Evin Aktar
Papers
2
Total Citations
75
H-Index
2
About
Evin Aktar’s research illuminates the early pathways through which anxiety is transmitted from parents to children, with a particular focus on social anxiety and its impact during toddlerhood and preschool years. Her work demonstrates how parental anxiety disorders and momentary expressions of fear shape children’s social referencing—the process by which young children look to their parents to interpret ambiguous social situations. In her highly cited 2013 study (58 citations), Aktar showed that parental social anxiety disorder prospectively predicts toddlers’ fear and avoidance in a social referencing paradigm, providing compelling evidence for observational learning as a mechanism of intergenerational transmission. Her 2017 study (17 citations) extended these findings by showing that parental expressions of anxiety and child temperament jointly predict preschoolers’ avoidance of novelty, highlighting the interplay between environmental and biological factors. Aktar’s research has significant implications for understanding the development of anxiety disorders and for designing early interventions that target parent-child interactions. Her work bridges developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and behavioral genetics, offering a nuanced view of how nature and nurture combine to shape children’s emotional development.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2