Thalia R. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology. Her work focuses on children's developing social and emotional skills, particularly theory of mind, empathy, and emotional control and regulation, and how such skills intersect with children's engagement in pretend play, theatre, drama, and other imaginative activities. She directs the SSIT lab (The Social Skills, Imagination, and Theatre Lab), which conducts research that looks both at the effects of engaging in pretend play and theatre on children's social-emotional skills, and how children understand and learn social information in fictional worlds. She is also the co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, the Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC). 

Goldstein's current research includes projects on: 1) what implicit and explicit teaching strategies the very best acting teachers use with high school students to improve their social and emotional knowledge; 2) How varying levels of embodiment and representation improve children's learning and retention of social and factual information in pretend play; 3) How acting (versus reading) affects children's understanding of mental and emotional states; 4) How moral reasoning may be different for children in the pretend versus real world; 5) The creation of a new measurement of pretend play that incorporates all pretense-related behaviors; 6) How marching band may be an ideal test case for intergroup context and belongingness across racial and ethnic backgrounds; 7) How acting may be related to creativity across child development. For more information on her research, please visit her lab website (ssit.gmu.edu).