Jennifer Phillips Email & Phone Number

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy at the University of Toronto- Mississauga campus. Working under Dr. Tina Malti and Dr. Either Spiedel, I am in charge of the ADAPT project, which focuses on early childhood development of kind emotions, empathy, and sympathy. A particular focus of the research is looking at children who have faced adversity in a community sample from the GTA.I received my PhD in Psychology in May 2024 at Virginia Tech. Under the mentorship of Dr. Martha Ann Bell, my dissertation was focused on maternal parenting and personality as predictors of infant fear reactivity and regulation. My research is broadly focused on the development of emotions and emotion regulation in early childhood and external factors that influence such. I utilize a multi method approach, including psychophysiology, behavioral observation, and questionnaires.During my undergraduate career, I worked in two research labs at Penn State. One was based at the Altoona campus and focused on clinical aspects of personality psychology, including personality assessment. In this lab, I have worked with behavioral coding, advanced statistical analyses, referencing, and poster design. I have presented a poster at an undergraduate research conference in April 2017 and co-authored a publication that is published in the Journal of Personality Assessment.The other lab that I worked in was based at the University Park campus and is a child development lab. My lab work here focuses on emotional development on children and am gaining experience working with EEG, heart rate analysis, and a variety of coding tasks. Throughout this experience, I presented a poster at the International Conference of Infant Studies (ICIS) in Philadelphia, PA during July 2018 and at an undergraduate conference in April 2019. Further, I completed an undergraduate thesis in this lab that focused on how maternal personality may predict infant regulation of negative emotions.