Dr Harriet Tenenbaum

Harriet is the principal investigator of this project. She is interested in how children learn from everyday interactions with others, such as conversations with parents and peers. She has two main lines of research.  Much of her work focuses on children’s reasoning about social issues, such as children’s rights (and especially rights for others) and rejection based on social groups. She is  also interested in how children learn about everyday science and emotion understanding. 

 

Professor Patrick Leman

Patrick Leman's research focuses on children's conversations, communication, learning, and social development. A central interest is how social identities (gender and race) influence the style of communication, interaction and the knowledge that children construct. Another related question concerns the forms of argument and negotiation that children use in interaction with others. Other research in social and developmental psychology includes beliefs about conspiracy theories, the social basis of knowledge and evidence, moral reasoning and the psychology of gender.

 

Professor Melanie Killen 

Dr. Killen’s research areas of expertise include children’s and adolescents’ social and moral reasoning, peer relationships, inclusion and exclusion, intergroup relationships and attitudes, prejudice and bias, gender roles, social development, social competence, theory of mind, and the role of school environments on child and adolescent development. 

 

Dr. Ffion Jones 

Ffion started writing children's fiction and illustrating her books while completing her PhD in English at the University of Wales. She has published a number of children’s picture books, such as Mabbit Jack, Ted Goes Exploring, and The Little Girl Who Lost Her Voice. 

 

Dr. Ana Aznar

Ana is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Surrey. She is interested in how children learn from everyday interactions with significant adults in their lives, such as their parents, teachers, and peers. Her work has focused on parent-child conversations about emotions and how they influence children’s emotion understanding. Much of this work has examined gender differences on parent-child emotion talk and children’s emotion understanding. Her second area of research is parent-child physical touch and how it influences children’s emotion understanding and emotion regulation.

 

Rachel Duthie

Rachel is a Research Officer and Associate Tutor at the University of Surrey. Her research interests lie in the development and expression of children’s cognitive and emotional understanding as an effect of the interactions they have with parents and peers. As an Associate Tutor Rachel supports undergraduates within the Business School at Surrey.