Cara Palmer PhD

Cara A. Palmer is the director of the Sleep and Development Lab and the co-director of the MSU Sleep Lab. Before coming to MSU, Dr. Palmer completed her Ph.D. in Life-Span Developmental Psychology at West Virginia University in 2014, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in Clinical Child Psychology at the University of Houston. Dr. Palmer then served as research faculty at the University of Houston within the Department of Psychology and the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics. Dr. Palmer joined the MSU faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in 2018.

Research questions in the Sleep and Development Lab focus on two broad questions: 1) why do so many children, adolescents, and emerging adults struggle to get adequate sleep? and 2) what are the consequences of poor sleep? Many of our research questions are motivated by research suggesting that poor sleep impacts our overall well-being and can lead to the later development of mental health difficulties such as depression and anxiety. As a result, many studies in the lab are focused on understanding how sleep patterns shape daytime emotional and social experiences in ways that make us more or less susceptible to mental health problems. We investigate how sleep and socioemotional development intersect within various contexts (e.g., community, family, school) and in response to a variety of milestones and experiences (e.g., trauma, life stress, puberty). Ongoing studies also examine how both healthy and unhealthy sleep patterns develop, with a particular focus on how societal barriers and disparities, attitudes, and daily social/emotional experiences impact our sleep behaviors.

Dr. Palmer's research is interdisciplinary and incorporates methodology and theory from developmental psychology, clinical child psychology, social psychology, and behavioral sleep medicine. Research in the lab includes multiple methods to assess daytime emotional and social experiences (e.g., behavioral paradigms, psychophysiological and neural responses, ecological momentary assessment) and to assess sleep (polysomnography, actigraphy).