Courtesy Pace University

Thalia R. Goldstein, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pace University in New York City and the director of the Social Cognition and Imagination Lab. She studies how children participate in and create fictional worlds, how actors construct characters onstage and the effects of these activities on empathy, theory of mind, emotion regulation, compassion and altruism. Her other work focuses on how children and adults understand social categorization at the fiction/reality border, and how children react to watching fictional worlds. Her work has been supported by The John Templeton Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Psychological Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. She has won awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, American Psychological Association, and the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media. She is currently an associate editor of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA Division 10). Dr. Goldstein earned her B.A. from Cornell University in Theatre and Psychology, her Ph.D. from Boston College in Developmental Psychology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship Yale University. She spent several years as a professional actress and dancer in New York City.