Hello! I’m Elaine 😊

I am currently a fourth-year PhD student in Developmental Psychology, working with Dr. Julia Leonard at Yale University.

To learn a sport, make new friends, master mathematics, or achieve any long-term goal, children must overcome adversity and work through a multitude of difficult challenges. Yet effort is costly and its rewards are often uncertain, tasking young children with figuring out when and how they should persist in order to optimize their learning. My research explores how young children leverage information from the social world to form beliefs about their own competence and guide decisions about effort allocation. I ask questions such as: How do children use social comparisons to inform their perceptions of their own competence? How do they integrate diverse adult inputs to infer the value of effort? How do features of formal schooling shape children’s optimistic self-beliefs? By exploring how children represent and reason about these social and structural signals, I aim to uncover the mechanisms underlying when, how, and why these well-intentioned social systems can sometimes help - or even hinder - children’s motivation.

Prior to joining the PhD program, I received my Bachelor’s degree in psychology and neuroscience from the University of Toronto.

Beyond the lab, I enjoy jewelry-making, painting, cooking, playing tennis, and creating new records on the NYT crossword with friends!