Dr. Kristin Buss, Lab Director

Dr. Kristin Buss is Professor of Psychology and Human Development & Family Studies at Penn State University and also Director of the Emotion Development Lab.  She is interested in children’s emotional and social development.  Her studies often focus on how early emotional experiences shape later development. 

Dr. Buss' C.V.

Email: kab37@psu.edu

Dr. Buss' Homepage

Andrea Cordero, Project Coordinator 

Andrea Cordero joined the Emotion Development Lab as a Research Coordinator working closely with Dr. Buss primarily on the TEENS Study. Andrea is a 2017 Penn State graduate with multiple B.A. in Psychology, Criminology, and Sociology. Prior research experiences include a project on social games for adolescents with Autism, directed by Dr. Suzy Scherf and serving as a lab manager for the Child Attention and Learning Lab directed by Dr. Cynthia Hunag-Pollock. She is currently working on her M.Ed in Institutional Research and Applied Statistics. She is broadly interested in how negative family environment and adversities affect children's temperament and biological regulations. 

Email: alc5886@psu.edu

Stacey LeVan, Lab Coordinator 

Stacey LeVan joined the Emotion Development Lab in 2019 as a Lab Coordinator. Stacey is a 1994 Penn State graduate with a B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis on Adolescent Development. Prior research experience includes multiple projects on School Readiness under Dr. Karen Bierman.  She spent 7 years working with students who have intellectual disabilities in the State College Area School District. That position lead to an enhanced interest in how child development impacts overall family dynamics.  

Email: sls217@psu.edu  

Margaret Whedon, Post-Doctoral Scholar

Margaret joined the EDL in 2019 with a PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). At UNCG, she was extensively trained in psychophysiological (EEG, RSA) data collection and analysis by Dr. Susan Calkins and Dr. Martha Ann Bell as part of her work on the Cognition, Affect, & Psychophysiology (CAP) Study. Her research is broadly focused on biological underpinnings of self-regulation (e.g., inhibitory control) and the interplay of cognition and emotion in development. As a post-doc, she is working with Drs. Kristin Buss and Koraly Perez-Edgar to understand how children's temperament serves to organize their developmental pathways to adaptive functioning and maladjustment.

Email: mqw5261@psu.edu

Briana Hernandez, Project Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Briana Hernandez graduated from Penn State University in 2018 with a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is working in the Emotion Development Lab at the PACT Harrisburg site as a Lab Coordinator for LAnT and TEENS. Prior research experience includes working as a research assistant and participant scheduler/recruitment coordinator at Dr. Kenneth Levy’s Laboratory for Personality, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy Research at Penn State University. She also worked as a mental health worker at Four Winds on the teenage Externalizing Behavioral Unit. She is broadly interested in the early identification and intervention/treatment of mental health disorders and plans to attend grad school to obtain her PhD in Clinical Psychology.  

Email: bgh5058@psu.edu

Tennille Hill, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Tennille Hill recently joined the Emotional Development Lab as a Research Coordinator working closely with Dr. Kristin Buss on the T.E.E.N.S. Study. Tennille received her B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies from Penn State University and M.S. in Mental Health Counseling from Springfield College.  She has 20 years of mental health, social service, and clinical experience working with children, youth, & families. Tennille’s strong passion for helping others lead her to further her love for hair as she recently obtained her licenses in Cosmetology and Cosmetology Teacher.  She is interested in helping troubled youth find a successful balance between academics and skills.

Email: tda115@psu.edu

Samantha Leigh, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Samantha Leigh graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2018 with her B.S. in Neuroscience and Psychology, and minor in Writing. She is working in the Emotion Development Lab at the PACT Harrisburg site as a Project Coordinator for LAnT and TEENS. Her previous experience includes working as a research assistant in Dr. Stephanie DeLuca’s Neuromotor Research Clinic at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, as well as using eye-tracking equipment in Dr. Laurie Hunter’s Face Processing Research Lab at CNU to study how students examine facial expressions. She is interested in the development of stress and anxiety, particularly in k-12 students, and plans to attend graduate school to study Educational Psychology and help schools improve student mental health.

Email: sxl1221@psu.edu

Venus Ricks, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Venus Ricks recently joined the Emotional Development Lab as a Lab Coordinator working with Dr. Kristin Buss on the LAnT and T.E.E.N.S. project. Venus received her M.Ed in Higher Education Administration from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her B.A. in Sociology from Susquehanna University. Her experience spans close to 20 years in social services, higher education administration as well as teaching and facilitating in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion. Venus has a strong passion for social justice and providing opportunities and experiences that improve the lives of marginalized populations. She is glad to be working with Dr. Buss and the Emotional Development Lab to improve the lives of youth and families in the Harrisburg area. 

Email: vpr5063@psu.edu

Centia Thomas, Research Assistant at PACT Harrisburg

Meghan McDoniel, Graduate Student

Meghan is a sixth year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program at Penn State University.  She is working with Dr. Kristin Buss in the Emotion Development Lab.  Her research interests focus on the multiple factors that influence social and emotional development of children in special populations (e.g. low-income populations, special needs populations).  Meghan received her B.A. in Psychology with a Neuroscience concentration from Grinnell College in 2010.  She also received her M.Ed. in Elementary Education with an Early Childhood emphasis from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2012 while teaching preschool with Teach For America.

Email: mem489@psu.edu

Alicia Vallorani, Graduate Student

Alicia is a fourth-year student in developmental psychology and cognitive & affective neuroscience, studying how differences in temperament, cognition and biology tether children to developmental pathways leading to difficulties with social engagement. She graduated from Knox College in 2011 with a B.A. in Psychology emphasizing in Behavioral Neuroscience. She then worked in the Neurology Department at the Washing University School of Medicine as the Clinical Research Coordinator for the Washington University Neurofibromatosis (NF) Center where she aided in the study of social-emotional delays in children with NF1. Alicia is interested in understanding the biological profiles of infants and children on developmental trajectories that may lead to social anxiety later in life.

Email: auv27@psu.edu

Berenice Anaya, Graduate Student

Berenice is a fourth-year graduate student, who received a B.A. in Psychology (2014) and a M.S. in Psychology (2016) from Western Kentucky University. For her Master's thesis, she examined the validity of 'hot' and 'cool' tasks as measures of self-regulation, and how these tasks predicted future academic performance and socio-emotional competence. These processes play a crucial role in school readiness. Currently, Berenice is working under the mentorship of Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, in studying how affect, temperament, and attention interact to shape different social processes.

Email: bua25@psu.edu

Anna Zhou, Graduate Student

Anna is a third-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology Program under the mentorship of Dr. Kristin Buss and Dr. Jenae Neiderhiser. She graduated from Tufts University in 2015 with a B.S. in Cognitive Brain Science and Child Development. After graduating, Anna worked at the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital with Dr. Charles Nelson on a longitudinal project examining the neural bases of emotion processing in infants and toddlers. Anna takes a biopsychosocial approach to her research, and is interested in the interplay between biological and environmental factors across development, and how they may be associated with children’s trajectories of socioemotional outcomes over time. Her master's thesis focused on how maternal internalizing symptoms, child physiology and their interaction were associated with trajectories of internalizing symptoms in early childhood.

Email: amz5260@psu.edu

Frances Lobo, Graduate Student

Frances Lobo is a fourth-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program. She received her B. S. degree in Neuroscience and Psychology from Duke University in 2013 and spent the following three years studying self-regulation in adolescents and college students with Dr. Rick Hoyle. She is currently working with Dr. Erika Lunkenheimer and Dr. Kristin Buss to understand how family systems promote or inhibit child self-regulation and resilience. Specifically, she is interested in studying the development of parent-child behavioral, affective, and physiological patterns. She hopes to investigate how dyadic interaction patterns are shaped by and  influence the relationships among family risk factors, family protective factors, child temperament, and child outcomes.  

Email: fml4@psu.edu

Kelley Gunther, Graduate Student

Kelley is a third-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program. She received her B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience from the University of Maryland in 2015, where she worked primarily on a project examining the role of emotion priming on visual search in the lab of Dr. Nathan Fox. After graduation, she spent the following two years working as a lab manager with Dr. Dima Amso at Brown University. She is interested in the interaction of maternal care and maternal buffering with temperamental and attentional risk factors for anxiety disorders, and neural correlates of these relationships.

Email: keg44@psu.edu

Liu Bai, Graduate Student

Liu is a third-year graduate student in Human Development and Family Studies, who is currently working with Dr. Doug Teti and Dr. Kristin Buss. She received her B.S in Psychology and M.Ed. in Developmental Psychology from Beijing Normal University. For her master's thesis, she compared different emotion regulation strategies using self-report, physiological measurements and eye-tracking. She is broadly interested in understanding how parenting and other environmental factors influence the trajectories of children's emotional development, and the physiological and behavioral mechanisms of emotional regulation.

Email: lxb313@psu.edu

Austen Trainer, Graduate Student

Austen is a second-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program working with Kristin Buss and the Emotion Development Lab at Penn State University. He received a BA in psychology from the University of California Riverside in 2016, and then spent time working as an RA in Kristin Lagattuta’s Mind-Emotion Development Lab. His research interests include the efficacy of emotion regulation strategies across contexts and how parents understandings of their children’s emotions affects child development.

Email: att64@psu.edu