Amanda Sheffield Morris is an American developmental scientist, known primarily for her work on parenting, emotion regulation, and the neuroscience of adversity and resilience in terms of optimal child and adolescent development.
Her research covers a broad range of topics in developmental psychology, with a specific focus on social and emotional development in childhood and adolescence.
[6] Morris proposed strategies to enhance effortful control and school readiness among kindergarten children from primarily low-income families.
[11] In 2021, Morris presented a model focused on highlighting how experiences affect the whole child, the heart and the head, and considers development within context and across domains.
[16] She is an MPI on the Oklahoma site of the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD), where she provided principles for guiding the selection of early childhood neurodevelopmental risk and resilience measures.
[19] In a series of papers published 2021, she explored the role of cumulative protection in the context of understanding resilience, as well as evaluated the associations between ACEs, PACEs, and attitudes towards nurturing and harsh parenting.
[20] Furthermore, she proposed a model for understanding the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as dynamic biobehavioral adaptations to early life stress in children.