MIND Lab

Minds Interacting n' Developing

Tal Yatziv, PhD
Tal, the MIND Lab’s PI, is a Lecturer (assistant professor equivalent) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s (BGU) Department of Psychology, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. Tal completed her PhD in Psychology at BGU (supervisors: Profs. Naama Atzaba-Poria and Yoav Kessler), and her dissertation focused on the cognitive processes supporting parents’ capacity to understand their child’s mind (thoughts and feelings underlying their behavior) in infancy and preschool. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the Yale Child Study Center (mentor: Dr. Helena Rutherford), where she studied the neural processes involved in understanding infant affective signals (such as emotional facial expressions and cries), before returning to BGU as a faculty member.

Tal’s research focuses on the cognitive and emotional processes that contribute to positive adaptive caregiving behavior, how they develop across the transition to parenthood (from pregnancy across the first year of the infant’s life), and the impact of risk factors such as emotional distress and parental stress on these processes. Parenting is a meaningful and challenging role in adulthood, and the transition to parenthood is a developmental stage that includes many changes at different levels – behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively, and neurologically. Specifically, new parents are required to fulfill the needs of a new human, starting their lives lacking the capacity to regulate themselves or explain what their needs are. Tal’s research explores questions such as: how do parents come to understand their infant’s wants and needs? how do these processes develop across the transition to parenthood? how do risk (e.g., parental emotional distress) and resilience factors impact the emotional, cognitive, and neural processes being shaped across the transition to parenthood? and how do these abilities contribute to parental caregiving behavior, under what conditions, and what is their effect on infant development?

talyat@bgu.ac.il

Team

Our Students

Meytar Lavon

Meytar is an MA student in Developmental Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology and her BSc in Cognitive Science from Ben Gurion University. Her thesis focuses on parental mentalization - the capacity of parents to think about their own and their child’s behavior as mental states, and to consider their child as an agent with a mind separate from their own. Her thesis aims to examine the relation between parental mentalization capacity and biases in processing infant cues.

Goni Haber

Goni is an MA student in Developmental Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology and Management from Ben Gurion University. Currently, she is leading the BEAP-Lab-TAB research team.

Daniel Dahan

Daniel is an MA student in Developmental Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology and Management from Ben Gurion University. Currently, she is developing a Hebrew Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based text analysis measure for assessing mental-state language in parental discourse.

Shir Golan

Shir is an MA student in Clinical Psychology and the lab manager at the MIND lab. She received her BA in Psychology and her BSc in Cognitive Science from Ben Gurion University. Her research interests include parental mentalization, the impact of stress and trauma on parenting, and how early experiences shape emotional difficulties and psychopathology in adulthood.

Noa Shatsberg

Noa is an MA student in Cognitive Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology and her BSc in Cognitive Science from Ben Gurion University.

Haneen Saadi

Haneen is an M.A. student in child and Developmental Psychology. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Educational Consulting from bar-Ilan university. Her research interests focus on the transition to parenthood and the parent-child relationship during the early years, including examining the factors that influence this life stage and contribute to adaptive and effective parenting.

Tamuz Weinberger

Tamuz is an MA student in Developmental Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology and Education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.