Dr. Tal Yatziv
Department of Psychology - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
My life before BGU:
I was born in Beer-Sheva and grew up in Omer for most of my childhood. I completed all my degrees in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University. My doctoral dissertation focused on the cognitive processes supporting parents’ capacity to understand their children’s mind (the thoughts and feelings underlying their behavior) in infancy and preschool. I completed my postdoctoral training at the Yale Child Study Center, where I studied the neural processes involved in understanding infant affective signals (such as emotional facial expressions and cries). I continue to collaborate with the Yale Child Study Center as an Adjunct Assistant Professor.
Why BGU?
I grew up academically and professionally here, at the Department of Psychology. The Department has been my home throughout my academic journey, a safe and nurturing place to develop my skills, curiosity, and research. In my personal life, I grew up in the Negev, and my parents met as students here. For me, joining Ben-Gurion University as a faculty member means returning home, and I am excited to contribute to training the next generation of researchers and psychologists in our community.
My research:
My 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 through 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 being starting life and lacking the capacity to regulate themselves or explain what their needs are. I study questions such as: how parents do come to understand their infant’s wants and needs? how these processes develop across the transition to parenthood? how 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 these abilities contribute to parental caregiving behavior, under what conditions, and what their effect on infant development is?
My lab will combine a range of different methods tapping into different levels of explanation, including interviews and observations of parent-infant interactions and infant development, computerized tasks measuring cognitive and affective processes, and measuring parents’ and expectant parents’ neural activity in response to infant affective signals (e.g., emotional faces) using EEG.
An insight from my research:
Parenting changes one’s brain. Even though we tend to think about the adult brain as fully developed, recent research characterizes the transition to parenthood as a developmental process involving neural, cognitive, and emotional plasticity and change, much like adolescence. This field is still in its infancy, and I believe that as we gain more knowledge about parenthood as an (optional) developmental process in an adult’s life and the impact of risk and resilience factors on developmental trajectories, we will be able to better support parents, expectant parents, and children, as early as possible.
Something that doesn't appear on my CV:
In my free time I enjoy doing yoga and baking. During working hours, you will probably find me with a cup of coffee.
If I wasn’t a researcher, I would...
Probably be in education
In Brief:
- Yoga or CrossFit? Yoga – and Ashtanga yoga especially
- Steak or tofu? Tofu
- Trekking or the spa? Trekking, but I wouldn’t object to the spa at the end
- Car or train? Train
- Night or morning? Morning (but only if there’s good coffee)
- Winter or summer? Totally summer
- City or country? Country close to the city
- Savory or sweet? A combination. There’s nothing like salted caramel
- Cat or dog? Cat, as can be testified to by the quantity of cat-shaped office gadgets I’ve received as gifts over the years.
- Facebook or Twitter? If you had asked me this question a few months ago, then the answer would definitely be Twitter. Today, it’s neither
