Amy Nuttall

Amy K. Nuttall, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University.

Nuttall earned her bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, graduating summa cum laude with distinction. She earned her master of arts in psychology and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology with a minor in quantitative psychology from the University of Notre Dame.

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, Nuttall conducts process-oriented basic research with the goal of informing preventive interventions aimed at supporting positive outcomes for children/ siblings, and parents.

Nuttall has published in top journals in developmental, clinical, and quantitative psychology. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Family Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s journal for family research.

Ph.D. in Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 2015
M.A. in Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 2013
B.S. in Psychology, University of Colorado, 2006