Recently, a few of our Development, Context and Communication Lab members and collaborators received an exciting email informing us that our recent article has been published!

Shajeena Balasingam, the first author and lead on this manuscript entitled “Age and Gender Effects on the Emotionality of Adolescents’ COVID-19 Memory Narratives”, began this project as her undergraduate honours thesis, and after months of working tirelessly on it, through multiple rounds of reviews and edits, her work is now published in Wiley’s Applied Cognitive Psychology Special Issue. The focus of the Special Issue was to honour Dr. Robyn Fivush’s contributions and research examining autobiographical memory and narratives integrated in life stories.

This publication focuses on age and gender differences in how frequently emotional utterances are shared in narratives and the emotional valence of these utterances in adolescents’ COVID-19 memory narratives. The findings from this study provide insight into how the emotional nature of memory narratives may differ across adolescence and gender for global events.

Shajeena Balasingam undertook and led this project with the assistance, support, and mentorship of PhD student Sydney Spyksma, MSc, Collaborator Dr. Taylor Heffer, and Supervisor Dr. Lindsay Malloy.

We are also grateful and proud to say that with the support of Ontario Tech University, this publication was published as an open-source article and is publicly accessible.
If you are interested in reading Shajeena’s work, it is available here:

Balasingam, S., Spyksma, S. D., Heffer, T., & Malloy, L. C. (2026). Age and gender effects on the emotionality of adolescents’ COVID-19 memory narratives. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 40(4). https://lnkd.in/g8u-QTPJ.

Shajeena Balasingam, we are so proud of all of your hard work and excited to see what you have in store next!