Olivia Atherton, Post-Doctoral Researcher at UC Davis

During adolescence, youth are expected to traverse a path towards becoming responsible adults, while being bombarded with new and enticing temptations (sex, drugs, delinquency, etc.) that could cause them to lose their way. Through my research, I have discovered that one critical ingredient for successfully navigating the complexities of adolescence is the development of effortful control (i.e., the capacity to regulate impulses and behaviors, to focus and shift attention, and to motivate the self towards goals when there are competing desires). In my talk, I will use data from a 12-year longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin youth to address three research questions: (1) Do youth generally increase or decrease in effortful control as they go through adolescence?; (2) What are some of the risk and resilience factors (from family, peer, school, neighborhood, and cultural contexts) that lead youth to develop better or worse effortful control?; and (3) Are youth with poor effortful control more likely to exhibit behavioral problems in school and other contexts, and how does engaging in problem behaviors influence the development of effortful control? I will conclude by discussing broader implications and future directions of this work.

Olivia E. Atherton received her PhD in Psychology from the University of California Davis in 2020 and her BS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Broadly, her research focuses on the development and consequences of effortful control during adolescence. She is particularly interested in the utility of effortful control as a source of resilience for promoting positive youth development. Using large-scale, multi-method longitudinal studies, she investigates developmental processes from multiple levels of analysis (biological, psychological, family, peer, school, neighborhood, cultural). Dr. Atherton has received dissertation awards from the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and published her work in prominent outlets such as Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Clinical Psychological Science, and the Journal of Research on Adolescence.