Stress response and regulation in children
Dr. Mayes's research focuses on stress-response and regulatory mechanisms in young children at both biological and psychosocial risk, especially the impact of prenatal substance use on children's long-term outcomes. She focuses on understanding the mechanisms of effect of prenatal stress and toxin exposure on prefrontal cortical development and function. Her work also addresses the basic neural circuitry of early parent-infant attachment using both neuroimaging and electroencephalographic techniques and she studies the transition to parenthood in adults who have themselves experienced early adversity and at risk for the intergenerational transmission for the early social-biological impacts of adversity to their offspring. Dr. Mayes is also the Director of the Yale Developmental Electrophysiology Laboratory (DEL), which is equipped to study brain electrical responses and peripheral psychophysiological indices of cognition, emotion and arousal in populations from infancy through later adulthood. She has considerable experience in intergenerational life span studies and in recruiting, maintaining, and studying longitudinal cohorts with one cohort now its third decade of study participation. In relation to the goals of the Wu Tsai Institute, Dr. Mayes work is relevant to understanding the relations between neurocognition and behavior, that is, how basic brain imaging measures of cognitive processes relate to individual differences in observed behavior and function. Her work is also relevant to understanding neurodevelopment and plasticity, that is, how early stressors and exposures prenatally and perinatally shape developmental trajectories and adaptive/maladaptive responses across development.