Zehra Gulseven

Dr. Zehra Gulseven is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech, specializing in Developmental Science. She directs the Positive Social Development (PSD) Lab, focusing on prosocial behavior, moral development, and parenting influences across diverse cultural contexts. Her research examines how individual, familial, and contextual factors shape positive social outcomes in children and adolescents.

Dr. Gulseven holds a B.S. in Psychology from Abant Izzet Baysal University (Turkey, 2009), an M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Science from the University of Missouri (2015-2019), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Irvine (2019-2022).

Her research interests include understanding how cultural orientations, parenting practices, and social relationships influence prosocial behavior and moral reasoning. She employs longitudinal designs to study developmental trajectories of social competence, with recent work addressing the impacts of unsupervised youth time, afterschool environments, and cross-national cultural variations in prosociality during crises like the pandemic.

Key contributions include identifying self-control and cooperation as precursors to reduced moral disengagement in adolescence, and demonstrating prosocial behaviors' predictive value for academic success in Latino youth. Her work bridges developmental, cultural, and social psychology, with implications for education and family policy.

Dr. Gulseven’s lab focuses on translating research into practical strategies for fostering positive social development. Current projects explore cultural dimensions of prosociality, mechanisms linking parenting to moral behavior, and the role of empathy in socialization processes.