Title:  Neuroscientific Evaluation of Risk in Early Childhood Psychopathology: Integrating Proximal and Distal Factors

Dr. Susan Perlman is an Associate Professor at Washington University-St. Louis, Department of Psychiatry, with a PHD in Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.  Her NIH-funded research uses neuroscientific and biological measures to predict which preschool age children (ages 3-7) are at the highest risk for the development of psychopathology.  Dr. Perlman’s talk will focus on the interacting systems perspective that she takes to neurodevelopment, starting with factors internal to the child (temperament, emotion), moving to family factors (parent-child relationship), and broadening to external influences (adversity, life stress).  Dr. Perlman’s research program is multi-modal, integrating biological measures (MRI, fNIRS, Eye-tracking, cortisol, inflammatory markers) with custom-designed, child-friendly behavioral tasks for optimal testing of children in the preschool age range.  She will discuss her recent projects in the role of irritability in the development of psychopathology, parent-child neural synchronization as a buffer or transmitter of psychiatric symptoms, and free movie viewing as a probe for changes in the developing brain.

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