The first time I saw the video of Dr. Harlow 's monkey studies (Harlow, 1958) in Developmental Psychology class, I couldn’t help but burst into tears. It occurred to me that for children, mothers are not just food providers, but also protectors and encouragers. Then I started to consider the influence of mother-child emotional bond on children’s psychological well-being. While the monkey mother and children in Harlow’s study established a positive bond between each other, this is not always the case in the complex family system of human beings. Family conflict and domestic abuse may negatively affect children’s development and that impact may persist to their adulthood. The profound but contrasting influence family casts on children intrigues
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My first independent research was on parental involvement. As the existing descriptions of effective parental involvement are mainly applied to American and European society, I decided to first investigate their applicability to Chinese context. The finding suggested that autonomy support, process focus and warmth were the three most distinct characteristics of parental involvement of high quality. Based on three-dimension model of parental involvement and previous study, I designed “Parental Involvement Quality Questionnaire” as a measurement of parental involvement. After evaluating its validity and reliability, I conducted a cross-sectional study among 419 families to test whether parental involvement was related to children’s positive outcome. The results turned out that parental involvement was positively related to children’s academic achievement, academic motivation and learning strategies. Although conducting research was far more difficult than I had expect, I found that I was hardly afraid of this difficulties as the process of solving problems was also an opportunity to enrich my research skills and expand my practical experiences. Thanks to this project, I taught myself conducting structural equation modeling (SEM) in Amos 7.0 and multilevel model (MLM) analysis in HLM 7.0. Moreover, as the group leader of this project, I …show more content…
Han 's lab researching on developmental psychopathology and parenting practice. I assisted a longitudinal study on the impact of patent-child interaction on children 's emotion regulation, internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Multi-dimensional analysis, which combines self-reports, psychophysiological measures (e.g. heart rate, respiration, skin conductance), biological measures (e.g. salivary cortisol) and laboratorial observations, were used to examine variables comprehensively such as emotion regulation. As a research assistant, I was fully involved in experiment implementing and data analysis, and I learned how to collect physiological data in Acknowledge and interact with children in laboratorial context. I found that family could serve as a risk factor to the psychological well-being of school-age children, such as in cases of maternal emotion dysregulation and child maltreatment. The research findings made me wonder what the protective factors in family contexts are contrasted with the destructive factors. I decided to thoroughly investigate this topic in my future
My first independent research was on parental involvement. As the existing descriptions of effective parental involvement are mainly applied to American and European society, I decided to first investigate their applicability to Chinese context. The finding suggested that autonomy support, process focus and warmth were the three most distinct characteristics of parental involvement of high quality. Based on three-dimension model of parental involvement and previous study, I designed “Parental Involvement Quality Questionnaire” as a measurement of parental involvement. After evaluating its validity and reliability, I conducted a cross-sectional study among 419 families to test whether parental involvement was related to children’s positive outcome. The results turned out that parental involvement was positively related to children’s academic achievement, academic motivation and learning strategies. Although conducting research was far more difficult than I had expect, I found that I was hardly afraid of this difficulties as the process of solving problems was also an opportunity to enrich my research skills and expand my practical experiences. Thanks to this project, I taught myself conducting structural equation modeling (SEM) in Amos 7.0 and multilevel model (MLM) analysis in HLM 7.0. Moreover, as the group leader of this project, I …show more content…
Han 's lab researching on developmental psychopathology and parenting practice. I assisted a longitudinal study on the impact of patent-child interaction on children 's emotion regulation, internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Multi-dimensional analysis, which combines self-reports, psychophysiological measures (e.g. heart rate, respiration, skin conductance), biological measures (e.g. salivary cortisol) and laboratorial observations, were used to examine variables comprehensively such as emotion regulation. As a research assistant, I was fully involved in experiment implementing and data analysis, and I learned how to collect physiological data in Acknowledge and interact with children in laboratorial context. I found that family could serve as a risk factor to the psychological well-being of school-age children, such as in cases of maternal emotion dysregulation and child maltreatment. The research findings made me wonder what the protective factors in family contexts are contrasted with the destructive factors. I decided to thoroughly investigate this topic in my future