Abstract: In this talk, I will present the results of two papers that that examine the effects of the social-context (i.e., parents, neighborhoods) on children’s socioemotional and corticolimbic development. The first paper uses data from the Fragile Families study, a longitudinal birth-cohort of 4,898 families oversampled for non-marital births, to test a longitudinal Family Stress Model with child internalizing and externalizing behaviors as the outcomes. The second paper uses data from the Pitt Mother and Child Project, a prospective longitudinal study of 310 low-income boys, to investigate the effects of the neighborhood context across childhood on corticolimbic function in young adulthood.

Bio: Arianna Gard is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology. Her work examines biopsychosocial models of psychopathology, with a focus on the interplay between parenting, corticolimbic function, and genome-wide genetic liability.