About

Rebecca Brooker is a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University, affiliated with the Personality Processes, & Affective Science research cluster. Her research focuses on affective science, cognition and cognitive neuroscience, and personality processes, with a particular emphasis on developmental psychology. She investigates emotional and biological risk factors for anxiety and psychopathology in early life, exploring neurodevelopmental correlates of risk, normative and atypical developmental trajectories of emotion, and gene-environment interplay in the development of anxiety problems. Her work also examines the transactional mechanisms of risk for anxiety in parents and offspring, as well as the plasticity of the maternal brain during the perinatal period. Brooker's research aims to understand the biological and environmental factors influencing emotional development and mental health outcomes from early childhood through adolescence.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Biology
• Clinical psychology
• Psychiatry
• Social psychology
• Cognitive science
• Neuroscience
• Medicine
• Cognitive psychology
• Obstetrics

Selected publications

• Emotional Reactivity and Internalizing Symptoms in Middle Childhood: Integrating Autonomic and Behavioral Markers of Social Fear and Positive Affect

  Developmental Psychobiology · 2025-06-17

  articleOpen access

  Emotional reactivity is a well-validated corollary of children's risk for internalizing psychopathology and can be indexed by autonomic and behavioral measures. Yet, it is unclear whether and how autonomic and behavioral markers of emotional reactivity interact to characterize internalizing symptoms and whether these associations differ based on emotional context. As such, the current study aimed to (1) clarify associations between autonomic (RSA, PEP) and behavioral measures of emotional reactivity across two tasks designed to elicit fear and positive affect in social contexts and (2) examine the unique and combined associations between autonomic and behavioral reactivity during these tasks and internalizing symptoms. Participants were 328 children aged 6-10 (M = 7.91, SD = 0.97; 50% female; 94% White). Behavioral displays of positive affect during a parent task were associated with RSA withdrawal, but there were no significant associations between autonomic reactivity and behavioral displays of stranger fear. RSA augmentation during the parent task was associated with lower internalizing symptoms at average or high levels of positive affect. Finally, higher stranger fear was associated with higher internalizing symptoms only when coupled with reciprocal parasympathetic activation. These findings suggest context-specific patterns of autonomic activation that are differentially associated with internalizing symptoms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The N2 During Preschool: Temporal Stability and a Test of Bidirectional Effects With Maternal Emotion Characteristics in a White, European-American Sample

  Child Development · 2025-07-18

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Despite well-documented behavioral changes, the development of neuropsychological substrates underlying inhibitory control remains unknown, hindering understanding of this construct over time. Stability and change in N2, a neural correlate of inhibitory control, and its crosslagged, bidirectional associations with maternal emotion characteristics were examined in 121 preschoolers (59% female, predominantly White) between 2014 and 2017. N2 was stable from 3 to 5 years of age. Greater maternal negativity at age 4 predicted smaller N2 amplitudes in preschoolers at age 5 (β = 0.22); preschoolers' N2 amplitudes did not predict subsequent emotion characteristics in mothers. Findings provide initial evidence for mother-to-child, but not child-to-mother effects linking N2 with mothers' emotion characteristics and a foundation for future longitudinal work on developing neural correlates of inhibitory control in preschoolers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Maternal Social Phobia, but not Generalized Anxiety, Symptoms Interact with Early Childhood Error-Related Negativity to Prospectively Predict Child Anxiety Symptoms

  Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology · 2025-01-06 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• State and trait late positive potential predict maternal mental health.

  Emotion · 2025-11-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 30.49) women between 2015 and 2017 during laboratory visits in the second trimester of pregnancy and at 4-month postpartum. Infant temperamental negativity was observed at 4-month postpartum. Lower trait-level LPP predicted greater maternal depressive symptoms, while higher state-level LPP predicted both maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms. Neither trait nor state-level LPP predicted infant negative emotional reactivity. Findings suggest that trait and state level of maternal emotion reactivity may be differentially related to specific maternal health outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Cognitive Control Moderates Associations Between Domains of Temperamental Reactivity and Preschoolers’ Social Behaviors

  Developmental Psychobiology · 2024-09-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Temperamental characteristics and emerging cognitive control are meaningful predictors of children's development of adaptive and maladaptive social behaviors during the preschool period. However, knowledge of the interplay of these pathways, when examined concurrently to highlight their individual contributions, is limited. Using a cross-sectional sample of 3-year-old children, we examined parent-reported discrete traits of negative (anger, fear, sadness, and shyness) and positive (low- and high-intensity pleasure) temperamental reactivity as predictors of children's prosociality and physical aggression. Further, we tested whether the effects of discrete temperament were moderated by cognitive control, as indexed by the N2 event-related potential, during a go/no-go task. Analyses focus on a subsample of children with an observable N2 (n = 66). When controlling for other relative temperament traits, several significant main effects emerged. Moreover, at low cognitive control (smaller N2), fear was negatively associated with aggression, whereas at high cognitive control, sadness was positively associated with aggression. Heightened anger was linked to reduced prosocial behavior when cognitive control was low but linked to greater prosocial behavior when cognitive control was high. The results highlight that discrete temperament traits predict individual differences in child outcomes but that associations depend on concurrent levels of cognitive control.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Maternal symptoms of prenatal depression predict context-incongruent negative emotion in infants.

  Emotion · 2024-08-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 92) prenatal depressive symptoms as prospective predictors of infants' context-incongruent emotion. Greater prenatal symptoms predicted more context-incongruent negativity in infants even when controlling for context-congruent affect. Findings demonstrate a novel utility of context-incongruent emotion as one possible vulnerability linking mothers' prenatal depression to socioemotional difficulties in offspring. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Variation in coupling across neural and cardiac systems of regulation is linked to markers of anxiety risk in preschool

  Development and Psychopathology · 2024-03-15 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Both cortical and parasympathetic systems are believed to regulate emotional arousal in the service of healthy development. Systemic coordination, or coupling, between putative regulatory functions begins in early childhood. Yet the degree of coupling between cortical and parasympathetic systems in young children remains unclear, particularly in relation to the development of typical or atypical emotion function. We tested whether cortical (ERN) and parasympathetic (respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) markers of regulation were coupled during cognitive challenge in preschoolers ( N = 121). We found no main effect of RSA predicting ERN. We then tested children’s typical and atypical emotion behavior (context-appropriate/context-inappropriate fear, anxiety symptoms, neuroendocrine reactivity) as moderators of early coupling in an effort to link patterns of coupling to adaptive emotional development. Negative coupling (i.e., smaller ERN, more RSA suppression or larger ERN, less RSA suppression) at age 3 was associated with greater atypical and less typical emotion behaviors, indicative of greater risk. Negative age 3 coupling was also visible for children who had greater Generalized Anxiety Disorder symptoms and blunted cortisol reactivity at age 5. Results suggest that negative coupling may reflect a maladaptive pattern across regulatory systems that is identifiable during the preschool years.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infant negativity moderates trajectories of maternal emotion across pregnancy and the peripartum period

  Journal of Affective Disorders Reports · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Background: Although the effects of maternal behavior on the development of child emotion characteristics is relatively well-established, effects of infant characteristics on maternal emotion development is less well known. This gap in knowledge persists despite repeated calls for including child-to-mother effects in studies of emotion. We tested the theory-based postulate that infant temperamental negativity moderates longitudinal trajectories of mothers' perinatal symptoms of anxiety and depression. Method: Participants were 92 pregnant community women who enrolled in a longitudinal study of maternal mental health; symptoms of anxiety and depression were assessed during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy and again at infant age 4 months. A multimethod assessment of infants' temperament-based negative reactivity was conducted at infant age 4 months. Results: Maternal symptoms of anxiety showed smaller postnatal declines when levels of infant negativity were high. Negative reactivity, assessed via maternal report of infant behavior, was related to smaller postnatal declines in maternal anxiety, while infant negative reactivity, at the level of neuroendocrine function, was largely unrelated to longitudinal changes in maternal anxiety symptoms. Infant negativity was related to early levels, but largely unrelated to trajectories of maternal symptoms of depression. Limitations: Limitations of this work include a relatively small and low-risk sample size, the inability to isolate environmental effects, and a nonexperimental design that precludes causal inference. Conclusions: Findings suggest that levels of infant negativity are associated with differences in the degree of change in maternal anxiety symptoms across the perinatal period.

  PublisherDOI

• Socioeconomic status moderates neural markers of cognitive reappraisal across preschool

  Biological Psychology · 2023-12-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Envisioning motherhood: Mental‐state language in caregiving narratives across the perinatal period

  Infant Mental Health Journal · 2023-03-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Nancy Suchman's work highlighted the fundamental role of maternal mentalization in maternal addiction, mental health, and caregiving challenges. In this study, we aimed to examine the role of mental-state language (MSL) as a measure of mentalization in prenatal and postnatal narratives and their sentiment in a sample of 91 primarily White mothers from the western United States, followed from the second trimester of pregnancy, through the third trimester, to 4 months postpartum. Specifically, we investigated the use of affective and cognitive MSL in prenatal narratives when mothers visualized caring for their baby and postnatal narratives when mothers compared their prenatal visualization to the current caregiving reality. Results indicated moderate consistency in MSL between the second and third trimesters, but prenatal and postnatal MSL was not significantly correlated. Across all time points, higher use of MSL was related to more positive sentiment, indicating an association between mentalization and positive caregiving representations across the perinatal period. Women used more affective than cognitive MSL in prenatal imagination of caregiving, but this pattern was reversed in their postpartum reflection. Implications on assessing parental mentalization prenatally and considering the relative dominance of affective and cognitive mentalizing are discussed while considering study limitations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Convergent Markers of Risk for Psychopathology in Infants and Toddlers

  NIH · $531k · 2013–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew Vess

  Texas A&M University

  9 shared

• Kristin A. Buss

  9 shared

• H. Hill Goldsmith

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  7 shared

• Tristin Nyman

  Kennedy Krieger Institute

  6 shared

• Elizabeth J. Kiel

  Miami University

  6 shared

• Sejal Mistry‐Patel

  Texas A&M University

  6 shared

• Rebecca J. Schlegel

  Texas A&M University

  5 shared

• Tracy A. Dennis

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  4 shared

Labs

• Psychological & Brain SciencesPI

Education

• PhD, Psychology

  The Pennsylvania State University

  2011