Rebecca Waller

I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the EDEN Lab. I study how children’s social and emotional development unfolds over time. I am particularly interested in why some children develop serious and persistent problems with aggression, antisocial behavior, and callous-unemotional traits. I am originally from the UK, and my route into academia and clinical science was not entirely conventional. My undergraduate training was in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, but my first career was as a high school science teacher. That experience shaped many of the questions I still care about today, including my motivating principle that psychological science be applied in ways that our genuinely helpful to children and families.

Much of my research stems from the observation that children differ from one another in temperament, emotional sensitivity, attention, physiology, and neurobiology, and that these characteristics shape how children experience and respond to the world around them. At the same time, parenting, family relationships, schools, neighborhoods, and broader environmental conditions can increase risk, promote resilience, or change developmental trajectories altogether. We examine the dynamic relationship between children and their caregivers, including how parenting behaviors such as warmth, harshness, and responsiveness shape children’s emotional and behavioral development, but also how children themselves influence the responses they receive from parents. As a mom to two children, these questions have become even more immediate for me. Parenting has reinforced just how complicated the interplay between temperament and environment really is, and how little family life resembles the tidy statistical models we like to use in our research papers!

In the EDEN Lab, we follow children and families over time and combine traditional methods within clinical and developmental science with newer technologies. Alongside interviews and questionnaires, we observe parents and children interacting, measure physiological responses, use mobile eye-tracking to study social attention, and apply computational methods to facial expressions, speech, language, and behavior. In other projects, we use genetics and neuroimaging data. Ultimately, I want this work to help identify developmental processes that can be changed, including modifiable aspects of children’s social and cognitive skills and their environments and relationships that could improve early identification and more precise and effective prevention and intervention. I also care deeply about teaching and mentoring, and about creating a lab environment in which students can ask ambitious questions, learn new methods, and develop their own questions and answers to problems they want to address.