Our mission is to study children, teens, and emerging adults’ interaction with the newer forms of interactive digital media and to see how these interactions both affect and reflect their offline lives and long-term development. We endeavor to keep up with the latest technologies used by young people.
Ph.D. / CDMC Director
Patricia Greenfield received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA. \She directs the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, and is the founding director of the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development. Her central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between culture and human development. A major aspect of modern culture is the world of digital media and at Children’s Digital Media Center she leads a team that has studied the developmental implications of new media from chat to video games to social networking sites to YouTube.
Her 1984 book, Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games and Computers was published in ten languages. Her 1996 book, Interacting With Video (Advances in Applied Developmental Psychology), co-edited with Rodney Cocking, was the first to explore the cognitive effects of video games. She is a past recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Behavioral Science Research and the 2010 recipient of the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society. She has received teaching awards from UCLA and the American Psychological Association.
Contact: Faculty Page
Email: greenfield@psych.ucla.edu
Ph.D. / CDMC Associate Director
Dr. Yalda Uhls has been a researcher at CDMC since 2006. After a career as a film executive, she received a Ph.D. in Psychology in 2013 and published ground-breaking studies on the historical rise of fame as a teen value and the effects of digital media on emotion recognition. After receiving her PhD, she first focused on outreaching research on media effects to parents – with the publication of her book, Media Moms and Digital Dads: A Fact not Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age.
Subsequently she founded the Center for Scholars and Storytellers in order to transmit research findings on child and teen development to media creators. In 2022, she became the second Associate Director of Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles, fostering an even closer connection between CDMC and Center for Scholars and Storytellers.
Contact: UCLA Faculty Page
Blog: Psychology Today
Email: yaldatuhls@gmail.com