Vrantsidis, Daphne

My primary research interests are in understanding the development of executive function and emotion regulation in 3- to 7-year-olds and how difficulties in these areas are related to the development of externalizing behaviour problems like ADHD and conduct disorder/oppositional defiant disorder. I do research in four main areas.

1. Environmental influences on children’s executive function and emotion regulation

Much of my work focuses on understanding how prenatal and early postnatal environmental factors related to socioeconomic status impact children’s executive function and emotion regulation. For example, my work has examined parental mental health, parental behaviour, and preterm birth as factors related to socioeconomic status that may impact children’s executive function and emotion regulation. The goal of this line of work is to better understand how social determinants of health impacted by poverty impact children and increase their risk for mental health problems.

2. Interplay between environmental factors and individual biological differences on children’s executive function and emotion regulation

Externalizing behaviour problems are the result of complex interplay between the environment (e.g., parental behaviour) and individual biological differences like genes. My goal in this line of work is to understand how individual biological differences, like child sex (which is related to differences in the dopamine system) and genetics, modify the impact of environmental factors on children’s executive function and emotion regulation, themselves early risk factors for externalizing behaviour problems.

3. Early neurodevelopmental predictors of executive function

Executive function abilities begin to development between 6 months and 4 years of age. This means that executive function is not present from birth. Therefore, prenatal and early postnatal factors cannot be directly impacting executive function, rather they must be impacting the early neurodevelopmental abilities that support later executive function development, like attention and motor skills. My goal in this line of work is to better understand the early development of executive function (before age 3 years) and the role these foundational neurodevelopmental abilities play in executive function development to be able to identify neurodevelopmental pathways from prenatal and early postnatal environmental factors to children’s executive function.

4. Understanding parental behaviour

Parental behaviours are thought to change in response to children’s self-regulatory abilities. For example, parents are thought to use more positive discipline strategies if their children have better self-regulation and more negative discipline strategies if their children have poorer self-regulation. My goal in this line of work is to understand this change in parental behaviour over childhood, and identify predictors of change. My work to date has looked at children’s executive function and parental mental health as predictors of parental behaviour. I am particularly interested in the role parent’s executive function and emotion regulation play in their behaviour.