Family Conversations
How parents talk with children and adolescents about their emotions as well as race, ethnicity, culture, and discrimination, and what helps those conversations feel supported and effective.
families · context · connection
PACC Lab Parents, Adolescents, and Children in Context
We study how families talk and grow together, and how their context shapes children's development.
Department of Human Development and Family Studies · UNC Greensboro
What We Study
The PACC Lab explores how parents, adolescents, and children shape one another, and how culture, community, and family support adaptive parent-youth interactions. We aim for research that is grounded in families' strengths and useful to the families we learn from.
Parent–Child Dynamics
How parents and children regulate each others' emotions, behaviors, and physiology, both moment to moment during parent-child interactions and across time.
Context & Resilience
The familial and cultural strengths, such as family closeness, identity, values, and coping, that help families thrive amid stress and discrimination.
Research
We combine observational, biobehavioral, survey, and community-engaged methods to understand families in context: at home, in their communities, and within broader systems of culture and race.
Talking About Emotions
How families socialize children around their emotions, a process called emotion socialization.
Related papers
Talking About Race & Culture
How families of color talk to children about their ethnic-racial identity, pass on ethnic-racial pride, and prepare them for bias, a process called racial-ethnic socialization.
Related papers
Parent–Child Coregulation
Using observational and physiological data to see how parents and young children coordinate their behavior, emotions, and physiology, and how that shapes children's self-regulation.
Related papers
Culture, Coping & Resilience
How cultural assets like familism and ethnic identity help youth and families cope with discrimination, immigration-related stress, and challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Related papers
Selected Publications
Recent and representative work from the PACC Lab. For a complete list, see Dr. Lobo's CV or Google Scholar page.
Parental racial-ethnic socialization and competence in Asian families
Identifies distinct patterns in how Asian American parents talk with children about race and culture, and how confident they feel doing so.
Fostering familial resilience in Latinx youth in the context of COVID-19
Explores the cultural assets that supported familial resilience in Latinx families during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cultural stressors, youth coping, and mother–adolescent conflict
Examines how cultural stressors, and the ways youth cope with them, relate to conflict between mothers and adolescents.
Effects of parent–adolescent relationship quality on youth symptoms amidst COVID-19
Looks at how the quality of parent–youth relationships relates to young people's mental health symptoms during the pandemic.
Parental emotion coaching moderates the effects of family stress on internalizing symptoms in middle childhood and adolescence
Examines how parents' emotion coaching buffers the link between family stress and children's anxiety and depression.
Understanding the parent–child coregulation patterns shaping child self-regulation
Examines moment-to-moment patterns in parent–child interaction and their links to young children's self-regulation.
In the News & Outreach
- Psychology Today · 2024 Do you need to talk to your child about race?
- International Congress of Infant Studies Blog · 2021 Recruiting diverse samples: Get out into the community!
- Penn State News · 2019 Keeping kids on task in school may start at home
Teaching & Mentoring
Dr. Lobo teaches courses on child development that support active learning and application of content to real-world settings.
- 149 students taught in Principles of Learning
- 121 students & volunteers in Research Experience in Psychology
- 21 undergraduates in the Research Experience Workshop
- 23 undergraduate posters presented at university and national conferences
Seminar in Parent-Child Relations
A seminar focused on understanding the impact of the parent-child relationship on children's development.
Development of School-Age Children
Physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development in middle childhood, and the family, school, and cultural contexts that shape it.
Research Experience in Psychology
A seminar on clinical and developmental research on race, racism, and culture. Students read and critique studies, then design their own research projects.
Principles of Learning
Foundations of behavioral psychology, including operant and respondent conditioning, and how to apply them to support behavior change.
Research Experience Workshop
A two-month workshop where undergraduates search the literature, pose their own research question, learn how to analyze data, and submit a conference abstract.
Our Team
The PACC Lab is a growing team of scholars who care about families and engaging the community in our research.
Principal Investigator · Lab Director
Frances M. Lobo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, UNC Greensboro
Dr. Lobo is a developmental psychologist who studies how parental socialization and parent-child interactions support children's self-regulation, coping and well-being, and identity. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Penn State, where she was an Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral fellow, and completed postdoctoral training in Penn State's Emotion Development Lab and the CAMINOS Lab at UNC Greensboro and UT Austin.
Lab Members
Michele Kamau
Graduate Student
Michele is a doctoral candidate at UNCG in the Human Development and Family Studies department. Her research interests center on language and literacy and their role in shaping the experiences of refugee families in the United States. Specifically, she is interested in language and literacy practices, language access policies, and how these intersect with refugee resettlement, economic mobility, and multidimensional poverty..
Amy Mejia
Graduate Student
Amy is a doctoral candidate at UNCG in the department of Human Development and Family Studies. Her research interests revolve around preservice teachers’ field experiences in early childhood and teacher preparation. Specifically, she is interested in the role online resources and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have in early childhood education, specifically within teacher preparation programs.
AJ Judd
Undergraduate Research Assistant
AJ is a 4th year student studying Human Development and Family Studies at UNCG. Broadly, their research interests involve young people and creating collaborative community spaces. AJ hopes to continue their career in community and youth development backed by communal research-informed interventions.
Aliyah Miller
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Aliyah is a senior Psychology major with a minor in English. This is her second semester in the PACC Lab. During her time in the lab, she has developed an immense interest in investigating racial socialization, specifically how communities of color come together to navigate racial stressors.
Leyser Murillo-Santos
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Leyser is a Psychology major with a minor in Social Work. He is interested in learning how family, environment, and life experiences can affect a person’s development. As a bilingual Spanish speaker, he’s interested in working with and learning more about different communities. .
Keira Nottingham
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Keira is a junior Psychology major focusing on social psychology. Her primary research interest is studying the mental health of women and teenage girls of color, specifically Black women and teenage girls. Keira hopes to pursue a career in research in hopes to further broaden the knowledge of how mental health looks in everyone.
Dulce Perez-Carranza
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Dulce is a sophomore Psychology major on the pre-med track. Her research interests include studying Mexican-American students who have faced adverse childhood experiences such as, discrimination, trauma, etc. and how resilience factors help mitigate these issues in adulthood, especially in higher education. Dulce hopes to become a pediatric psychiatrist and work with younger children in her marginalized community.
Annika Redmond
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Annika is a junior Psychology major, and African American Studies Minor. This is her second year working in the PACC Lab. Her research interests revolve around creating safe spaces for minority children and families to communicate and problem solve regarding everyday issues that occur in our society. Annika hopes to have a career working with children with cognitive disabilities, assisting in creating independent communication and confidence regarding racial identity.
Taijah Robinson
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Taijah is a senior Psychology major and Human Development and Family Studies minor. Because of her interests in adolescent mental health, racial socialization, and self esteem, Taijah hopes to pursue a career in clinical mental health counseling for adolescents of color.
Melissa Salazar
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Research interests and background coming soon.
Join the PACC Lab
We're building a warm, collaborative lab where students from all backgrounds, including first-generation students and students of color, can grow as researchers. No prior research experience is needed to reach out.
Prospective Ph.D. Students
Dr. Lobo welcomes inquiries from applicants to UNCG's Ph.D. program in Human Development and Family Studies who are interested in parent–child relationships, emotion and/or racial-ethnic socialization, and families of color.
- Read about our research and a few recent papers above.
- Email Dr. Lobo with your CV and a short note about your research interests. Use the subject line "Prospective Ph.D. Student: Your Name".
- Apply to the HDFS Ph.D. program by December 15 and name Dr. Lobo as a faculty mentor of interest in your professional statement.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
UNCG undergraduate students from any major are welcome. Research assistants get hands-on experience and close mentoring, and many go on to present their own posters at conferences.
- Help review research articles and prepare study materials
- Learn to code observational videos of parent–child interactions
- Build data skills and develop your own research question
- Present at the UNCG Undergraduate Research & Creativity Expo
To apply, email Dr. Lobo with your major, class year, weekly availability, and a few sentences about why you're interested.
Get in Touch
-
Email fmlobo@uncg.edu