Symphony of cells: Purdue Human Development and Family Science researcher connects culture, behavior and biology to bridge social-emotional development with epigenetics

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu

For Meingold Chan, assistant professor in the Purdue University Department of Human Development and Family Science, studying epigenetics can be analogized to playing a piece of sheet music. When conducted or played by a different musician or performed in a different venue, the musical experience can be different, even though the notes themselves stay the same.

She explained that like that piece of music, the body’s DNA sequence doesn’t change but different chemical markers — the musician or conductor — may change how the DNA expresses itself, influencing the behavior or health outcome. Likewise, playing in a small room versus a large arena will further change the experience in the same way sociocultural contexts can change the behavior or health outcome in the human body.

“I’ve seen a lot of different analogies for this kind of biology, but this one really speaks to me,” Chan said. “I take a sociocultural perspective to understand children’s social-emotional development, so really thinking about the context they grow up in. Family and culture are two contexts I’m really interested in. Then, epigenetics allows me to answer those questions of the biological embedding of this experience and environment as we grow up — so how they get under our skin and have a long-term effect on our health and development. Right now, my hope is to bridge the two fields.”

Linking biology and behavior

Meingold Chan(Photo provided)

A significant portion of Chan’s work in the College of Health and Human Sciences is focused on how psychological or behavioral variables can be shown or reflected through biology. Epigenetics is a relatively new research field, so Chan noted it’s often focusing on risk factors or problems. Chan wants to focus on the bigger picture to look at the biological factors present with both the positive and negatives in emotional socialization processes.

“I’m actually writing a book chapter on summarizing epigenetic findings or gene and environment interplay for social-emotional development,” Chan said. “We really struggle because social-emotional development is so much more than just a problem, right? We have emotion regulation. We have social understanding. We have peer relationships and well-being. I want to move toward understanding strengths, cultural differences and the lived experiences behind those numbers.”

In a November 2025 article published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, Chan explored how cell-type differences could produce vastly different results in epigenetics research. In collecting saliva samples from children, the study found a significant difference in the samples’ composition from child to child, with some containing 100% immune cells and some containing 100% epithelial cells. This cell-level difference indicated that a more rigorous analytical approach is needed in this research to ensure samples are analyzed equally to get the most accurate results.

“I anticipate this paper will be quite impactful for the field to make sure scientists handle the cell-type heterogeneity carefully in saliva samples in epigenetic studies,” Chan said.

This study built upon a previous study that looked at race and ethnicity within epigenetics — a focus of Chan’s work.

“When I realized I was going to jump into epigenetics and look at how culture can be reflected by epigenetics, I realized there’s still a lot more groundwork that has to be done,” Chan said. “My colleagues and I then developed this integrated framework of thinking carefully about how epigenetics can be studied with culture, race and ethnicity while considering that important genetic architecture underlying epigenetics.

Giving children their voice

In another recent study looking at children’s perceived psychological and social problems, Chan explored the possibility of using the Berkeley Puppet Interview, which features two dog puppets named Iggy and Ziggy, to identify psychological symptoms and social problems in children ages 4-5.

Chan’s study, which was one of the first to look at using this tool with children as young as 4, had the puppets ask these young children questions about their mental health. Because social science research often focuses on the parents’ reports of their child’s behavior and experiences, this study made strides in understanding how soon children are able to speak for themselves and the tools needed to get that information.

“This is one of those few tools where we can directly ask the kid about their depression or anxiety,” Chan said. “In past studies, we have seen that when parents report their kid having externalizing behavior like aggression, later there is an association with depression when the kid grows up. In this specific study, what we see is that children’s self-report of depression is actually positively related to their mother’s report of children’s aggression. So maybe they don’t have that tool to express their negative emotion, or maybe they’re struggling with some of this emotion dysregulation, and it’s manifested as aggression or disruptive behavior. If we’re only collecting parents’ data, we don’t see these underlying internalizing problems.”

Chan explained this information is really important for clinicians to be aware of to avoid missing important pieces of the picture.

Chan also looked into parents’ reports and how they compared to the reports of the child. She found the child’s reports were often more consistent with their father’s report than that of the mother. While part of the study was looking at mothers who were experiencing mental health struggles themselves and those effects on the consistency of the reports, it also shows the importance of having multiple informants to give a complete picture of children’s social-emotional development.

What’s next

In her BioPsychosocial Development in Context Lab, Chan is currently interested in exploring epigenetic age, or the age of the body based on the cells and tissues rather than based on years, in child populations. While there’s data available for older populations, very little has been explored in children. As she continues to build on her work, she hopes to look at how environmental and family factors influence children’s epigenetic age.

“I’ve lived in six different countries, and throughout that experience, I’m seeing a lot of cultural differences in how parents talk to their kid about emotion, how adults interact with each other in workplaces, in families, in romantic relationships for emotional communication,” Chan said. “That has really intrigued me and made me curious about how those kinds of differences emerge.”