Madison Bishop

Madison (Maddy) Bishop is a fourth-year Psychology major with a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology at UCLA. Through the support of UCLA’s Keck Humanistic Inquiry Research Award, Maddy is investigating how the frequency of emotion words spoken by parents influences children’s ability to categorize emotions. Her project focuses on whether commonly spoken words such as “happy,” “sad,” and “love” enhance children’s accuracy in categorizing these emotions. Her goal is to deepen her understanding of how early parental language exposure shapes children’s emotional understanding. Maddy hopes her research will contribute to the development of new parenting practices and early childhood education programs that better support children’s emotional and cognitive development. In addition to her project, Maddy is an undergraduate teaching assistant for a developmental psychology course and serves as as lead research assistant in the Language and Cognitive Development Lab. She is currently applying to master’s programs in Marriage and Family Therapy, with the long-term goal of opening her own clinic to support children and families. This research project will serve as the the stepping stones for her future work, paving the way for her to translate research into practice.