Cecilia Wainryb: Professor, University of Utah
Cecilia Wainryb is a professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Utah. Her work explores how children and adolescents make sense of interpersonal and group conflict situations, especially the types of conflicts in which one or both parties feel hurt or mistreated. She is particularly interested in how the specific ways in which children interpret these exeriences both affect their actual behavior in conflict situations and further their moral development. She has studied this process by interviewing children about hypothetical conflict situations (Shaw & Wainryb, 2006; Wainryb, Shaw, Langley, Cottam & Lewis, 2004; Komlova & Wainryb, 2011) and, also, by eliciting children's narrative accounts of their own conflict experiences (Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a; Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, in press; Wainryb & Recchia, forthcoming-a).
In current work, I ask how children make sense of such extreme instances of interpersonal and group harm, and how their subjective interpretations of these experiences further - or hinder - their moral development (Recchia & Wainryb, 2011; Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2008; Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010; Wainryb, 2010). Current studies include groups of children and adolescents displaced by civil war (e.g., in Colombia;Posada & Wainryb, 2008; Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010) and tribal wars (e.g., in Papua-New Guinea;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010), children from refugee communities relocated in the United States (e.g., from Bosnia; Pasupathi & Wainryb, in preparation), and even groups of children and adolescents who were themselves recruited into armed groups and served as child soldiers (e.g., in Colombia; Wainryb, 2011), as well as children and adolescents living in violent communities in the United States (Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2010).
