Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—This presentation will focus on importance of parental language input in the development of emotional regulation mechanisms in toddlers.

Dr. Cole will address the role of both parental language input and toddler language ability as contributors to the development of emotion regulation by the time a child is preschool age. Cole is widely published in the area of the development of emotion regulation in early childhood and its implications for the development of both child competence as well as child psychopathology. Her work includes attention to cross-cultural variations in emotion and its socialization, and in the underlying role of the young developing brain in response to the child’s emotional environment.

During her visit to campus, Dr. Cole will also be consulting with Dr. Elizabeth Harvey on her project entitled, “A Longitudinal Study of Emotion Regulation in Preschool Children with Symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” which she is preparing for submission to the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Cole is jointly trained in clinical and developmental psychology; earning a MA at the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University.

​This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.