Lehigh University

Faculty Member, Psychology

College of Arts & Sciences

About

Ageliki Nicolopoulou is currently Professor and Chair in the Psychology Department at Lehigh University. She was born and raised in Patras, Greece and came to the US for her undergraduate and graduate education, receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Since then, she has held research appointments at the City University of New York/Graduate Center and the University of California at San Diego (in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition), and has taught at UC San Diego, Smith College, and (since 1996) at Lehigh University.

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INTERESTS:  I am a sociocultural developmental psychologist with a range of research interests that include the role of narrative in development, socialization, and education; the influence of the peer group and peer culture as social contexts for children's cognitive, socio-emotional, personality, and moral development; the relationship between play and narrative; the foundations of emergent literacy; and the developmental interplay between the construction of reality and the formation of identity, including gender identity.

The larger agenda that unifies and directs these lines of research is to contribute to the effort to build up a more effective sociocultural developmental psychology. This has involved a close and systematic integration of theoretical and empirical work. I have consistently argued that psychological research needs to situate development more effectively in its sociocultural contexts, including institutional and cultural frameworks, but without ignoring children's own agency and the inner processes of development. And one requirement for doing this successfully is to rethink, refine, and broaden researchers' conceptions of the "social context" of development to encompass, not just direct adult-child (or expert-novice) interaction, but also peer-group processes, including modes of genuine peer collaboration and the ways that children, like adults, create, maintain, and participate in fields of shared activity that provide both resources and motivations for development. Methodologically, my empirical research combines quantitative, interpretive, and ethnographic analysis, primarily using data obtained in naturalistic settings.

One long-term line of research has focused on children's narrative activities and their role in development. This research addresses both (a) narrative development per se (the development of narrative competence and sophistication) and (b) the role of narrative in the overall process of development, including cognitive, socio-emotional, and personality development. Much of this work has been based on my studies of middle-class and low-income preschool classes (in California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania) where a peer-oriented practice of spontaneous storytelling and story-acting is a regular component of the curriculum. Over time, it has become increasingly clear that this research also has significant implications for understanding the foundations of emergent literacy and the role of peers in children's development, socialization, and education. These issues were central to the large-scale multi-year study I conducted at a local child care program serving low-income children. The goal was to examine the effectiveness of this storytelling and story-acting practice for promoting key components of young children's school readiness: narrative skills (and the broader cluster of decontextualized language skills); emergent literacy; and social competence (including capacities for cooperation, self-regulation, and social understanding).

A by-product of this project has been my increasing interest in the multiple ways we elicit narratives from children in order to compare them more systematically.  I'm also interested in constructing a standardized, developmentally appropriate, and culturally sensitive measurement instrument with which to comprehensively assess the narrative abilities of preschool children from disadvantaged and culturally diverse backgrounds.

A recurrent theme in my work has been the need for developmental research to pay more systematic attention to the interrelations of play and narrative in children's experience and development. They should be treated as complementary and often closely interwoven forms of socially situated symbolic action. I was Guest Editor of a  special issue of Cognitive Development (2004) on the subject of "Play and Narrative in the Process of Development: Commonalities, Differences, and Interrelations."

I'm also very interested in the role that narrative activities play in promoting social understanding and in particular theory of mind development.  My former graduate student Carolyn Brockmeyer and I conducted a training study using commercially available children's books that successfully promoted theory of mind concepts in preschool children.  This research has piqued my interest in analyzing children's books using more theoretically informed ways to understand mentalistic concepts in children's development than the simple counting of mental state words.

Last but not least, one of my current interests is using commercially available children's books to promote narrative comprehension in young children and in particular to help them appreciate the shift from actual to possible worlds.

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