Position Title
Department of Psychology
child development, theory of mind, emotional understanding, moral cognition
Kristin Lagattuta is a professor of psychology and studies age-related changes and individual differences in emotion understanding, theory of mind, moral cognition, and past-to-future reasoning. At her Mind-Emotion Development Lab, Lagattuta further conducts research that bridges theory of mind and moral reasoning, including studies on children’s beliefs about the emotional consequences of willpower, transgression, and altruistic helping, as well as children’s social categorization in moral and non-moral contexts. Sources of individual differences include worry and anxiety, working memory, inhibitory control, visual attention biases, reasoning about mathematical probability and uncertainty, family composition (especially siblings), and attachment.