
Ronald Dahl on Emotion and Sleep in Adolescence
Ronald Dahl, a developmental scientist at U.C. Berkeley, sits down with Yale's Experts in Emotion series to discuss how sleep and emotional development interact during adolescence. He traces what drew him to study emotion in the first place, then walks through the central findings of his research program, including how changing sleep patterns during puberty affect mood regulation, risk-taking, and stress reactivity in teenagers. Dahl spends the bulk of the interview on these core discoveries before turning to where he thinks the field is headed next, pointing to emerging questions about brain development and emotional maturation that remain unresolved. The conversation closes with his advice for students considering a career studying emotion. Produced by Yale's Broadcasting and Media Center under series director June Gruber, the format is a structured one-on-one interview divided into clear chapters, running about 23 minutes, and it functions less as a formal lecture than as a researcher's guided walk through his own body of work.