Our second Cognition Workshop of fall quarter will take place on Thursday (10/19/2017), from 3:30 – 5:00 pm in Harper 140. Refreshments and snacks will be served.
Our speaker will be Karen Smith, a graduate student in Psychology, presenting:
Understanding individual differences in responses to early life stress.
Abstract: Early life stress has been associated with a host of emotional and behavioral difficulties for children later in life. However, there is a wide range of variation in these outcomes. Understanding what contributes to these individual differences will aid in the development of more effective targeted interventions and tools for children exposed to early stress. The current work examines psychological and neurophysiological responses to early life stress and the factors that influence individual differences in these responses, specifically focusing on the role of stability within the home environment and autonomic cardiac functioning in responses to early life stress, with the goal of identifying protective factors for children in high risk environments to better understand which children/families might be most susceptible to specific types of intervention.
You can read an overview of Karen’s work here and find her published work on Google Scholar.