Dr. Diana Parvinchi has long known that the brain’s design is not by chance.

“Even before I was a Christian, the more I studied, the more I was in awe of the mind, the design of the human brain … Who is the designer? How did this come about? This is absolutely amazing. There’s no way that this happened just randomly.”

She earned her PhD in 2012 and became a Christian shortly after. Post doctorate, Parvinchi has continued to investigate how human behaviour is represented in the brain, studying the connections between cognition, emotion and behaviour.

In 2022, Parvinchi began teaching at Redeemer University as an adjunct assistant professor of psychology and was recently promoted to a tenure-track faculty position. She has held research positions at McMaster University, SickKids Hospital and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Parvinchi’s research, spanning more than 20 publications, investigates the neural, cognitive and socio-emotional mechanisms underlying behaviour, with a focus on how these findings can lead to improved treatments and strategies (known in psychology as interventions) for individuals with disabilities.

Exploring Resiliency

Currently, Parvinchi is interested in how resilience is represented in the brain and how she can use this data to improve or create interventions for children and youth with disabilities. Most recently, she has taken the lead on a study published this past July, titled “An Umbrella Review of the Characteristics of Resiliency-Enhancing Interventions for Children and Youth with Disabilities. Disability and Rehabilitation.” This paper reviews and synthesizes a variety of literature to identify evidence-based “key intervention characteristics” that have enhanced resiliency in young people: self-regulatory skills, self-efficacy, capacity building, positive social connectedness and a customized intervention approach. These characteristics can help inform interventions while also providing a framework for future research projects. As a result, individuals with disabilities can develop adaptive skills for life’s stressors more easily.

There are two myths about disability that Parvinchi seeks to provide clarity on. First, she shares that many people think resilience is about having a strong will. Rather, she says, it is a process that happens in the context of community. “Everyone has the capacity to bounce back,” she explains. Secondly, she shares that it is common for people to assume that families who have a child with a disability are fraught with negativity and struggle. While these may be part of the family’s experience, she clarifies that these families also have many positive experiences that foster hope, optimism, meaning and cohesion.

Even before I was a Christian, the more I studied, the more I was in awe of the mind, the design of the human brain.

Improving Quality of Life

As she was completing her PhD dissertation, she discovered one particularly fascinating finding—and some of her hypothesizes ended up being incorrect. When administering cognitive tests to children with and without Tourettes Syndrome (TS), the children with TS performed better. They had better inhibitory control—holding themselves back from having a reaction—than children without these disabilities. She thought this was an error at first, though later realized this was a result of these children inhibiting their “ticks” on a daily basis. This everyday self-training was changing the children’s brains, and this finding has guided Parvinchi’s research ever since.

“If everyday activities can create biologically based changes … then you could include activities in people’s lives and make positive changes, the changes they want in their life.”

In her more recent research, Parvinchi has shifted toward taking a strength-based approach, as opposed to a deficit-based approach she has taken in the past. Though academic definitions vary, in short, the deficit approach focuses on the ability to stop oneself from taking an action, whereas the strength approach focuses on one’s ability to take an action. The question turns from “What can youth do to limit reflexive habits or patterns?” to “What can youth do to improve their quality of life?”

Research at Redeemer

She is currently working on bringing at least two major research projects to Redeemer. First, she wants to run a small-scale study to determine the effectiveness of how certain intervention features can enhance resiliency. The second project is also about resiliency, but focuses on analyzing brain imaging and clinical data collected by the Ontario Brain Institute, in collaboration with a colleague from Brock University.

I see signatures of God in human functioning, cognition, emotion and behaviour.

Now able to conduct research in the context of Christian education, she looks forward to diving deeper into research factors like meaning, purpose and religiosity that she has not yet had the chance to explore.

“When you do the research well, it does latch onto some truth, and the truth that it reveals is consistent with what the Bible teaches. I just find that amazing, because that means that the information we have from the Bible transcends time … I see signatures of God in human functioning, cognition, emotion and behaviour. I do see the beauty in all those branches of psychology, and I do see the brokenness in all of them as well.”