Rate My Professor Elena Hoicka

Professor Elena Hoicka is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Bristol, where she holds a BSc and PhD. Her research interests encompass humour, pretending, creativity, social learning, social cognition, touchscreens and screen time, parenting practices such as scaffolding and parenting styles, survey development, pragmatics, deception, trust, generics and essentialism, cross-cultural research, acoustics, and early years development from birth to age five or seven. She utilises experiments, quantitative observational methods, and parent-report surveys to examine how playful abilities like humour, pretending, and creativity emerge and develop, including cross-cultural studies involving the UK, USA, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and other English-speaking countries. Professor Hoicka has developed the Early Social Cognition Inventory (ESCI), a 20-item parent-report survey for tracking social cognition from birth to 47 months, and has explored links between these topics and social learning.

Her work also addresses the effects of touchscreens on joking, pretending, and creativity in the early years through surveys, experiments, and interviews, as well as relationships between screen use and autism traits. Additional projects examine parenting influences on children's joking and pretending, and she supervises PhD research on related areas including humour in English as an Additional Language teaching. Professor Hoicka is affiliated with the Centre for Psychological Approaches for Studying Education and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Curriculum. She has led funded projects such as one on the effects of touchscreens on social play in 1-3 year olds and another on second language learners' comprehension and production of online sarcasm. Recent contributions include publications and chapters on play and humour, validation of the Turkish Early Social Cognition Inventory, and lexical features of sarcasm.