Investigator Development (IDeA) Award 2023: Diane Lickenbrock

Institution: Western Kentucky University

Department: Psychological Sciences

Rank: Associate Professor

Project Title: The development of emotion regulation within the parent-infant relationship: intrinsic and extrinsic predictors

About the project: Our project examines how mothers, fathers, and infants contribute to children’s ability to regulate their emotions over time. Early infancy is an important time-period to examine the development of emotion regulation, because infants are learning to regulate their emotions during interactions with their parents. 

Project updates: Since last year, we have submitted 2 additional manuscripts with data from this project so far. One examines the extent to which parent mental health and marital satisfaction are associated with infant regulation with mothers and fathers. The other examines the goodness of fit between parent personality and infant temperament as predictors of parenting behaviors with mothers and fathers. Currently, there are 3 graduate students and 3 undergraduate students helping to objectively rating infant activity level, affect, and cardiac impedance. There are more publications in the works!

How KY INBRE will help accomplish these goals: The funding from this recent KY INBRE has supported the purchase of software needed for the project. It has also helped fund graduate students, research assistants in summer and winter, as well as travel to conferences to present our findings! The data from this project has also supported NIH R15 grant applications for funding to continue examining contributors of infant emotion regulation development.

Outside of the classroom/lab: I enjoy going on adventures with my family.