Dr. Ella Daniel
Ella Daniel is an Assistant Professor at the Department of School Counseling and Special Education, Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the personal and social determinants of moral development in children and youth, specifically their development of values.
Dr. Daniel's expertise includes children and adolescents’ value development from middle childhood to early adulthood. She examines changes in the importance, structure, and understanding of values across this long developmental period. She also looks at precursors of value development and the role of cognition and morality in predicting value importance. She is especially interested in the role of the social environment in promoting positive values; here, she considers the contributions of the family, the culture, and the school. Finally, Dr. Daniel investigates the development of moral behavior, moral understanding and moral emotions, specifically in young children.
In her work, Dr. Daniel combines a range of research designs and methods, including interviews, observations and questionnaires. She specializes in complex statistical analyses to uncover developmental trajectories and differentiate between the role of the individual and the environment in development.
Ella Daniel received her doctorate in Developmental and Social Psychology from the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2012. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Ariel Knafo, investigates the development of values’ contextualization among majority and immigrant youth. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, working at the Social Development laboratory of Dr. Joan Grusec, the Laboratory for Social Emotional Development and Intervention of Dr. Tina Malti, and the Developmental Psychopathology Laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Jenkins.
Dr. Daniel has received numerous awards in recognition of her research. In 2012, she was named an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. In addition, her doctoral dissertation was a runner-up for the Harry and Pola Triandis Doctoral Thesis Award, given by the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received awards from the Martin & Vivian Levin Center for the Normal and Psychopathological Development of the Child and Adolescent (2012) and Facet Theory Fund (2007) and an Early Career Achievement Award by the American Psychological Association (2016). Notably, she acted as guest editor for a special section of the journal Social Development, "Value Development from Middle Childhood to Early Adulthood: New Insights from Longitudinal and Genetically Informed Research" (2016). She was also a member of the organizing committee for the 3rd Israel-US Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium in Irvine, California (2017). She was invited to the University of Western Australia in 2017 as a Business School Early Career Researcher Visitor.