Maria Gartstein Ph.D.

Maria (Masha) Gartstein, Ph.D., is a professor in the Washington State University (WSU) Department of Psychology and Director of ADVANCE at WSU. Born in Moscow, Russia, she fully expected to spend the rest of her life there until her family started talking about immigrating to the U.S. After a long strange trip, having traveled through Vienna, Austria, Rome, Italy, and New York, they ended up in Cincinnati, Ohio. There, she attended middle school, high school, college, and eventually graduate school, and developed an appreciation of psychological sciences, earning a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1996.

Throughout her undergraduate and graduate training, Masha worked with a number of clinicians and researchers at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CHMC), focusing on issues related to pediatric chronic illness, and its impact on the lives of affected children and families – an area of research she is still engaged in today. Post-doctoral training brought Masha Gartstein to Eugene, OR, where at the University of Oregon and the Oregon Social Learning Center, her training focused primarily on temperament research, but also disorders in childhood and adolescence, as well as family-oriented interventions.

Current research interests include a number of areas that are all related to temperament development. Chief among these is the study of the role that parenting plays in how temperament “comes online” in early childhood – the subject of the upcoming personality episode of the Netflix documentary “Babies” filmed at the Gartstein Temperament Laboratory. Another active program of research involves understanding how temperament contributes to either healthy social-emotional development, or else a pathway marked by difficulties in behavioral adjustment and symptoms/disorders (e.g., Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Cross-cultural differences in temperament development and contributing factors represents another critical area of study, with the help of a global network of collaborators, who recently contributed to a book, entitled Temperament, Parents and Culture: Findings from the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC). Finally, Masha Gartstein has also begun to examine brain activity underpinning temperament development and prenatal effects resulting from maternal well-being and stress during pregnancy. All of these lines of research lead to findings relevant to parents of young children, presented in the blog.