Chia-li Yu

Chia-li Yu (she/her) is a fifth-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program at Penn State. She previously attended the University of Washington, where she received a B.S. in psychology in 2019. Following graduation, Chia-li worked as a research assistant for a start-up company that collaborated with hospitals and therapy clinics to track patient-reported outcomes, particularly mental health outcomes. She has long been interested in why children differ from one another early in life, and what drives those differences – genes, environment, or their interplay.

Chia-li was drawn to Penn State because of its renowned developmental psychology training and Dr. Jenae Neiderhiser’s work using behavioral genetics studies. In particular, she was drawn to natural experimental designs, such as twin and adoption studies, that can distinguish genetic and environmental effects on child development. Chia-li is especially interested in the development of antisocial behavior, including early callous and unemotional behaviors, such as lack of empathy or remorse, that may be risk factors for later callous and unemotional traits and psychopathy. Throughout her developmental training, she became interested in how children and parents influence each other bidirectionally. For example, her master’s thesis examined reciprocal relations between parenting and callous and unemotional behaviors from toddlerhood to adolescence. While most existing evidence has shown child-driven effects, such that the child’s behavior influences subsequent parenting practices, Chia-li demonstrated the opposite effect, such that maternal hostility predicted child antisocial behavior over time. She has also contributed to another project with Dr. Lijun Li and Dr. Neiderhiser showing that sleep problems, such as shorter sleep duration and taking longer to fall asleep, relate to higher psychopathology symptoms across child development.

Chia-li’s dissertation will extend her prior work by exploring the impact of genetics and prenatal substance exposure on callous and unemotional behaviors, as well as the mechanisms underlying these effects. In the future, Chia-li would like to continue researching risk mechanisms in early childhood that underlie the emergence of psychopathology.