Darby Saxbe
Darby Saxbe is a professor of psychology specializing in the neuroscience of parenthood and family relationships. Her research focuses on neurological and psychological changes across the transition to fatherhood, including paternal brain structure, resting-state connectivity, and neural processing of infant stimuli. She also studies maternal perinatal mental health, family interaction dynamics, physiological stress markers such as cortisol and oxytocin, and the impacts of household labor disparities.
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Publications
- Intrinsic resting-state connectivity and personal meaning across the transition to fatherhood.
- Changes to Family Life, Youth COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Traumatic Stress, and the Youth Mental Health Crisis.
- Shifting the Load: A Pilot Study of a Behavioral Intervention to Reduce Gender Inequities in Household Labor and Improve Mental Health Outcomes.
- Oxytocin moderates father-infant dynamics during triadic family interaction: A dynamic structural equation modeling approach.
- Partner validation during couple conflict predicts reduced negative affect and better psychosocial adjustment to parenthood.
- Cognitive household labor: gender disparities and consequences for maternal mental health and wellbeing.
- Behavioral and neural evidence for difficulty recognizing masked emotional faces.
- Trajectories of mothers' perinatal depressive symptoms during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns: The protective role of romantic relationship quality.
- How intersectional identity and discrimination contribute to depressive symptoms and hair cortisol concentrations among low-income, racially and sexual diverse adults.
- Using Machine Learning to Identify Predictors of Maternal and Infant Hair Cortisol Concentration Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- My Baby Versus the World: Fathers' Neural Processing of Own-Infant, Unfamiliar-Infant, and Romantic Partner Stimuli.
- Risky family environment, white matter organization, and effective parenting in expectant fathers.
- Neural correlates of inhibitory control in the context of infant cry and paternal postpartum mental health.
- Cortical volume reductions in men transitioning to first-time fatherhood reflect both parenting engagement and mental health risk.
- White matter microstructure organization across the transition to fatherhood.
- Glee in threes: Positive affect synchrony in parent-infant triads is moderated by maternal hair cortisol and parenting stress.
- Leveraging machine learning to study how temperament scores predict pre-term birth status.
- First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples.
- Changes in left hippocampal volume in first-time fathers: Associations with oxytocin, testosterone, and adaptation to parenthood.
- The birth of a story: Childbirth experiences, meaning-making, and postpartum adjustment.
- Differences in infant negative affectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Fathers' subjective childbirth stress predicts depressive symptoms at six months postpartum.
- Prenatal prolactin predicts postnatal parenting attitudes and brain structure remodeling in first-time fathers.
- Prenatal testosterone synchrony in first-time parents predicts fathers' postpartum relationship quality.
- Maternal prenatal social contact during the COVID-19 pandemic predicts infant birth weight.
- Stronger mentalizing network connectivity in expectant fathers predicts postpartum father-infant bonding and parenting behavior.
- Delivering alone in a pandemic: Anticipated changes to partner presence at birth are associated with prenatal distress.
- The transition to parenthood in obstetrics: enhancing prenatal care for 2-generation impact.
- Recent Neuroscience Advances in Human Parenting.
- COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences and Symptoms of Pandemic-Associated Traumatic Stress Among Mothers in the US.
- The Future of Women in Psychological Science.
- Physiological linkage in pregnancy: Couples' cortisol, negative conflict behavior, and postpartum depression.
- Theory of mind processing in expectant fathers: Associations with prenatal oxytocin and parental attunement.
- Physical touch during father-infant interactions is associated with paternal oxytocin levels.
- Early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility preferences in the United States: an exploratory study.
- Social Allostasis and Social Allostatic Load: A New Model for Research in Social Dynamics, Stress, and Health.
- Best practices in research mentoring in clinical science.
- Corrigendum to "Examining Positive and Negative Affect as Outcomes and Moderators of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder" [Behav. Ther. 50(6) (2019) 1112-1124].
- Prenatal relationship conflict behavior predicts childbirth experiences and birth outcomes.
- Changes in functional connectivity with cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety disorder predict outcomes at follow-up.
- How do expectant fathers respond to infant cry? Examining brain and behavioral responses and the moderating role of testosterone.
- Machine learning uncovers the most robust self-report predictors of relationship quality across 43 longitudinal couples studies.
- The buddy system: A randomized controlled experiment of the benefits and costs of dieting in pairs.
- Neural connectivity during affect labeling predicts treatment response to psychological therapies for social anxiety disorder.
- Self-referential processing during observation of a speech performance task in social anxiety disorder from pre- to post-treatment: Evidence of disrupted neural activation.
- How Can Psychological Science Contribute to a Healthier, Happier, and More Sustainable World?
- Human milk as "chrononutrition": implications for child health and development.
- Maternal prenatal plasma oxytocin is positively associated with prenatal psychological symptoms, but method of immunoassay extraction may affect results.
- Examining Positive and Negative Affect as Outcomes and Moderators of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder.
- Longitudinal Associations Between Family Aggression, Externalizing Behavior, and the Structure and Function of the Amygdala.
- The Birth Experiences Questionnaire: A brief measure assessing psychosocial dimensions of childbirth.
- The weight of fatherhood: identifying mechanisms to explain paternal perinatal weight gain.
- Community violence exposure in early adolescence: Longitudinal associations with hippocampal and amygdala volume and resting state connectivity.
- The transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult health.
- Fathers' decline in testosterone and synchrony with partner testosterone during pregnancy predicts greater postpartum relationship investment.
- Prospective and dyadic associations between expectant parents' prenatal hormone changes and postpartum parenting outcomes.
- Treatment for social anxiety disorder alters functional connectivity in emotion regulation neural circuitry.
- HPA axis linkage in parent-child dyads: Effects of parent sex, autism spectrum diagnosis, and dyadic relationship behavior.
- High paternal testosterone may protect against postpartum depressive symptoms in fathers, but confer risk to mothers and children.
- Corrigendum: Associations between Family Adversity and Brain Volume in Adolescence: Manual vs. Automated Brain Segmentation Yields Different Results.
- Neural correlates of inhibitory spillover in adolescence: associations with internalizing symptoms.
- Neural mediators of the intergenerational transmission of family aggression.
- Diurnal salivary cortisol patterns prior to pregnancy predict infant birth weight.
- Basic emotion processing and the adolescent brain: Task demands, analytic approaches, and trajectories of changes.
- Sleep Quality Predicts Persistence of Parental Postpartum Depressive Symptoms and Transmission of Depressive Symptoms from Mothers to Fathers.
- Associations between Family Adversity and Brain Volume in Adolescence: Manual vs. Automated Brain Segmentation Yields Different Results.
- Postpartum Depressive Symptoms Following Consecutive Pregnancies: Stability, Change, and Mechanisms.
- Corrigendum: Associations between Family Adversity and Brain Volume in Adolescence: Manual vs. Automated Brain Segmentation Yields Different Results.
- Attenuated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning predicts accelerated pubertal development in girls 1 year later.
- Neural correlates of adolescents' viewing of parents' and peers' emotions: Associations with risk-taking behavior and risky peer affiliations.
- Physiological linkage in couples and its implications for individual and interpersonal functioning: A literature review.
- Neural correlates of parent-child HPA axis coregulation.
- Cortisol covariation within parents of young children: Moderation by relationship aggression.
- Childhood maltreatment, pubertal development, HPA axis functioning, and psychosocial outcomes: An integrative biopsychosocial model.
- Relative influences: patterns of HPA axis concordance during triadic family interaction.
- A path modeling approach to understanding family conflict: reciprocal patterns of parent coercion and adolescent avoidance.
- Randomized controlled trial of cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy for social phobia: outcomes and moderators.
- Cognitive mediators of treatment for social anxiety disorder: comparing acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy.
- The embodiment of emotion: language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity.
- Diurnal cortisol and functional outcomes in post-acute rehabilitation patients.
- Does dampened physiological reactivity protect youth in aggressive family environments?
- Correlates and characteristics of adolescents' encoded emotional arousal during family conflict.
- Time spent in housework and leisure: links with parents' physiological recovery from work.
- Adult health in the context of everyday family life.
- No place like home: home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol.
- For better or worse? Coregulation of couples' cortisol levels and mood states.
- Assessing the scholarly impact of health psychology: a citation analysis of articles published from 1993 to 2003.
- Brief report: Fathers' and mothers' marital relationship predicts daughters' pubertal development two years later.
- Marital satisfaction, recovery from work, and diurnal cortisol among men and women.
- Neural responses to emotional stimuli are associated with childhood family stress.