Mother-Child Dynamics (MCD) Study

How do mother-child dynamics during social interactions play a role in children's social learning and anxiety? 

Parental anxiety is a well-established predictor of children’s anxiety. One pathway that may explain this transmission is what children learn through their social experiences with their parents. The MCD project examines how mother–child verbal communication and attention dynamics shape children’s social learning and the development of anxiety.

Design

Children (ages 9–12) and their mothers visited the lab and participated in social tasks (e.g., a Trier task, social learning tasks) while being video recorded. They also wore mobile eye-tracking glasses to capture real-time attention patterns during these tasks and completed questionnaires at baseline and again one year later.

Status

Data collection is complete. Mobile eye-tracking and verbal communication data are being processed using machine learning approaches. SEED lab members can have opportunities to present findings or publish papers using these data.

Funding

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, F32MH127869)

Example presentations & a relevant manuscript

Kapoor, S. & Zeytinoglu, S. (2025, November). Bidirectional affective synchrony in parent-child conversations using machine learning. Poster to be presented at the Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, San Diego, CA. 

Fein, S. & Zeytinoglu, S. (2025, October). Maternal accommodation mediates the relation between maternal anxiety and child anxiety. Global Psychological Science Summit of the Association for Psychological Science, Virtual. 

Zeytinoglu, S., White, L. K, Morales, S., Degnan, K., Henderson, H., Pérez-Edgar, K., Pine, D., Fox, N. A. (2025). The roles of parental verbal communication and child characteristics in the transmission and maintenance of social fears. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry. PDF