Dr. Ha’s research interests are in infant and child development, focusing on eating decisions and self-control in children with and without obesity; interventions for reducing advertising effects in unhealthy eating; identifying risk factors for the development of obesity in infants and young children; prosocial decision-making in parent-child dyads; language acquisition in children with and without Williams Syndrome; and stress and rejection impacts on prosocial and eating decisions in adults. Dr. Ha utilizes behavioral, experimental, and physiological approaches including eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, preferential looking, and habituation techniques.
Research
- Child Study
- Healthy Eating for Healthy Baby Project
- Healthy Food Choice Project
- Share My Precious Project: Prosocial Decision-Making
- Adult Study
- Prosocial Decision-Making
- Healthy Eating Information Processing
- Emotional Eating
In particular, with emphasis on children’s health and well-being, we investigate how obese and healthy weight children make food choices, and how dietary self-control, food advertising literacy, and parents’ eating habits influence children’s unhealthy and healthy food decisions.
With emphasis on children’s social adaptation, we investigate how children make prosocial choices, and how cognitive and affective empathy and maternal sensitivity influence children’s prosocial decisions.
Additionally, we investigate the role of stress in young adults’ eating and prosocial decision-making.
Area of Research: Infant and child development using behavioral and physiological techniques — eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, economic games — with a particular focus on eating decisions, self-control, resilience to advertising effects in children with and without obesity, identifying risk factors for developing obesity in infant-parent dyads, prosocial decision-making in parent-child dyads, as well as impacts of stress, rejection, inequity contexts on adults’ prosocial and eating decisions.
