SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series - Self-Regulation in Children and Their Caregivers: Implications for Adaptation and Resilience in Early Childhood

Dr. Obradović will discuss the importance of executive functions—a set of higher order cognitive skills that help children regulate their own attention, behavior, and emotions—for adaptive functioning in early and middle childhood. Further, she will identify how the quality of early contextual experiences and caregiving behaviors are linked to the development of executive function skills. Finally, the presentation will conclude with a review of how caregivers’ own self-regulation skills are associated with responsive and engaged caregiving behaviors known to promote children’s self-regulation. The talk will highlight the need to foster good self-regulation skills using a two-generation intervention approach designed to promote resilience in at-risk families.

Dr. Obradović's research examines how contextual risk and adversity influence children’s adaptation across multiple domains of functioning over time. She is interested in identifying the biological, behavioral, and environmental processes that enable some highly disadvantaged children to demonstrate remarkable resilience, while placing others at risk for maladaptive outcomes. Her current focus is on how exposure to environmental risk and adversity interacts with children’s stress reactivity and self-regulatory abilities to influence their social, emotional, and cognitive development. She earned a BA in Psychology from Lewis & Clark College, an MA in Developmental Psychology from the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, and a PhD. in Developmental Psychology from the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. Thanks to our sponsors for the 2016–17 SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series:

• The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
• The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities
• The Stanford Graduate School of Education

Save the date for our next Brown Bag Seminar Series lecture on January 24, 2017, when Guillermo Solano-Flores will present, "Evaluating and Improving the Design of Textual and Visual Components in National and International Assessments."