Congratulations to Pamela Cole on being awarded the Raymond Lombra Award for Distinction in the Social Sciences

Pamela Cole, Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies, Associate Director of Clinical Training, and Director of the Emotion Regulation Lab was recently awarded the Raymond Lombra Award for Distinction in the Social Sciences by the College of the Liberal Arts. This award “recognizes a tenured faculty member in the College of the Liberal Arts who, by his or her outstanding work in the field of social or life sciences, has demonstrated excellence in research and scholarship.”

Dr. Cole studies emotional development in early childhood, focusing on how children learn to regulate their own emotions, including biological, behavioral, and contextual factors. Her work includes conceptual work on the nature and measurement of self-regulation as a dynamic, unfolding process, and empirical work on emotion regulation development in young, typically developing children and children who are at risk for psychological problems. At present, she is leading several projects with her team of co-investigators, post-doctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students:  (a) the Development of Toddlers (D.O.T.S.), an NIMH-supported study that followed children from age 18 months to age 5 years, tracing changes in their anger reactions and regulation and the role of their language development in those changes, (b) the Proximal Emotional Environment Project (PEEP), an NIMH-supported study that investigates children’s neural processing of emotion in the voice, including both familiar (parental) and unfamiliar voices, and (c) the Development of Self-Regulation Dynamics, an NICHD-supported study that investigates the dynamics of self-regulation in children and parents and how the dynamics change during early childhood. In addition, Dr. Cole leads the Pathways to Competence (P2C) research initiative and participates in the Families at Risk research initiative; both of these initiatives are housed in the Child Study Center. Her P2C group meets regularly throughout the year to provide intellectual support to faculty members developing new projects and applying for external funding.

Congratulations, Dr. Cole!