This webinar was presented live on January 7th, 2022. If you were unable to attend the live event, a recording is posted here.

Webinar Presented by Hiram Fitzgerald

Hiram (Hi) Fitzgerald is University Distinguished Professor and Associate Provost Emeritus at Michigan State University, and Adjunct Professorial Fellow at Curtin University, Australia. He is past president and executive director of both the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health and the International Association for Infant Mental Health, and for 16 years served as executive director of the World Association for Infant Mental Health. He served two terms as Editor of the Infant Mental Health Journal, and currently is Associate Editor of Adversity and Resilience Science.  His 600 publications include articles, chapters, books, technical reports, and peer-reviewed abstracts.  He has received the ZERO TO THREE Dolley Madison Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to the Development and Well Being of Very Young Children, the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health Selma Fraiberg Award, and the designation of Honorary President from the World Association for Infant Mental Health.  He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 7, 34, 37. 43. 50) and the Association of Psychological Science.  He is an elected member of the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (2014). His most recent book is Handbook of Fathers and Child Development: Prenatal to Preschool, Springer.

In this webinar, we will review the origins of male aggression and violence, including social, psychological, developmental, neurological, genetic, epigenetic, evolutionary, and attachment/activation research related to the early-in-life origins of male violence.  Early caregiver abuse and neglect, father absence, parent/family psychopathology and violence, and neighborhood violence exacerbate boys’ greater risk for aggressive behavior and increase the probability of carrying out violent acts later in life.  We examine the impact on the infant and toddler’s emergent mental representation of self, others, and self-other relationships within the context of parental psychopathology.  Special attention is given to the unique contributions that fathers make to the organization of self-regulatory systems in their sons.  Developmental science perspectives on the origins of biopsychosocial characteristics of the individual stress systemic causal pathways and the complexity of individual-environment interplay that shapes who we are and who we may become.