Ashley Nielsen
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience·Early-career
Babies learn to manage their emotions largely through their caregivers. A parent's warmth, support and responsiveness in the first year help children develop emotion regulation (ER), the ability to monitor and control emotional reactions.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
emotion regulation
parenting
parent-child interaction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Code parent-child interaction videos at age 1 to measure unpredictability in parents' sensory signals (visual, auditory, touch) and in their emotional signals (inconsistent nurturing or support).
- Test whether unpredictable parent emotional signals at age 1 predict how children's emotion regulation develops from ages 1 to 6, using longitudinal behavioral data from a birth cohort.
- Examine whether infant exposure to parent unpredictability relates to how brain systems for emotion regulation are connected and how they respond at age 6, using resting-state fMRI and movie-watching fMRI.
- Determine whether brain function supporting emotion regulation helps explain the link between early parent unpredictability and later child psychopathology.
More about the research
Trouble with ER is an early warning sign shared by many childhood mental health disorders. Yet it is unknown how parenting shapes the brain systems that support ER. Animal studies point to unpredictability, meaning how inconsistent or random the patterns in a parent's behavior are, as one way caregiving directly changes the development of emotional brain circuits.
Why it matters
Unpredictability in parent behavior may be a changeable part of caregiving. If inconsistent nurturing in infancy alters brain systems for emotion regulation, early parent-child interventions could target this unpredictability. Such programs could support healthy emotional development and lower children's risk of later mental health problems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rachel Lean
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether maternal mind-mindedness, a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states, predicts later parenting sensitivity, using prospective observations of mother-infant interactions from birth to age 3.
Itamar Kahn
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Chart how brain network organization, especially system segregation, changes across the mouse lifespan by repeatedly scanning the same awake mice with resting-state fMRI from 3 to 21 months of age.
Muriah D Wheelock
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience
Compare the spatial and temporal patterns of brain development from birth to age three with patterns of aging and Alzheimer degeneration, using harmonized MRI datasets (eLABE, Baby Connectome Project, ADNI, SORTOUT-AB, HABS-HD) to test the 'first in last out' hypothesis.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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