KEYNOTE

Home
Presenters
Schedule
Hotel and Travel

Thalia R Goldstein
Developing Wonder: The Developmental Psychology of Theatre
Saturday, 9:30-10:30
Thalia R. Goldstein, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Applied Development Psychology at George Mason University and the director of the Social Skills, Imagination and Theatre Lab. She studies how children participate in and create fictional worlds, how actors construct characters onstage, and the effects of these activities on empathy, theory of mind, emotion regulation, compassion, and altruism. Her other work focuses on how children and adults understand social categorization at the fiction/reality border, and how children react to watching fictional worlds. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, The John Templeton Foundation, Arts Connection, the National Science Foundation, American Psychological Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. She has won awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, American Psychological Association, and the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media. She is editor of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA Division 10). Dr. Goldstein earned her B.A. from Cornell University in Theatre and Psychology, her Ph.D. from Boston College in Developmental Psychology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. She spent several years as a professional actress and dancer in New York City.