Seth Pollak

Research Area(s)
Biology of Brain and Behavior
Clinical
Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
Developmental
Individualized Graduate Major

Lab Website
Child Emotion Research Lab

Research Interest
Seth Pollak is the Vaughan Bascom Distinguished Professor of Psychology. He also holds appointments in the Lafollette School of Public Affairs, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Pediatrics, the Waisman Center, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. His research focuses on children’s brain and cognitive development, with particular focus on the emergence of human emotions, socio-emotional learning, and risk factors affecting children’s health. Dr. Pollak has been the recipient of the Boyd-McCandless Award for Distinguished Contributions to Child Development, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Early Career Award, the APS James McKeen Cattell Award, as well as the University of Wisconsin’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. In 2020, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow. His current research is addressing how early experiences in children’s lives influences how children think about and understand emotions, and the role of emotion in children’s decision-making.

Representative Publications

(Please see https://childemotion.waisman.wisc.edu/publications/ for full list)

Xu, Y., Harms, M., Green, CS., Wilson, R., and Pollak, SD. (2023). Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(49), e2303869120.

Plate, RC., Woodward, K., and Pollak, SD. (2023). Category flexibility in emotion learning. Affective Science, 4, 722-730.

Woodard, K., Plate, RC., and Pollak, SD. (2022). Children track probabilistic distributions of facial cues across individuals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(2): 506-511. [PMCID: PMC8923917, PMID: 34570561].

Ruba, AL., Pollak, SD. and Saffran, JR. (2022). Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion. Topics in Cognitive Science,  14(3), 432-450.

Smith, KE. and Pollak, SD. (2021). Early life stress and perceived social isolation influence how children use value information to guide behavior. Child Development, 93(3), 804-814.

Dukes, D., et al. (2021). The rise of affectivism. Nature Human Behavior, 10, 1-5.

Woodard, K., Zettersten, M., & Pollak, SD. (2021). The representation of emotion knowledge across development. Child Development, 93(3), e237-e250.

Pollak, SD, & Wolfe, BL. (2020). How developmental neuroscience can help address the problem of child poverty. Development and Psychopathology, 32, 1640–1656.

Ruba, AL., and Pollak, SD. (2020). The Development of Emotion Reasoning in Infancy and Early Childhood. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2(1), 503-531.

Smith, KE., and Pollak, SD. (2020). Rethinking Concepts and Categories for Understanding the Neurodevelopmental Effects of Childhood Adversity.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1-27.