Title: Principal Investigator
Groups: Investigator
Dr. Goldstein is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Applied Developmental Group at George Mason University. Her research focuses on how children, adolescents and adults can learn social and emotional skills through engaging in pretend, imagined, and theatrical worlds, as well as individuals understand characters in such worlds.
She graduated Cum Laude (Psychology) and With Distinction (all subjects) from Cornell University and spent several years as a professional actress and dancer in New York City. She then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Boston College in Developmental Psychology under the advisement of Dr. Ellen Winner, completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Paul Bloom at Yale University and spent 4 years as an assistant professor of Psychology at Pace University.
Dr. Goldstein’s work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts (Research: ArtWorks and Arts Labs), The John Templeton Foundation, Arts Connection, a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, a dissertation grant from the Esther Katz Rosen Fellowship (APF), an NSF small grant for exploratory research (SGER #0841047), and a graduate fellowship from the Department of Homeland Security. She has won awards from IGEL (Best Student Paper), SRCD (Student Travel Award) and APA (2009 Division 10 Frank X. Barron Outstanding Student Award; 2016 Daniel E. Berlyne Award for Outstanding Research by an Early Career Scholar). She is currently Co- Editor of the APA Division 10 Journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts and on the editorial boards of Empirical Studies in the Arts and Imagination, Cognition and Personality.