hello!

i'm rachel jordan kingstone. i'm studying developmental psychology & early childhood in toronto. i research how persistence, motivation, and resilence develop in early learning environments. starting fall 2025 i will be focusing on psychosocial dimensions of childhood cancer as part of a child studies MA.

what i'm working on:

Previous research suggests that when children are praised for their effort, they try harder, generate better problem-solving strategies, and are able to cope with setbacks. Process praise that overlaps with effort and success boosts infants' motor-based persistence, while random process praise is detrimental to persistence. I'm exploring whether contingent process praise influences how infants reason about effort expenditure, and whether this mental effort correlates with infants’ physical persistence.

i'm also broadly interested in philosophy of science/history of psych kinds of things like: looping effects and categorical classification, experience-based expertise in survivorship research, and the history of infant research.

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