My research focuses on the cognitive and affective mechanisms supporting adaptive caregiving, their development across the transition to parenthood (from pregnancy across the first year of the child’s life), and the impact of risk factors such as parental stress and emotional distress on these processes and their trajectories. I am particularly interested in the interplay between cognitive control and automatic processing in shaping sensitive responsive caregiving, attuned to the child's internal states and needs.

Parenting is a significant and challenging role in adults’ lives, and the transition to parenthood is a developmental process that includes many changes in different levels – behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively, and neurologically. Research in my lab seeks to understand the neurocognitive and neuro-affective processes that enable parents to understand their child’s mind (“mentalize”) and support the child’s regulation and socio-emotional development, focusing on understanding how these processes change and develop across the transition to parenthood and the impact of parental stress and emotional distress on their trajectories. Work in my lab employs a range of methodological approaches tapping into different levels of analysis, such as: neural responsivity to infant affective signals (measured using EEG), computerized cognitive tasks and computational modeling of task performance (self-regulation and cognitive control, biases in perceiving and interpreting infant affective signals), as well as interviews and observations of parent-infant interactions and infant development.

A link to the updated publication list can be found on my Google Scholar profile (please find the link above, under "additional links").

Selected publications:

Yatziv, T., Simchon, A., Manco, N., Gilead, M., & Rutherford, H.J.V. (2022). Parental mentalizing during a pandemic: Use of mental state language on parenting social media before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical Psychological Science, 10(6), 1129–1150. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026211062612
Materials on OSF: https://osf.io/psbm7/

Yatziv, T.*, Vancor, E.*, Bunderson, M., & Rutherford, H.J.V. (2021). Maternal perinatal anxiety and neural responding to infant affective signals: Insights, challenges, and a road map for neuroimaging research. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 387-399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.09.043

Yatziv, T., Kessler, Y. , & Atzaba-Poria, N. (2020). When do mothers’ executive functions contribute to their representations of their child’s mind? A contextual view on parental reflective functioning and mind-mindedness. Developmental Psychology, 56, 1191–1206. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000931

Yatziv, T., Kessler, Y., & Atzaba-Poria, N. (2018). What’s going on in my baby’s mind? Mothers’ executive functions contribute to individual differences in maternal mentalization during mother-infant interactions. PLoS One, 13: e0207869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207869

Yatziv, T., Gueron-Sela, N., Meiri, G., Marks, K., & Atzaba-Poria, N. (2018). Maternal mentalization and behavior under stressful contexts: The moderating roles of prematurity and household chaos. Infancy, 23, 591-615. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12233

BA - Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2010-2013
MA - Experimental Psychology: Cognition and Brain, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2013-2016
PhD – Psychology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2016-2019
Postdoctoral training – Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, 2020-2023