Amy K. Nuttall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies with an adjunct affiliation in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University.
Dr. Nuttall earned her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, graduating summa cum laude with distinction. She earned her M.A. in Psychology and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Nuttall’s program of research broadly focuses on understanding how children and families cope with stress in the family system and how these experiences shape development across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in the impact of parenting, including family relationships and roles (e.g., generational boundary dissolution, role reversal parentification, triangulation) and parent-child communication (e.g., emotional reminiscing), on child developmental processes of risk and resilience. Guided by a developmental psychopathology perspective, she studies family relationships and development in a variety of stress contexts, including both normative and severe stressors (e.g., interparental conflict, sibling with a disability, childhood bereavement, child maltreatment, parental psychopathology). She also examines the impact of these childhood experiences on relationships in adulthood, including early parenting during the transition to parenthood and the intergenerational transmission of parenting. With a particular emphasis on identifying adaptive processes and resilience, Dr. Nuttall conducts process-oriented basic research with the goal of informing preventive interventions aimed at supporting positive outcomes for children/ siblings, and parents.
Given her background in quantitative psychology, Dr. Nuttall integrates advanced models into her substantive work throughout her program of research. She applies structural equation modeling (SEM) and mixture modeling in longitudinal data, family/dyadic data, and biological data to understand the impact of family processes and family dynamics on development over time. Dr. Nuttall also teaches advanced graduate statistics courses, including Applied SEM and Longitudinal SEM.
Dr. Nuttall has published in top journals in developmental, clinical, and quantitative psychology. Dr. Nuttall is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Family Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s journal for family research, and a statistical consulting editor for Child Development, the Society for Research in Child Development’s flagship journal.
Dr. Nuttall is considering doctoral students for the 2024-2025 academic year. Prospective students may wish to read more about joining the Family Stress Lab or email Dr. Nuttall.