Group: Current PHD and MA Students

Tatiana Williams is a first year graduate student in the Applied Developmental Psychology program at George Mason University.
She obtained her Bachelor of Arts with a focus in fine arts and a psychology minor from Shepherd University in 2022. She has also worked at Loudoun Therapeutic Riding as an administrator, grant writer, and fundraiser. Her research interests surround the role visual arts play in development, specifically among adolescents and young adults.

Racquel is a first-year Master’s student working in Dr. Goldstein’s PLAY lab. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Music from Kent State University in May 2022. As an undergraduate, she served as a research assistant in the Clinical Affective Science lab, where she assisted with the Resilience After Injury study. After graduation, she worked as a youth counselor at Bellefaire JCB, a residential treatment facility for adolescents with autism and mental health diagnoses. Her current research interests include how music-making affects social-emotional development in children and adolescents and the evolutionary origins of music-making.

Abigail (Abbey) Milhaven is a first-year Psychology Ph.D. student in the Applied Developmental Program at George Mason University and is also in Dr. Goldstein’s PLAY Lab. Abbey graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors in Psychology from Lafayette College in 2024 where she received a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in Anthropology & Sociology. While at Lafayette College, Abbey was the Head Research Assistant of the Lafayette Kids Lab and worked on multiple research projects regarding grandparent/grandchild interactions during video chat sessions. Her research interests include social cognitive development, socio-emotional learning, playful learning, the performing arts, and education during childhood. Abbey is also interested in being involved in research both during and after graduate school to further advocate for and contribute to the equity, accessibility, and applicability of child development research.

Jasmine Rose is a second year MA student in the ADP program under the advisement of Dr. Goldstein. Jasmine’s broad interests surround the experiences of Black women; especially as they relate to gendered-racial identity development, racism, self-efficacy and other factors which influence Black womens’ life experiences. Her current work includes an investigation to the longitudinal experiences of Black women in education. Jasmine’s master’s thesis explores how Black women’s intersectional identity may act as a mechanism between academic self-efficacy and academic achievement. Jasmine participated in the Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program (MAOP) at Virginia Tech, where she completed and presented an independent research project focused on how religiousness mediated the relationship between adolescent substance use and socioeconomic status. She graduated with a BS in Psychology with Honors and a concentration in Health Psychology from GMU in 2021, where she also worked in the REACH lab.

Anna S. Caruso, who mostly goes by Sofie, is currently a third year PhD student in Dr. Goldstein’s lab. She graduated Summa cum Laude from the University of Oklahoma in 2021 with both a BA in psychology and a BMA in Opera Vocal Performance. Her Research in the PLAY lab has included studying how people do or do not engage in a variety of artistic and imaginative forms (i.e., music, stories, pretense). This work has included examining how children engage in immoral pretend play, how adults consider extramusical information when engaging with music, and how opera and musical theater performers view the differences across theatrical-musical productions.

Additionally, Anna is a passionate educator. She is also working with Dr. Alison Melley at GMU to develop an open access resource for Introductory Psychology students and instructors following the updated APA Introductory Psychology Initiative guidelines by developing the resource around key integrative themes and diverse, current research in the field.

Her current research interests include music performance, imagination, engagement, and morality.

Lamin Fatty is a fourth year PhD student in Dr. Goldstein’s lab interested in parent’s perceptions of pretend play, social-emotional development and its socialization, and play based interventions, particularly in a West African context.

Darian Stapleton is a fifth-year PhD student in Dr. Goldstein’s lab. She graduated from Washington & Jefferson College where she majored in Psychology and Studio Art with a minor in Art History. She previously interned in the Cognition, Affect & Temperament Lab at Penn State University working on projects dealing with behavioral inhibition. Her current research interests include looking at video games and why/how children engage with them, and how video game play relates to creativity and other outcomes. Her career goals are to work with gaming companies, digital media, or child focused organizations doing data analysis to inform policies about digital media and game design decisions. She is currently working on developing a machine learning model that can predict the creativity ratings of images from the video game Pokémon Snap.