Using multilevel modelling to investigate the links between play behaviour and children's emotional development

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My fellowship involves a variety of activities that aim to advance the understanding of children's play behaviour and its links to their emotional development. Based on my PhD research findings, I will disseminate new evidence on children's engagement in social pretend play with friends during middle childhood and evidence on the relations between social pretend play behaviour and children's emotional experience, expression and regulation. For example, findings from my research indicate that pretend play could promote positive emotional expression among children, and may serve as a vehicle for children to regulate their emotions in social contexts. Apart from publishing journal papers and attending international conferences to disseminate my PhD research findings, I will also undertake limited new research on parent-child play interaction during my fellowship. In collaboration with colleagues at the PEDAL Centre (Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning) at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, I will use advanced quantitative methods to analyse existing data on parent-child play interaction from a large-scale project. This work has the potential to provide new evidence on the links between parents' and children's emotional well-being and their play interaction, and on using early psychological intervention to prevent emotional and behavioural problems.During my fellowship, I also plan to communicate my research with a wide range of non-academic audiences. For example, I will write articles for PEDAL Hub, a website run by the PEDAL Centre that aims to make play research across the world accessible to researchers, teachers, parents/carers and policy makers. A further plan is to write summaries of my research for non-academic audiences and talk about my research to newspapers. I also plan to give talks to parents and teachers to promote understanding of factors influencing children's emotional development and the potential to use play to facilitate children's emotional expression and regulation.To broaden my network with internationally renowned scholars, I plan to visit the Harvard Graduate School of Education during my fellowship. I plan to discuss my research with Professor Paul Harris (an influential psychologist on emotional development, pretend play and imagination) and other researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I hope this visit will provide me with an excellent opportunity to learn about cutting-edge educational and psychological research at Harvard University and the opportunity to develop research ideas and future collaboration.