Sara Such

Sara Such is a fourth-year Child Clinical Psychology student from St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated from Bard College in 2018, where she studied psychology and human rights. As an undergraduate, Sara worked with Dr. Sarah Dunphy-Lelii in the Child Development Lab investigating theory of mind and imitation development in preschool children. After graduation, she joined the PTSD Research and Treatment Program at Columbia University Medical Center, where she worked as a research coordinator with Dr. Yuval Neria. In this role, she oversaw several studies, including one which examined the specific neural patterns of fear learning and the visual attention patterns of individuals exposed to trauma and those with PTSD.

As a graduate student at Penn State, Sara works with Dr. Yo Jackson and Dr. Erika Lunkenheimer to better understand the effects of trauma and maltreatment on development. Her research focuses on adversity experienced by children currently in the foster care system. She is particularly interested in how maltreatment that occurred both before contact with the child welfare system and factors while in out-of-home placement may differentially lead to maladjustment and behavior challenges for children in foster care. Sara’s research has also focused on the factors that protect children in foster care from developing psychopathology. In her thesis, she examined how the magnitude of the effects of maltreatment dimensions, such as type, frequency, and severity, varied as a function of the perpetrator, whether parents, unrelated adults, or a combination of the two, and how such dimensions may lead to behavioral difficulties. Sara has also been researching parent-child interactions, with an interest in evaluating the tools researchers use to evaluate parenting practices associated with elevated risk. In particular, she plans to examine whether parents’ early adversity experiences might contribute to hostile attribution biases that parents have about their children, thereby contributing to emotion dysregulation in parents and their children.

Sara’s goals include pursuing studies exploring aspects of the parent-child relationship. She plans to investigate how parents and their children engage in self-regulation as well as co-regulation across a variety of contexts. In addition, she will explore the risk of maladjustment after exposure to trauma and adversity.