Kirby Deater-Deckard

Kirby Deater-Deckard, Ph.D., is a consulting investigator on the Parenting Across Cultures study. Deater-Deckard is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Research on Families, at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also serves as Visiting Professor of Social Sciences at University of Turku (Finland), and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Deater-Deckard conducts research and teaches courses on biological and environmental influences on individual differences in social-emotional and cognitive development in childhood and adolescence. The emphasis in this work is on inter-generational transmission, biology-environment interaction mechanisms, and home and school environments. His publications span developmental and family sciences and developmental psychopathology areas, with research currently and previously funded by NSF and NIH. Applications focus on stress reactivity and self-regulation in parents and youth: identifying antecedents and consequences, adaptive and maladaptive features, and implications for family-based prevention and intervention programs. In Deater-Deckard’s current collaborative work on parenting and youth development, he is examining maternal and youth cognitive and physiological self-regulation and their roles in family distress and resilience in the face of challenging contextual stressors.