Sabrina Beck

LIFE Fellow since 2021, University of Zurich

In 2015, I received my master’s degree in Psychology at the University of Zurich and started training in Psychotherapy (CBT and Interpersonal Psychotherapy) at the Klaus-Grawe-Institute. For the next five years, I worked as a psychotherapist with children, adolescents, young adults and their families. During this time, I learned a lot about the impact of family cohesion, parental agreement and parenting practices on children’s individual developmental trajectories. Driven by the motivation of using my clinical experience and knowledge for a better understanding of these interactions on a scientific level, I applied for a PhD program at the chair of Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood as well as the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich, headed by Moritz Daum. In my dissertation project, I want to investigate the impact of parenting practices and parental agreement on children’s socio-emotional development. For this purpose, I will use a smartphone-based application called the “kleineWeltentdecker-App”. This ambulatory assessment tool allows parents of children from birth to 6 years to track the ongoing development of their children’s skills in different domains by answering questions that are matched to the children’s age, thereby covering the entire period in which changes of particular skills are expected to occur.

Dissertation project:

The interplay of parenting practices, child temperament, and parenting dynamics in early childhood

Publications

Reinelt, T., Wermelinger, S., Beck, S., Brehm, J., Helbling, N., Manfredi, M., Moersdorf, L., Wagner, L., & Daum, M. M. (2022). Infancy researchers need to change the way they develop their measures: A comment on Byers-Heinlein et al. (2021). Infant and Child Development, 2022, Article e2322. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.232