PEOPLE

Principal Investigator

Kristin H. Lagattuta is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. She received a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Lagattuta is a developmental scientist who studies children’s and adults’ reasoning about connections between the mind and emotion, how children and adults attend to and interpret emotional information, parent versus child evaluations of children’s mental health, as well as further aspects of social cognition, including morality, social categorization, and beliefs about common ground versus diversity in how people will think, feel, and act. In addition to examining normative development, she also explores sources of individual differences in attention and reasoning. She is the editor of the 2014 book, Children and emotion: New insights into developmental affective science, and her empirical work appears in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Developmental Science, Emotion, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Psychological Science. Dr. Lagattuta served as Associate Editor at Developmental Psychology, and she serves on the editorial boards of Affective Science, Child Development, Emotion, and Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. She received the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Excellence in Teaching Award as well the UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching. Dr. Lagattuta is also very active in higher education leadership and faculty governance, serving as Vice Chair and then Chair of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Faculty Executive Committee (2015-2017) and then Vice Chair and then Chair of the UC Davis Academic Senate (2017-2020). From 2020 to 2022 she served as the Faculty Advisor to the Provost on Closing Student Opportunity Gaps. She is currently the Chair of the Psychology Department (2022-).

Graduate Students

Maritza Miramontes is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and minors in Spanish and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Merced. Maritza works with Dr. Lagattuta investigating parents' versus children's perspectives on their relationship quality, including relations to socio-emotional outcomes. She plans to pursue interests in children’s theory of mind, emotion beliefs, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation; the impact of culture and acculturation on these developmental processes; and mental health outcomes. Beyond her research, Maritza is interested in helping support under-represented populations develop the skills they need to pursue higher education.

Lucy Stowe is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from Boston University in 2020. She investigates how children's expectation management strategies help improve their emotion wellbeing, how moral reasoning develops across childhood, and how emotions influence prosociality. She currently serves as the President of the Psychology Student Association at UC Davis, and works as a teaching assistant where she enjoys working with and mentoring undergraduate students in Psychology.

Maia Southwick is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She earned a B.S. in Psychology (Honors) and Health, Society, and Policy along with minors in Economics and Sociology from the University of Utah. Her main research goal is how to best represent intraindividual variability and change in moral judgment and reasoning across childhood and adolescence. Further study on this topic can inform how conceptions of ourselves and others as moral persons may vary across context and time. She is co-advised by Dr. Emilio Ferrer in the Quantitative Psychology area. In her free time, she enjoys art, soccer, and board games.

Maria Calderon is a second year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She earned a B.S. in Psychobiology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She investigates how beliefs about emotions influence self-regulation and how close others influence emotion regulation, as well as how affective forecasting is related to perceptions of emotion controllability. Additionally, she is interested in exploring how students’ previous life experiences, expectations, and emotions shape their well-being and academic outcomes in their first year of college. Maria is eager to continue mentoring students and plans to get involved in programs aimed at supporting underrepresented students.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Luke Roncevich is a 4th year student majoring in Psychology with a Human Development minor. He is also a student athlete at Davis, from Southern California. He aspires to get into a graduate program for Psychology after completing his undergraduate degree. He wants to research social conformity in infants and how closely they will mirror their parents.

Mirabella Hofland is a 4th year at UC Davis, studying Cognitive Science. She is also planning on pursuing a minor in Human Development, as she is interested in developmental psychology, especially social emotional development. Mirabella is also very interested in exploring new developments in artificial intelligence and what implications they may have in how the mind is studied and defined.

Dena Pham is a second-year Psychology and Applied Statistics student at UC Davis. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in Psychology after completing her bachelor’s. Her research interests focus on the development of individual differences, particularly how past experiences and socio-economic factors shape cognition across groups. She is also interested in how responses to stressors are pathologized, as well as the historical evolution of what is considered maladaptive behavior.

Anna Zhang is a second year student majoring in Psychology. She is currently assisting with research focused on adolescent moral development. Her main responsibilities are screening and coding qualitative data as part of a scoping review, honing her research and critical thinking skills under the mentorship of experienced researchers and peers. Passionate about the lab’s work on mind-emotion development, Anna is excited by its potential to address key issues in school and family education. Outside the lab, she enjoys Chinese classical dance, reading non-fiction, and playing ultimate frisbee—blending intellectual curiosity with a love for dancing in a groove.

Charlie Martinez is a 4th year Cognitive Science and Psychology double major at UC Davis. She's interested in identifying and combating health inequities, as well as promoting mental health within the Hmong and Mexican community. She joined this lab because of her curiosity in moral development. She enjoys bouquet making, arts and crafts, martial arts, and the occasional dance class.