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Temperament and Social Behavior in Adolescence
This study examines the cognitive, social and psychiatric behaviors and outcomes of a sample of adolescents first recruited and selected when they were four-months-of-age for a longitudinal study at the Child Development Laboratory at the University of Maryland. Infants were selected for their reactions to novel auditory and visual stimuli and were assessed at 9, 14, 24, 48, and 84 months of age. Their social and emotional responses to novelty were assessed as were their physiological responses (EEG and ECG) to challenge. Through the measurement of their responses to these tasks we have characterized their infant temperament and have observed how these temperaments remain stable or change over time. These children, now between the ages of 15-17 are returning to UMD for a new set of assessments. During their visit, they participate in a number of tasks designed to assess their attention, reactions to novelty, and social competence. We are examining issues as varied as their attention bias to threat to their thoughts about romantic relationships. The Cognition, Affect, and Temperament Lab is working with UMD to oversee testing, analysis, and publication. We hope that our work will help expand our understanding of temperament into adolescence and also enrich our understanding of adolescence in and of itself.
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Neural Substrates of Behavioral Inhibition in Adolescence
Building on the large longitudinal study (Temperament and Social Behavior in Adolescence), a subset of adolescents have come to the National Institute of Mental Health for a series of studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This work is done in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Pine at the section for developmental and affective neuroscience (SDAN). The first, completed, study examined the links between temperament and neural response to two classes of motivationally salient stimuli: emotional faces and monetary incentives. The findings indicate that behaviorally inhibited adolescents show greater amygdala and striatal activation to salient stimuli, implicating the fear circuit and reward processes. The second, ongoing, study is continuing our study of reward processes in inhibited adolescents. We are now in the process of planning study three which will focus on social processing in adolescents.
Current Projects
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Biological and Emotional Consequences of Social Stressors
Developmental research shows that individual children differ in the way they react to and handle social stress. These differences are evident in their behavioral responses and in their underlying physiology. In this study, seven-year-old children were asked to give a speech about their most embarrassing moment, with a two-minute preparation period. Children were videotaped during the preparation time. In addition, we collected measures of electroencephalogram (EEG) activity during preparation. The EEG measures the normal electrocortical activity of the brain. Work in children and adults show that differing patterns of EEG activity can reflect underlying emotional biases and can shift with the current demands of the situation. As a result, our analyses will focus on how EEG activity shifts between periods of rest and under the stress of preparing a speech. Laboratory members are coding the children’s responses to see if the underlying biology is evident in behavior. In terms of individual differences, we are interested to see if early temperament shapes these patterns. In particular, we believe that children temperamentally predisposed to shyness or social withdrawal will show more ‘distress’ to the presentation task.
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The Link Between Attention and Individual Differences in Response to Social Stressors
Undergraduates are currently participating in this study, in anticipation of future application to children. Recent work suggests that anxious (and perhaps depressed) individuals show a bias to threatening stimuli in the environment. We are presenting participants with threatening (angry) and non-threatening (happy) stimuli during an attention task in order to track individual differences in attention bias. In addition, participants are asked to give a short presentation. Presentations have been used with children and adults as social stressors. We also record the electrocortical activity of the brain (EEG, ERP) during both tasks, in order to examine the biological links between attention and social stress. Electrocortical activity is recorded in George Mason's ERP Systems Lab, which is also located in David King Hall.
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