Principal Investigator
Xin Feng, Ph.D is Professor in the Department of Human Sciences, Human Development and Family Science program area. She has a broad background in social and emotional development in diverse family and cultural contexts, with specific focus on the interface of temperament, emotional and cognitive regulation, and contextual influences in the development of adaptive socioemotional functioning and childhood psychopathology. She is particularly interested in examining early emotional and cognitive regulation as mechanisms for the transmission of depression between mothers and their children. Her research has focused on: 1) the co-development of emotional and cognitive regulation during early childhood, 2) the effect of maternal depression and parenting on the development of emotional/cognitive regulation, and 3) early risk factors associated with the onset and maintenance of childhood depressive and anxiety symptoms. In these lines of research, her work relies on intensive behavioral observations of children and mothers. Her areas of expertise also include statistical methods in modeling longitudinal data. She is recruiting graduate students for Fall 2024.
Email: feng.88@osu.edu
Curriculum Vitae | HDFS Faculty Page | Google Scholar Citations | ResearchGate
Current Graduate Students
Karis Inboden is a doctoral student in the Human Development and Family Science program at the Department of Human Science. Her research interests include: parental emotional socialization, parental control, socioemotional development in early childhood, emotion regulation, and parental psychopathology–specifically, depression and anxiety. Karis earned her Bachelor’s of Science in Human Development and Family Science at The Ohio State University. View CV
Yvonne (Yihui) Gong is a doctoral student in the Human Development and Family Science program. Her current research focuses on the role of parents, such as parental physiological (e.g., Respiratory sinus arrhythmia) and psychological (e.g., depression) characteristics, in young children’s socioemotional development. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a minor in communication at The Ohio State University. View CV
Past Graduate Students
Emma Hooper, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the doctoral candidate at the California Lutheran University. Her research focuses on family and parenting processes that support the development of children’s emotional competences. She is also a couple and family therapist. View Profile
Seulki Ku, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Neuroscience and Education Lab at NYU School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the development of children’s executive function (EF) over the course of early and middle childhood. In particular, she is interested in examining how the family and school context are associated with children’s EF development, and also investigating protective factors, such as children’s temperament, which can change the strength of the associations. View CV
Qiong Wu, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Family and Child Sciences at Florida State University. Her research focuses on how maternal mental health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use) are transmitted to children within family context. She is also a couple and family therapist. View Profile
Micah Gerhardt is a Decision Analyst at Data and Analytics, Huntington National Bank. His previous research interests included young children’s socioemotional development, the roles of fathers in socializing children’s emotions, psychometrics, and personality. Micah earned his bachelor’s of science degree, Master’s, and Ph.D. (in 2020) in Human Development and Family Science at The Ohio State University. View CV
Meingold Chan is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Kobor Social Epigenetics Lab at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include the role of familial context and parental characteristics, such as maternal depression, in young children’s socioemotional development, more specifically, socialization of children’s emotion regulation. She is also interested in studying factors, such as upregulation of positive affect and emotion regulation flexibility, that protect children from developing later emotional and behavioral problems. Meingold earned a bachelor’s of Social Sciences in Psychology and Counseling at the University of Hong Kong in 2015, a Master of Philosophy in Social and Developmental Psychology in the University of Cambridge in 2016, and a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Science at OSU. View CV