Current Projects
A variety of ongoing projects address the research mission described above; and more are in the early planning phases:
Madres Nuevas | The New Mothers. Postpartum Depression Project. In collaboration with with Linda Luecken and Nancy Gonzales, Keith Crnic co-directs a 5-year, NIMH funded investigation of Mexican American mothers and their infants that seeks to understand the health disparity in postpartum depression in this population, and explore the coregulatory mechanisms (emotional, behavioral, psychophysiological) in mother-infant interaction that operate over time to influence the course of maternal depression and child early behavioral competencies. Recent additional funding from NIMH has allowed the expansion of this project beyond the early infancy period to include follow-up to child age two years, with a multi-modal data collection spanning observational, report, and physiological methods. In progress are proposals to NIH to expand the focus of this project to include fathers, more systemic family level measurements, and behavior-genetic methods to explore the processes of intergenerational transmission of regulatory mechanisms.
Collaborative Family Study. For more than 10 years, our lab has explored the contribution of family processes to the emergence of psychopathology in a high risk sample of children who were early identified (before age 3) as having developmental delays, and a matched sample of typically developing children. The goal of this study was to understand the connections between risk, family process, emerging regulatory capacities in children, and development of behavior problems. Data were collected at nine periods across a six year span of children’s lives (age three to nine years), including extensive home-based and lab-based behavioral observations of parent-child interaction as well as detailed parent report data on child and parenting factors. Although data collection is complete, there remains much to be explored within this comprehensive six year investigation, and we are actively pursuing several lines of inquiry.
Family Life Project. The Family Life Project is a large, multi-site, longitudinal study that explores the impact of living in rural poverty on family functioning, parenting, and children’s development. Since the project began in 2002, over 1,200 families living in either North Carolina and Pennsylvania have participated, beginning when the child was 2 months old. Our specific focus is the ways in which poverty affects or disrupts family processes and the subsequent influence on child competencies. In collaboration with colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill (and Penn State), we have been studying the developmental sequelae of non-urban poverty contexts on family and child psychological well-being, as well as children’s developmental competencies.
Neuroscience of Parenting. In February of 2010 we hosted a working conference on the neuroscience of parenting, bringing together nearly 25 scholars from around the country and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. A series of papers descriptive of the conference proceedings is underway, but we are also planning collaborative research efforts to address a core underlying premise… that the parent-child relationship may be more salient than any other to child and parent well-being, and may operate on functional affective levels different from other close personal relationships. We hope to bring neuroscientific methods to bear on this question, design studies to address the psychological ramifications of this unique status, and acquire NIH support to explore the questions of public health significance.
