Penn State Penn State: College of the Liberal Arts
Gene Environment Interplay
Across the Lifespan
  1. People
  2.  | Berenice Anaya

Berenice Anaya

Graduate Student Affiliate

Berenice is a sixth-year student working primarily with Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar to examine parent-child interactions, child temperament, and neurodevelopment. Berenice is a 2020 D-SPAN Scholar, an NINDS grant that funds her current predoctoral work and will also fund the continuation of her neuroscience research into the postdoctoral phase. For her dissertation, she is investigating infant developmental trajectories of EEG delta-beta coupling and functional-network connectivity – neural measures that have been associated with regulation in adults. The main goals of this project are to 1) map for the first time how these neural correlates emerge and change during infancy, and 2) examine how early maternal anxiety, infant temperament, and dyadic parent-child affective and behavioral profiles may influence these neural trajectories. Berenice received a B.A. (2014) and a M.S. in Psychology (2016) from Western Kentucky University. At the Gene Environment Interplay Across the Lifespan Lab, Berenice is working with Dr. Neiderhiser to learn the foundations of gene-environment designs, particularly as it applies to developmental trajectories of behavioral inhibition and parent to child transmission of psychopathology risk.