Neuroscience of social-emotional development in infants and children

Webinar Title:

Neuroscience of social-emotional development in infants and children


Webinar Description: 

Caregivers play a crucial role in child social-emotional development.  Research suggests when caregivers match an infant’s eye contact length and intensity as well as match and regulate infant emotion expressions, infants have more stable relationships with their caregivers. Additionally, when caregivers match and label emotions for young children, young children display stronger emotion regulation abilities than children whose caregivers provided less emotion matching and labeling. Importantly, both stable relationships and emotion regulation are highly associated with more higher functioning and life satisfaction outcomes across the lifespan. Recent advances in neuroscience have begun to clarify the ways in which these emotion processes are represented in the young brain and the ways caregivers influence children’s behavior and their brain activity to achieve these beneficial outcomes. In this webinar, we will review infant and child neuroimaging methods, early childhood functional neuroimaging findings, and how these findings are related to current infant mental health practices.
 

Presenter:

Maegan Calvert, Ph.D.

Dr. Calvert received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Eastern Michigan University and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from University of Arkansas. Her graduate research explored the intergenerational sequelae of adversity and violence including child social-emotional problems, parenting difficulties, and maternal psychopathology. She completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship at University of Mississippi Medical Center in child psychology and her clinical postdoctoral training at Children’s Medical Center Dallas in child psychology. Her clinical expertise is working with children and families with histories of interpersonal trauma. She has clinical experience in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, Circle of Security, infant mental health interventions in the NICU, and other brief behavioral and parenting interventions. Dr. Calvert joined the Brain Imaging Research Center as a NIDA T32 postdoctoral fellow to study neurodevelopmental trajectories of early life adversity, addiction risk, and resilience. She is particularly interested in the ways in which adversity and caregiver-child dyadic interactions shape the developing brain’s functional networks and confer risk/resilience to future psychopathology. With this line of research, her goal is to increase the effectiveness of psychological treatments for infants and children and to inform efforts to prevent psychopathology across the lifespan.

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