About

Dr. Marlen Zoraida Maria Gonzalez Caraballo (de Lawley), known as Dr. Gonzalez, is originally from the Dominican Republic and grew up in the tristate area. She earned her BA in Psychology and English Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. Early in her career, she conducted policy research with low-income families and social neuroscience research with families involved in the Simon Simplex Study, which focuses on families with de-novo Autism diagnoses. Dr. Gonzalez pursued clinical psychology at the University of Virginia under the mentorship of Dr. James A. Coan. Her research and that of the Life History Lab aim to understand how developmental context shapes the adult brain and its implications for normative behavior as well as non-communicative diseases such as mental health and cardiovascular health. By developmental context, she refers to the totality of childhood environment encompassing physical, social, political, and economic factors that impose demands on individuals. Dr. Gonzalez is interested in mentoring students who are creative yet methodologically rigorous and capable of making steady progress in research.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Biology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Genetics

Selected publications

• Resilience through regulation: Individual differences in inhibitory control shape neural and psychological responses to ostracism

  Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience · 2025-10-03

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Asymmetric access to social vs. economic resources during development calibrates socio-cognitive pathways to risk-taking in emerging adults

  Cerebral Cortex · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Developmental plasticity enables organisms to adapt to early-life environments by tailoring neurocognitive and behavioral strategies to local risks and resources. However, existing research often reduces this dynamic calibration to aggregate exposure to adversity, leaving the effect of distinct early-life environments on adult behaviors and brain functions poorly understood. We investigated how differential childhood socio-economic contexts influence adult risk-taking and associated mechanisms. Forty-eight adults were recruited, and grouped based on their relative access to social (socially-rich) or economic (economically-rich) resources during childhood and completed a balloon analog risk task during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Risk-taking tendencies were estimated via computational modeling and analyzed relative to developmental and current socio-economic contexts. While groups showed similar average risk-taking tendencies, for socially-rich participants only, greater current social support correlated with lower risk-taking. Similarly, risk-taking in both groups coincided with activation in the supramarginal gyrus. However, socially-rich participants uniquely recruited occipito-parietal cortices during risk-taking, a pattern attenuated by higher current social support. Across groups, supramarginal gyrus-prefrontal cortex connectivity tracked mismatches between childhood- and current resource environments, potentially reflecting "sensitized-specialization" of neural systems. Our findings highlight how exposure to distinct early-life environments shapes divergent neurocognitive mechanisms underlying adult risk-taking, offering insights for developing context-sensitive interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Disentangling the Neural Underpinnings of Risk and Reward in Human Decision Making

  Research Square · 2025-07-18

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The role of food-related strategies and social support: A qualitative study on the lived experiences with food among income-eligible food assistance beneficiaries

  Appetite · 2025-12-23

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  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Food-Related Strategies and Social Support: A Qualitative Study on the Lived Experiences with Food Among Income-Eligible Food Assistance Beneficiaries

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Science Democratization for Rigor, Relevance, and Resilience

  Developmental Psychobiology · 2025-08-21

  review1st authorCorresponding

  Developmental psychobiology and neuroscience hold the promise to improve children's lives but also the peril to entrench marginalization when insights are misapplied or stripped of context. Diversification tilts us towards promise, but as political forces threaten inclusive research practices and public trust in science, developmental researchers face a critical moment. This paper argues that science democratization-grounded in care, inclusivity, and shared authority-can make our science more rigorous, relevant, and resilient. We begin by reviewing how gender, ethnoracial, and cognitive diversity among researchers and participants has expanded the field's reach and sharpened its questions. We then turn to democratization as a relational stance centering care and agency, with the enhancement of our science as a consequence. To ground this approach, we describe an illustrative gender-inclusion event led by the Community Neuroscience Initiative (CNI), which brought together scientists and community members for dialogue, shared learning, and collaboration. Finally, we offer readings, practical recommendations, and open questions for readers interested in applying these ideas to their own work. Written collaboratively with input from all stakeholders involved, this manuscript offers a timely vision for a more ethical, inclusive, and impactful developmental psychobiology and neuroscience.

  PublisherDOI

• Social context links energetic and developmental accounts of life history

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2025-01-01

  review1st authorCorresponding

  The two-tiered model of developmental plasticity is elegant and presented with impressive interdisciplinary synthesis. We suggest that yet more - social context and nutrition behavior - will need to be incorporated into empirical research. Drawing from anthropology, nutrition, and neuroscience, we highlight connections that may help generate new approaches for studying the developmental calibration of life history in humans.

  PublisherDOI

• Classification of Rugosity in Plasmonic Metallic Thin Films Using Deep Learning for Speckle Images

  2024-01-01

  article

  In this work, we report, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the classification of metallic samples with different roughness values. As a reference, the R a and R q values were obtained using a Mitutoyo roughness meter. About 2,000 Speckle images were obtained for each sample. They were processed and used as inputting neural networks such as ResNet50 and EfficientNet. We obtained 99.63 % accuracy in classifying the samples with the ResNet50 model and 99.48 % accuracy for the EfficientNet model. These accuracies can be compared with the 99.926 % and 99.932 % values obtained for aluminum and steel surfaces in a similar work that used an optics system, image processing, and a CNN.

  PublisherDOI

• Stability and variation of brain-behavior correlation patterns across measures of social support

  Imaging Neuroscience · 2024-03-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The social environment has a critical influence on human development, cognition, and health. Research in health psychology and social neuroscience indicate an urgent need to understand how social relationships are associated with brain function and organization. To address this, we apply multilayer modeling and modularity maximization-both established tools in network neuroscience-to jointly cluster patterns of brain-behavior associations for seven social support measures. By using network approaches to map and analyze the connectivity between all pairs of brain regions simultaneously, we can clarify how relationships between brain regions (e.g. connectivity) change as a function of social relationships. This multilayer approach enables direct comparison of brain-behavior associations across social contexts for all brain regions and builds on both ecological and developmental neuroscientific findings and network neuroscientific approaches. In particular, we find that subcortical and control systems are especially sensitive to different constructs of perceived social support. Network nodes in these systems are highly flexible; their community affiliations, which reflect groups of nodes with similar patterns of brain-behavior associations, differ across social support measures. Additionally, our application of multilayer modeling to patterns of brain-behavior correlations, as opposed to just functional connectivity, represents an innovation in how multilayer models are used in human neuroscience. More than that, it offers a generalizable technique for studying the stability and variation of brain-behavior associations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring Contextual Factors in Vagal Tank Theory

  Physiology · 2024-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  High baseline Heart rate variability (HRV) is a putative measure of resilience which predicts adaptive HRV changes during (Reactivity) and after (Recovery) a stressor according to Vagal Tank Theory. However, we do not understand how the availability of resources prior to a stressor impacts this relationship. Using an ecological framework, we tested VTT hypotheses while examining receptivity to social presence and contemplative practices as a moderator to Reactivity and Recovery during a subsequent stressor. Using ECG, we modeled HRV as the root-mean square of successive R-R intervals (RMSSD) across four conditions: baseline, post contemplative practice, directly before a CO 2 breathing tasking, while breathing CO 2 , and after CO 2 . Reactivity and Recovery were defined as the usual subtraction for phasic HRV literature, while Receptivity was modeled as post contemplative practice HRV minus baseline. Our multiple regression analyses showed that higher baseline predicted greater reactivity, positively interacting with the female gender and the partner condition (F(9,83)=2.00, p=0.04). Higher baseline predicted lower recovery HRV with no significant interactions (F(9,85)=2.66, R2=0.22, p=0.009), potentially due to the benefit in the HRV level at the reference level (after contemplative practice). Higher receptivity predicted higher recovery, with women showing the strongest relationship (F(4,88)=16.3, R2=0.43, p<0.001). Our results suggest that both baseline and receptivity to resources may impact resilience to stress, and that future research should account for gendered effects. Cornell University. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James A. Coan

  University of Virginia

  9 shared

• Marissa A. Rice

  New York State University College of Human Ecology

  6 shared

• Joseph P. Allen

  University of Virginia

  5 shared

• Erin L. Maresh

  5 shared

• Roger Figueroa

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Richard F. Betzel

  Indiana University Bloomington

  4 shared

• Julia E. Kohn

  New York University

  4 shared

• Julio Salas

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

Labs

• Life History LabPI

Education

• Ph.D. in Psychology, Department of Psychology

  University of Virginia

  2018

• M.A. in Psychology, Department of Psychology

  University of Virginia

  2013

• Summa Cum Laude

  Manhattanville College

  2008