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By Denise H. Horton
Their dance begins at birth: Two partners, mother and child, learning to move together. Some are natural dancers, according to Hui-Chin Hsu, an assistant professor of child and family development in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Others struggle, metaphorically stepping on each other’s toes and turning in the wrong direction.
“It’s very important to find the origins of mother-infant relationships,” Hsu says. “In the past, there’s been a tendency to think the relationship was either defined by the baby’s temperament or by the mother’s sensitivity and responsivity to the baby. My view is it’s an interaction of the two that is quite intricate and complex.”
In an effort to explore this relationship, Hsu is developing a research project that will follow mothers and babies over several years, focusing specifically on how the mothers and their infants play together.
“We have a room at the McPhaul Child Development Center that is equipped with a remote-controlled camera and observation area, so we’ll be able to have mothers and their babies come here and be able to watch and tape their interactions,” Hsu explains.
While Hsu is refining plans for her research, she’s also contemplating a problem that faces most new faculty members--funding.
“I received funds from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences and the University of Georgia Research Foundation for a pilot study, but I’m still seeking funds for a full-scale study,” Hsu says.
In order to help young researchers in the behavioral sciences locate funding, the Institute for Behavioral Research has established a mentoring program. Hsu is one of seven in this year’s class.
“We began this program a decade ago with the support of the Office of the Vice President for Research,” says Rex Forehand, director of IBR. “Each year, we select several faculty members who haven’t received extramural funding. The group meets regularly with Steve Beach and Paul Roman, who run the program, and each participant is assigned two mentors. At the end of the year, we expect the mentees will have a grant proposal ready to submit. However, we actually provide support to the mentees on an ongoing informal basis as they continue to search for funding.”
Hsu’s primary mentors are Forehand and Maureen Killeen, an IBR fellow and a professor of nursing at the Medical College of Georgia’s School of Nursing at Athens.
“This has been a very fruitful experience for me,” Hsu says. “For example, I recently attended a grant-proposal workshop that offered insights on how proposals are reviewed. When you start searching for funding you feel like you’re in a huge sea. You know the money is out there, like an island, but you need help in learning how to reach that target.”
While she continues the search for funding this project, however, Hsu also is pursuing other research. Currently, she and fellow FACS professor Julia Atiles are developing a project with a multicultural perspective.
“Both Julia and I are non-American born. I was raised in Taiwan and Julia is from Puerto Rico,” Hsu explains. “What we found in visiting with each other is how differently we’ve been socialized in how we understand and interpret emotions.”
For example, Hsu says, she tends to be more reserved in her expressions, such as when it is appropriate to smile, while Atiles is more expressive.
In order to explore how young children understand and express emotions and the role their parents play in teaching these socialization skills, Hsu and Atiles have received a $7,500 grant from the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences that is being matched by the college.
“We plan to compare children from Latino, African-American and European-American backgrounds who are four to five years old in terms of how they express and understand emotions,” Hsu says. “We assume parenting plays a role in this area, but we also want to determine what are the cultural norms and, also, differences that occur within the cultures.”
The goal of both of these projects is not to provide parents with step-by-step lessons on how to rear their children, Hsu emphasizes. Rather, it is to explore one of the most fundamental outlets for human communication--emotions.
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