Intended Audience
The Department of Psychology welcomes Dr. Thalia Golstein who will present the second lecture in its 2018-19 lecture series, Psychology of Work and Play:
"The Role of Drama and Imagination in Building Children's Social and Emotional Skills"
Pretend and imaginative play, drama and theatre, have long been theorized as linked to social and emotional skills. Children and adults engage with such activities daily- through their own activities, or by watching actors on television and in film. Yet despite their prevalence, psychologists know very little about the effects of engaging with fictional worlds. I hypothesize that fictional engagement can be used as a lens to answer fundamental questions in the development, improvement, and intervention of social and emotional skills. This talk will present a series of studies, with children aged 3-18, from typical, at risk, and atypical backgrounds, investigating how and when dramatic, acting, and pretense experiences can be harnessed to foster increases in abilities such as emotional control, theory of mind, and empathy.
Thalia R. Goldstein, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Applied Development Psychology at George Mason University and the director of the Social Skills, Imagination and Theatre Lab. She studies how children participate in and create fictional worlds, how actors construct characters onstage, and the effects of these activities on empathy, theory of mind, emotion regulation, compassion and altruism. Her other work focuses on how children and adults understand social categorization at the fiction/reality border, and how children react to watching fictional worlds. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, The John Templeton Foundation, Arts Connection, the National Science Foundation, American Psychological Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. She has won awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, American Psychological Association, and the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media. She is editor of the journalPsychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts(APA Division 10). Dr. Goldstein earned her B.A. from Cornell University in Theatre and Psychology, her Ph.D. from Boston College in Developmental Psychology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship Yale University. She spent several years as a professional actress and dancer in New York City.