Morse Scholar 2016–2019
Current Position
Assistant Director of Research and Learning at CASEL (Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning)
Contact
About
At CASEL, Rista’s research is highly interdisciplinary, bridging developmental science and education research, policy, and practice. She leads several collaborations, including those examining how policy is related to implementation of social and emotional learning practices in schools, how education technologies are approaching social and emotional development (and what that means for student outcomes), and innovations in evidence-based approaches to supporting social and emotional learning in education settings. Rista is also adjunct faculty at Carthage College, teaching courses on Lifespan Development.
Education
| 2010 | BA | Psychology | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| 2013 | MS | Psychology | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| 2019 | PhD | Psychology | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| 2020 – Present | Postdoc | MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellow | University of Pennsylvania |
| 2016–2019 | Morse Scholar | Major Professor: Seth Pollak, PhD | Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
News
- The pandemic’s psychological scars
March 16, 2022 - Perceptions shaped social behavior during the pandemic
February 17, 2022 - An interview with Rista Plate, PhD
February 12, 2020 - Where do children’s emotions come from?
June 2017
Selected Publications
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Paz, Y., All, K., Kohli, S., Plate, R. C., Viding, E., & Waller, R. (2024). Why Should I? Examining How Childhood Callous-Unemotional Traits Relate to Prosocial and Affiliative Behaviors and Motivations. Research on child and adolescent psychopathology, 52(7), 1075–1087. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01170-4
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Plate, R. C., Powell, T., Bedford, R., Smith, T. J., Bamezai, A., Wedderburn, Q., Broussard, A., Soesanto, N., Swetlitz, C., Waller, R., & Wagner, N. J. (2024). Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search. Developmental science, 27(3), e13461. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13461
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Plate, R. C., Jones, C., Steinberg, J., Daley, G., Corbett, N., & Waller, R. (2024). Children’s knowledge and feelings align in response to emotional music. Developmental psychology, 60(2), 265–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001572
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Sun, S., Plate, R. C., Jones, C., Rodriguez, Y., Katz, C., Murin, M., Pearson, J., Parish-Morris, J., & Waller, R. (2024). Childhood conduct problems and parent-child talk during social and nonsocial play contexts: a naturalistic home-based experiment. Scientific reports, 14(1), 1018. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-51656-w
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Plate, R. C., Ham, H., & Jenkins, A. C. (2023). When uncertainty in social contexts increases exploration and decreases obtained rewards. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 152(9), 2463–2478. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001410
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Plate, R. C., Woodard, K., & Pollak, S. D. (2023). Category Flexibility in Emotion Learning. Affective science, 4(4), 722–730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00192-3
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Leitzke, B. T., Plate, R. C., & Pollak, S. D. (2022). Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 22(3), 479–492. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000763