Welcome
Our Mission
The HEART Lab exists to help adolescents and young adults build healthy, supportive relationships—with romantic partners, family members, peers, and the people who guide them.
We focus on how relationships shape mental health, well-being, and development, especially in today’s digital world.
Who We Are
We are a team of psychologists, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants at Arizona State University who study relationships during one of the most formative periods of life.
Why it matters
Relationship experiences during adolescence don’t stay in adolescence. They influence emotional health, academic engagement, and how people love and connect well into adulthood.
What is a Research Lab?
What do you imagine when you picture a research lab?
What A Research Lab Actually Does …
A research lab is a dedicated space, online or in-person or both, where scientists, students, and research staff conduct systematic investigations into a general topic of their choice. For psychology, these topics range from addiction and social cognition to neuroscience and relationships! Once the topic has been chosen, individual research studies are conducted with an even more specific focus. For example, if a lab’s general topic is adolescent relationships, an individual research study may be conducted on how adolescents in a little town interact with each other on social media. This research often requires funding through grants and includes various research processes such as participant recruitment, participant observation, and data management. Finally, this process concludes in a written paper that can be disseminated amongst people both inside and outside of the relevant field of study!
Beakers, flasks, and colorful fluids flowing through plastic tubes perhaps! If so, you wouldn’t always be wrong! But, research labs aren’t just focused on things like beakers and flasks. In fact, our research lab doesn’t use any of those pieces of equipment!
Due to the intensive nature of conducting these investigations, research labs often require daily maintenance and communication. Additionally, research labs may host activities in order to generally foster a space that encourages the pursuit of knowledge, the success of its members, and its integration with the communities it works with. These include, but are not limited to, hosting workshops on getting into graduate school, hosting journal clubs where research staff present the findings of a research article relevant to the lab, and making social media content to extend the lab’s reach into the lives of fellow academics and potential research participants.
TDLR: You can think of a research lab as an extremely large-scale group project with the best possible group you could ask for!
How We’re Structured
Principal Investigator
The Principal Investigator (P.I.) is the @HEART Lab’s leader. They oversee overall lab management and leadership, handle external communication and media outreach, and attract donors and funding. They are the figure-head of the lab, and as such, hold primary responsibility for the design, implementation, and management for all of its research.
Lab Leadership Team
The Lab Leadership team at the @HEART Lab consists of one Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, 4 Doctoral Graduate Students, 1 Lab Manager, and 1 Research Assistant Coordinator. Lab Leadership manages the everyday functions of the lab and directly execute many of the research projects’ major components. They serve as the primary relay point between the Principal Investigator and the Research Assistants, and are highly valued for both their academic and managerial skills.
Research Assistants
Research Assistants in the @HEART Lab comprises a team of undergraduate students and post-undergrad students who contribute to tasks such as participant recruitment, screening and scheduling, collection of survey data, data cleaning, and literature reviews. They report to Lab Leadership and are the reason why the lab can function at the scale that it does.