Tal Yatziv

Tal Yatziv, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and a core member of the Child Study Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, in 2019.

Her research focuses on the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in early parenting, examining how parental executive functions and automatic processing shape infant socioemotional development. Key areas include parental mentalization, neural correlates of parenting, and contextual influences on parent-infant interactions.

• 2024: Neural markers of maternal anxiety
• 2022: Parental mentalizing during the pandemic
• 2020: Executive functions in maternal reflective functioning

Dr. Yatziv employs multimodal methods including reaction-time measures, computational modeling, and video-based observational analysis. Her work spans diverse contexts like conflict zones and posttraumatic stress, with a emphasis on ecological validity and developmental outcomes.

She received the SRCD Small Grant for Early Career Scholars (2020). Her lab, The Before and After Baby Lab, integrates systems immunology and behavioral science to advance understanding of adaptive parenting mechanisms.