 By 1991, she created her own laboratory at the University of Iowa.The research she studies includes social-emotional development and developmental psychopathology, focusing on the interplay of children's biologically-based characteristics and parent-child relationships in the origins of adaptive and maladaptive developmental pathways.Kochanska received the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology in 2017 from Developmental Psychology, Division 7 of the American Psychological Association.