Senay Cebioglu

I am a cross-cultural developmental psychologist. I received my Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in Canada. Broadly, I study how culture shapes development. By examining infants’ and children’s experiences across various sociocultural contexts, I am trying understand the developmental processes that lead to cross-cultural variation in early socio-cognitive outcomes. I take a constructivist perspective to development and I use mixed methods of measurement including naturalistic and structured observations, experimental tasks, interviews, and questionnaires. I am particularly interested in development of children’s understanding of self and others. My Ph.D. work focused on mirror self-recognition in toddlers from Vancouver, Canada, and Tanna, Vanuatu – a small-scale society in South Pacific. Recently, I became interested in the relationship between culture and well-being. I am co-leading a project examining the dynamics of cultural change and well-being among indigenous Bantu and BaYaka communities in the Republic of Congo. This is an ethnographically-grounded, mix-method investigation that integrates cultural evolutionary theory with psychology and anthropology.