Rebecca Stelter
iRT Research Associate
Doctorate in Developmental Psychology,
North Carolina State University

Rebecca Stelter, PhD., is a Research Associate at innovation Research & Training Inc. Dr. Stelter received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from North Carolina State University under the direction of Dr. Amy Halberstadt. Her research interests focus on children and adolescent's social and emotional development, particularly the role of parents and mentors in the socialization process. Specifically, she has explored parents' beliefs and socialization behaviors regarding children's anger and sadness and how these beliefs and behaviors are associated with children's affective social competence. In another project she examined how parental stress impacts the relationship between parents' beliefs about children's emotions and children's feelings of attachment security.

Currently, Dr. Stelter is the project director on a Phase II SBIR grant to develop web-based training for mentors. In addition, she is project director for a Phase I SBIR grant, the Adolescent Boys Thinking About Peers Project, which will result in the creation of a computer software program to determine social cognitive deficits in aggressive elementary school-aged boys. In the past three years, Dr. Stelter has worked on several other projects at iRT including the Elementary Boys Thinking About Peers Project and the Making Important Decision Project, which examined the cognitions of teenagers surrounding their decision to drink alcohol underage in order to inform efforts to prevent underage drinking.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Stelter, R. L., Halberstadt, A. G. (in press). The interplay between parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions and parents’ stress impacts children’s attachment security.

Kupersmidt, J., Stelter, R. L., & Dodge, K. A. (under review). An innovative web-based measure of elementary aged boys’ social information processing skills.

Kupersmidt, J., Parker, A. E., & Stelter, R. L. (under review) Parent assessment of children’s social information processing skills.

Haskett, M., Stelter, R. L., Nice, R., McDaniel, K. (under review). Self-regulation mediates the relationship between parents’ emotional expressiveness and children’s outcomes in a high-risk sample.