Community lunch -- Fantasy Taina Lozada (Virginia Commonwealth University). Zoom.

Youth's emotion-related abilities are integral to their socioemotional health and academic success. Cultural context serves as a backdrop to children’s socioemotional development through the transmission of societal values of emotion (e.g., Halberstadt & Lozada, 2011). Yet, cultural expectations about youth's emotion varies across contexts (e.g., school vs home or intragroup vs intergroup interactions). This variation may be particularly salient for African American youth who engage with multiple cultural contexts with different expectations for their socioemotional behaviors. Such cultural navigation may foster advanced emotion skill integration and train youth to develop flexible emotional repertoires (e.g., “emotional codeswitching”). My work addresses conceptions of African American youth's emotional codeswitching through investigations of families' emotion-related beliefs and behaviors and youth's emotion-related abilities. I will summarize key findings from several of my quantitative and qualitative investigations, discuss the implications of considering intersecting contexts of emotion, and describe future directions for work on African American youths’ socioemotional development.