Lidya Yurdum studies whether singing helps babies feel good (she's a social psychologist)

Raised in a bilingual household in Istanbul, Lidya had lots of questions. She was keenly interested in people, and, on top of that, wondered things like, does her personality change when she speaks a different language? This led to her pursuing psychology in college to study human behavior in many different contexts.Now in graduate school at the University of Amsterdam, Lidya Yurdum's fascination with language has led to an interest in music (language "is surprisingly close to music in many ways," she says), and she is currently focusing on babies: Lidya's work on whether a parent singing to their baby changes mood was just published in Child Development. Researchers gathered data on families by pinging parents' cell phones to ask them if they had sung to their child in the past few hours, and what kind of mood their baby was in.Lidya also uses citizen science approaches - game-ified online experiments - to investigate and reach a wide variety of people all over the world.