Welcome!

The Life-Span Development Laboratory at Northwestern University examines pathways toward happy, healthy, and meaningful development across the life span with a focus on emotions in individuals and couples. Our research combines insights and paradigms from life-span developmental, affective, and relationship science. We use multiple methods (autonomic physiology, behavioral observations, subjective emotional experience ratings, linguistic markers), age-diverse samples (from adolescence to late life), diverse study designs (experimental and longitudinal), and single-subjects and dyadic approaches (studying married couples, parents and children, and friends). Our research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, the Retirement Research Foundation, and a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. Our studies have been published in PNAS, Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Affective Science, Emotion, Psychological Medicine, and many other outlets. They have often garnered attention from national and international media (e.g., New York Times; WBEZ), and several rank in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. You can find an overview of our publications here, our current research projects here, and our research team here. You can contact us at lifespan@northwestern.edu.