Caregiver-child Biobehavioral Synchrony in Positive Contexts

Barnard Center Free Lecture Series

A key developmental task of the first years of a child’s life is establishing child self-regulatory abilities. Biobehavioral synchrony or the extent to which the caregiver and child coordinate and match their vocalizations, affect, body movements, and touch as well as their physiological and neural responses during face-to-face interactions is theorized to support the development of young children’s emotional self-regulation abilities. This talk will describe the ways in which biobehavioral synchrony promotes infant and young child socio-emotional development and discuss factors such as parental psychopathology that may disrupt this important developmental mechanism.

DR. JUDITH MORGAN, PhD
Dr. Morgan’s research has focused on mechanisms of risk for affective disorders during early development. Dr. Morgan received her B.S.in Psychology from the University of Alabama in 2004, summa cum laude, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Delaware in 2010. Dr. Morgan has received continuous funding from the National Institute of Mental Health since 2013. In July 2013, she was awarded a NIMH-funded Career Development Award (K01), “Neural and Social Processes of Positive Affect in Children at Risk for Depression”, that examined neural reward function in 6- to 8- year-old children at familial risk for depression. In 2017, she was awarded a Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS) R01 to evaluate how affective, behavioral, and neural synchrony in mother-child dyads may be compromised by maternal depression. This prestigious R01 is awarded to “outstanding, exceptionally productive scientists who are in the early, formative stages of their careers and who plan to make a long-term career commitment to research”. Most recently, she received two additional R01 awards, one in February 2023 to evaluate biobehavioral synchrony in mother-infant dyads affected by postpartum depression, and another in July 2024 to experimentally test how parental socialization of child positive affect may shape child neural reward activity.  Dr. Morgan has been recognized for her scholarly efforts through various awards throughout her career, including a Klingenstein Third Generation Fellowship in 2014, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award in 2017, and a Constellation of Emerging and Rising Stars Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022.