CURRENT PROJECTS

PCAT: Parent-to-Child Anxiety Transmission

This is a NIMH-funded study designed to examine how parents and children develop anxiety and affect each other. We are studying children who are 4 to 6 years old. For this project, we are working with Dr. Susan Perlman and her team at the Washington University in St. Louis.

Parents will play games with their child while we collect data about their brain activity. Parents and children will also get to wear eye-tracking glasses to help us learn what they pay attention to.

Participating families will be compensated for their time and effort. We are particularly excited to have dads participate. If you are interested in joining our study, you can fill out this form, call (814) 867-2322, or email catlabpsu@gmail.com.

HBCD: The Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium

The Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium is a collaboration amongst 24 sites in the United States. The goal of this consortium is to create a dataset that will allow researchers to examine what influences neurodevelopmental trajectories. To this end, we will look at cognitive, social, and biological measures of healthy development.

We are recruiting pregnant women for this study, who will be compensated for their time and effort. If you are interested in participating, please email hbcd@psu.edu or call (814) 863-6018.

BFFs: Behavioral Foundations of Friendship Study

This study, led by PhD students Alicia Vallorani and Marisa Lytle, uses naturalistic methods to assess socioemotional processes underlying social interactions during emerging adulthood.

Young adults visit the lab with a friend and engage in a social interaction while mobile eye-tracking and heart rate data are collected. Participants return for a second fMRI visit where they “re-live” the social interaction by watching videos pulled from each participant’s eye-tracker. Thus, participants view moments of the social interaction from both their own and their friend’s perspective.

Data collected across multiple levels of analysis will enable researchers to ask questions about how individuals experience and interpret their social world.

EMIS: Emotion Regulation and Mother-Infant Synchrony

Did you know that babies begin to regulate their emotions as early as 3 months? Of course, they do so in very simple ways, such as sucking their thumb or looking at a colorful toy - which distracts them. Babies also need their caregivers to regulate! Through interacting with their parents, babies pick on emotional cues that can help them soothe when they are upset or feel safe when they are fearful.

In this study, we are interested in understanding how the brain supports these simple strategies that babies use to regulate their emotions. Additionally, we are also interested in whether babies' brains synchronize with their moms' brains when they need mom's help to regulate. To explore these interests, we use functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning, which is a non-invasive method to record brain activity from mom and baby at the same time, while they engage in some games together. We are also asking moms to answer some questions about their health, the baby's temperament, and the home environment to better understand how emotion regulation develops in context.

This study is actively recruiting families. If you have an infant who is 7 months or younger and want to participate, contact us today!

LAnTs: Longitudinal Attention and Temperament Study

For this project, we are partnering with Dr. Kristin Buss’s lab at Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Vanessa LoBue’s lab at Rutgers University. We are examining the link between attention, temperament, and emotional behavior, as well as how this link changes as infants age from 4-months to 24-months.

Children will play with objects and toys to help us learn about their temperament. They also will watch videos of people’s faces, and we will use eye-tracking equipment to learn what they are interested in and dislike.

We are no longer enrolling new participants in our study. If you would like to be a participant in our lab, check out the opportunities above or email catlabpsu@gmail.com.