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

Dr. Sarah Myruski, Associate Lab Director

My research examines psychological factors that contribute to emotional well-being across the lifespan.  By integrating neurocognitive, physiological, and behavioral techniques, I aim to gain insight into the complex processes that underlie risk and resilience throughout development. One current line of research uses this multi-method approach to investigate social context-sensitive biological signatures of emotion regulation flexibility in development.

Email: sfm6016@psu.edu

sarah.myruski.com

Stacey LeVan, Lab Coordinator 

Stacey LeVan joined the Emotion Development Lab in 2019 as a Lab Coordinator. Stacey is a Penn State graduate with a B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis on Adolescent Development. She is currently pursuing her M.Ed. in Higher Education. Prior research experiences include multiple projects on School Readiness under Dr. Karen Bierman.  She spent 7 years working with students with 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  

Tennille Hill, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Tennille Hill joined the Emotional Development Lab as a Research Coordinator 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

Venus Ricks, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Venus Ricks 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, Lab Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Centia graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 2019 with a B.S in Psychology and a minor in Rehabilitation and Human Services. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Applied Clinical Psychology while working in the Emotional Development Lab as a project coordinator for both LAnT and TEENS. Her prior research and mental health-related experiences include working as a research assistant in various other labs and working as a crisis hotline counselor during her time as an undergraduate student. She intends to obtain her Ph.D. after completing her master's program, she is interested in mental health disparities that exist among diverse populations.

Email: cjt5318@psu.edu

Annika Kershner, Project Coordinator at PACT Harrisburg

Annika Kershner joined the Emotion Development Lab in 2020 as a Project Coordinator for both the LAnT and TEENS projects. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Penn State Harrisburg in 2019 and worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Emotion Development Lab with the TEENS project. She has a special interest in trauma and resilience, as well as other risk and protective factors involved in anxiety development and prevention regarding children, teens, and their families. She enjoys being part of a team who works directly with families in the local community. 

Email: hja4@psu.edu

Anna Zhou, Graduate Student

Anna is a fourth-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 fifth-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

Liu Bai, Graduate Student

Liu is a fourth-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 third-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

Yushuang Liu, Graduate Student

Yushuang is a fifth-year graduate student pursuing a dual-title degree in Developmental Psychology and Language Science. She received her B.S. degree in Psychology from Wuhan University, China and her M.A. degree in Psychology from San Diego State University, under the mentorship of Dr. Margaret Friend on language and cognitive development in monolingual and bilingual children. Currently, she is working with Dr. Janet van Hell and Dr. Kristin Buss at Penn State. Yushuang is primarily interested in language processing and language learning in typically developing children and adults, using EEG. Aside from experimental psycholinguistics, Yushuang is also interested changes in temperament during early development and what predictors contribute to those changes. 

Email: yzl67@psu.edu

Nora Tucker, Graduate Student

Nora is a first-year graduate student in the developmental psychology program. She received her BA in Psychology from the University of Iowa where she worked with Grazyna Kochanska and Jodie Plumert. Currently, she is working with Kristin Buss and Pamela Cole to understand how parents influence children’s development of emotion- regulation by using a dynamic systems approach to study self- regulation.

Email: nat5288@psu.edu