Rate My Professor Jennifer Ablow

Jennifer Ablow is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where she serves as co-director of the Developmental Sociobiology Lab alongside Jeffrey Measelle. She earned her BA in 1988 from the University of Colorado Boulder and her PhD in 1997 from the University of California, Berkeley. Ablow's research investigates the intergenerational transmission of emotion regulation, examining how infants develop emotion management patterns similar to their parents. She merges attachment and psychobiological perspectives to identify prenatal and neonatal markers of risk for insensitive parenting. By longitudinally following parent-infant dyads, her work explores how parents' emotional arousal and regulation influence young children's (ages 0-3) emotion processes. Additionally, Ablow studies the spillover of emotional arousal and regulation from marital relationships to children's socioemotional development, including children's distress over parental conflict and vulnerabilities from assuming blame for parental issues. In collaboration with Heidemarie Laurent, she maps neural responses of depressed versus non-depressed mothers to infant cues like cries and facial emotions, linking these to differences in parenting, infant attachment, and neurobiology.

Ablow's research program emphasizes the impacts of prenatal mental health, stress, early adversity, and nutrition on fetal development, infant emotional regulation, and neurodevelopment, with a focus on low socioeconomic status populations, such as infants of caregivers with depression or poor nutrition. Her clinical efforts include developing and facilitating prenatal groups for pregnant individuals at risk for depression, mindfulness-based parenting programs in the early postnatal period, and video feedback dyadic parenting interventions to promote attachment and emotional regulation. As a licensed psychologist and certified Child Parent Psychotherapy clinician on the international roster, she advances parent-infant prevention and intervention. Selected publications include Wood, E.K., et al. (2025). Higher prenatal dietary glycemic index in the third trimester of pregnancy is associated with infant negative affect at 6 months. Scientific Reports; Werchan, D., et al. (2022). Behavioral coping phenotypes and psychosocial outcomes in a national U.S. sample of pregnant and postpartum women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientific Reports; Sun, X., Measelle, J.R., & Ablow, J.C. (2021). Predicting child effortful control: An integrative analysis of child, physiological, familial, and community factors. Developmental Psychobiology; Measelle, J.R. & Ablow, J.C. (2018). Contributions of early adversity to pro-inflammatory phenotype in infancy: The buffer provided by attachment security. Attachment and Human Development; and Conradt, E., Measelle, J.R. & Ablow, J.C. (2013). Poverty, problem behavior and promise: Differential susceptibility among infants reared in poverty. Psychological Science.