’ emotions, along with regulating own emotional expressiveness are also essential to academic success. Although emotional competence continues to develop throughout the lifespan, the skills obtained during preschool years make significant contributions to emerging social competence in peer interactions and mental health later in life. One of the developmental deficits found in aggressive children is a lack of social emotional competence. Children from families with limited support are even more at-risk. Therefore, promoting social-emotional learning has long-term benefits and implications for mental health. 

This research team aims to:

  • Increase awareness of the importance of social and emotional competence from younger ages.
  • Develop intervention strategies to coach social-emotional learning from multiple contexts.
  • Address social emotional learning in a changing context and emerging new challenges such as emotional well-being from the pandemic.

Issues Involved or Addressed

The research team examines factors contributing to the development of young children's social and emotional competence. It combines basic and applied research methodology. 

Current research projects include

  1. Social-emotional learning - document the effectiveness of emotional coaching intervention in young children who display behavioral and/or emotional issues.
  2. Parental influence on children's development of gender stereotype.
  3. The relationship between parental disciplinary strategies and children's social emotional competence.
  4. The impact of the pandemic on the stress and mental health of emerging adults.

Methods & Technologies: 

  1. Experimental Design
  2. Survey – digital forms
  3. Pre- and Post-tests
  4. Intervention research
  5. Short-term longitudinal research
  6. Statistical analyses (e.g., SPSS)
  7. Interview techniques

Students

Preferred Student Majors

  1. Psychology
  2. Education
  3. Computational Media
  4. Computer Science
  5. Industrial Design
  6. Human-Centered Computing
  7. Human-Computer Interaction
  8. Management of Technology
  9. Digital Media
  10. Health Systems 

Preferred interests and preparation:

  • Psychology; interested in Developmental Psychology
  • Computational Media; Digital Media; experiences in developing story board and images
  • Introductory psychology and research method; statistics preferred