Undergraduate Research Day 2020
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20158
With students involved in so many research opportunities, Undergraduate Research Day provides the perfect opportunity for them to share their work with the campus community. Held each April, Undergraduate Research Day showcases current research, scholarship, and artistic endeavors.
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Item Maternal Anxiety, Temperament & Brain Morphometry in Infancy(2020) Margolis, Emma; Filippi, Courtney; Ravi, Sanjana; Bracy, Maya; Pine, Daniel; Fox, Nathan; Filippi, Courtney; Fox, NathanMaternal factors (e.g., maternal anxiety) and infant temperament (e.g., distress to novelty) shape children’s social-emotional development. However, we know relatively little about the impact these factors have on infant brain development. This study investigates associations between maternal anxiety, distress to novelty (i.e., negative reactivity) and brain morphometry at 4-months. At 4-months, infants’ temperament was assessed by identifying distress in response to novel stimuli. Mothers completed the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) to measure maternal anxiety. Within 2-weeks, high-resolution structural MRI data were acquired during infants’ natural sleep. MRI data were processed using the iBEAT (Dai et al, 2013) pipeline to obtain subcortical and cortical volume estimates. Regression analyses were conducted to investigate whether infant temperament moderated the relation between maternal anxiety and brain volume at a priori selected regions of interest, controlling for total intracranial volume. Results indicate that there was no significant interaction or main effect of temperament. However, there was a main effect of maternal anxiety in all ROIs tested. Greater maternal anxiety predicted larger hippocampus (β=.417,p<.036), amygdala (β=.429,p<.031), superior frontal gyrus (β=.410,p<.041), middle frontal gyrus (β=.411,p<.039), inferior frontal gyrus (β=.404,p<.039), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (β=.416,p<.039) and posterior cingulate cortex (β=.407,p<.042). This study provides novel evidence that increased maternal anxiety is linked to differences in child-brain morphometry.Item MRI Processing Pipeline Variability and Infant Brain Morphometry Associations to 4-Month Infant Temperament(2020) Foster, Kayla; Filippi, Courtney; Margolis, Emma; Ravi, Sanjana; Bracy, Maya; Pine, Daniel; Fox, Nathan; Fox, Nathan; Filippi, CourtneyNegative reactive temperament, an infant temperament characterized by fear of novelty, is associated with adolescent amygdala volume (Filippi et al, 2020) and adult prefrontal cortex (PFC) thickness (Schwartz et al, 2010). However, it remains unknown whether these differences in brain morphometry emerge in infancy. Further, evaluating this possibility is a challenge because few pipelines are optimized for processing infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Thus, evaluation of available infant MRI processing pipelines is necessary prior to examining associations between negative reactivity and brain morphometry. This study examines (1) which MRI pipeline performs best for 4-month-old infant MRI data and (2) associations between temperament and brain morphometry. Behavioral reactivity was assessed by presenting novel stimuli to infants. High-resolution structural MRI data was acquired a few weeks later. MRI data were processed using the iBEAT (Dai et al, 2013), dHCP (Makropoulos et al, 2018), and CIVET (Ad-Dab’bagh et al., 2006) pipelines to obtain estimates of amygdala and PFC volume. The quality of segmentations of the three pipelines was then assessed. The processing pipelines showed differences in terms of quality of gray/white segmentation and percentage of processing failures. Overall, iBEAT performed the best with the highest percent of useable data. Using the iBEAT output, we examined the associations between infant brain morphometry and reactivity. Results indicated no significant association between amygdala or PFC volume and reactivity.Item Personality Parallels: Parent Neuroticism Predicts Child Social Anxiety(2020) Patel, Harshi; Seddio, Kaylee; Fox, NathanSocial anxiety is one of the most common mental health disorders amongst children and adolescents. There are many external factors associated with social anxiety including negative life events, impaired interactions with other individuals, and maladaptive lifestyle changes. In particular, during adolescence, the consequences of social anxiety can include unsatisfactory relationships with peers and changes in academic responsibility. Previous studies support maternal personality to be associated with the development of mental health disorders in their children. The mother’s personality influences the mother’s interaction with the child and creates the environment in which development occurs. The current study focuses on the influence of parent personality, specifically, neuroticism, on the prevalence of social anxiety in their children. Parents high in neuroticism tend to not be as present in providing support to their children. As well their inability to control emotions leads to unpredictable behavior. In the current study, 243 participants were recruited. Participants were given questionnaires to complete including the NEO-FFI parent report (maternal personality) at 4 years and the SCARED child report (child social anxiety) at 12 and 15 years. An independent samples t-test was performed to look at gender differences in terms of anxiety and parent neuroticism. Results revealed that females reported higher anxiety than males; however, gender was not significant to be a mediator between social anxiety and neuroticism. Neuroticism reported by the mother at 4 years was shown to predict total anxiety on the SCARED when the child was both 12 [F(1, 168)=4.868, p=.029] and 15 years old [F(1, 149)=8.05, p=.005]. This suggests maternal personality is a stable predictor of later childhood anxiety.Item Children’s Evaluations of Ingroup and Outgroup Members Following Accusations of Wrongdoing(2020) Ackerman, Elizabeth; D'Esterre, Alexander; Glidden, Jacqueline; Butler, Luke; Killen, MelanieChildren are commonly involved in competitive activities that can result in misunderstands because of differing interpretations of ambiguous situations. This study investigates if the group identity of children affects their interpretation of ambiguous situations when there is an accusation of misconduct. The results support the hypothesis because there was a divergence of evaluations based on team membership following an accusation of cheating.Item Parasympathetic Nervous System Functioning in Adolescents with Anxiety(2020) Modico, Maggie; Fox, Nathan; Zeytinoglu, SelinBased on theoretical work on the role of autonomic dysregulation in the development of psychopathology, previous work has shown relations between respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and anxiety (Chalmers et al., 2016; Blom et al., 2010; Monk et al., 2001). RSA serves as an indicator of adaptability, where high levels of RSA reflect flexible and low levels of RSA demonstrate less flexible responding (Pitting et al., 2013). We hypothesized that participants with an anxiety disorder will have lower RSA at baseline and during social situations than those without anxiety. Participants (N=92) were 15-year-olds selected as part of a larger longitudinal study examining the role of infant temperament on adolescent mental health. 33 participants were diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and 59 participants had no diagnosis. RSA was measured using electrocardiogram (EKG) during baseline, an unstructured social interaction task (Get to Know You, GTKY) and a stressful speech task. We derived RSA from the EKG. Independent t-tests were used. Those with an anxiety disorder (M= 6.44) compared to those with no clinical diagnosis (M= 7.08) demonstrated significantly lower baseline RSA, t =2.97, p=.004. Compared to those with no diagnosis, participants with an anxiety disorder showed lower RSA during GTKY and Speech, t =2.83, p=.006 and t = 2.62, p=.01, respectively. Our results showed that individuals diagnosed with anxiety have lower RSA across both baseline and social tasks than those without anxiety. The role of RSA in anxiety should be examined as it may serve as a biomarker used for treatment and intervention.Item Upset and Unfocused: ADHD symptoms and cognitive abilities as moderators for working memory performance under varying levels of emotional load(2020) Weisman, Hannah; Mohan, Svetha; Bowman, Evan; Bolger, DonaldBackground: ADHD symptoms are prevalent among college students and frequently cause executive function (EF) impairments. While EF impairments are well studied in this population, the interaction between emotional arousal/mood, working memory (WM), ADHD symptoms and cognitive abilities (CA) still remains unclear. Methods: 50 undergraduate participants’ ADHD symptoms and EF were assessed through cognitive assessments and behavioral questionnaires before they completed WM tasks under varying levels of laboratory-induced emotional load. Results: Participants with high ADHD symptoms and/or low CA struggled with the experimental WM task. Under emotional load, those with hyperactive-impulsive ADHD symptoms struggled with self-regulatory aspects of EF: producing more intrusions and recognition errors. The CA groups’ deficits were tied closer to recall ability – with and without added load. Conclusion: These findings further support that there are many reasons for WM challenges and that there is no single assessment that can identify the underlying cause of these struggles.