
Nancy McElwain
Professor
Primary Affiliation
Biologically Informed Artificial IntelligenceAffiliations
Status Part-time Faculty
Home Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Phone 244-7168
Email mcelwn@illinois.edu
Address 1612 Beckman Institute, 405 North Mathews Avenue
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Biography
Dr. Nancy McElwain is a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. She received an NICHD postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois. Dr. McElwain's research focuses on social and emotional development during the first five years of life. In particular, Dr. McElwain investigates the dynamic early-life interactions between parents and children that shape children’s developing abilities to regulate stress. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines neuroscience, psychophysiology, linguistics, and developmental psychology. Dr. McElwain teaches courses on behavioral research methods and social-emotional development, and she currently serves on the Editorial Board of the American Psychologist.
Education
Ph.D., psychology, University of Michigan, 1999
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Research
Research Interests:
Physiological and neural correlates of infant-mother attachment
Emotion-related dynamics of parent-child interactions
Maternal speech prosody and children's stress regulation
Parental socialization of emotion
Family-friend linkages and children's social-emotional competence