Office of Undergraduate Research

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Emphasizing equitable and inclusive access to research opportunities, the University of Maryland's Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) empowers undergraduates and faculty to engage and succeed in inquiry, creative activity, and scholarship. This collection includes materials shared by undergraduate researchers during OUR events. It also encompasses materials from Undergraduate Research Day 2020, Undergraduate Research Day 2021, and Undergraduate Research Day 2022, which were organized by the Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research.

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Age-related Differences Regarding Spontaneous Reasoning about Social Exclusion
    (2024) Moore, Sophia V.; Holloway, Hannah J.; Rumberger, Jonquil; Forbes, Marley B.; Kilby, Elena; Killen, Melanie
    Developmental science research has demonstrated age-related changes in children’s use of social and moral reasoning in contexts of intergroup social exclusion. Intergroup social exclusion refers to rejecting someone because of their group identity such as gender, race, and SES. Prior research has identified these patterns by individually interviewing children about their evaluations of different forms of social exclusion. What has not yet been examined is how children spontaneously reason about intergroup social exclusion in classroom-wide discussions. The present study addressed this gap by audio-recording teacher-facilitated classroom discussions that followed the use of an online tool depicting hypothetical intergroup exclusion scenarios once a week for eight weeks. Participants were ethnically and racially diverse 8- to 11-year-old elementary school students attending U.S. public schools in the Mid-Atlantic region, N = 522, N = 30 classrooms. The present study uses a smaller subset of the original sample, N = 6 classrooms. Three reasoning categories were analyzed for this project: moral (fairness, equity), group identity (ingroup preferences, group functioning) and psychological (personal choice). Preliminary analyses suggest age-related differences in children’s reasoning during discussions about race-based exclusion. Fifth graders referenced psychological reasons more often than third graders, who referenced mostly moral reasons. Quantitative analyses will elaborate further on these findings in the poster. These novel findings have broader implications for reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations in childhood using school-based interventions.
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    The Relation Between Early Childhood Behavioral Inhibition and Language Outcomes
    (2024) Trout, Makena; Fox, Nathan; Shin, So Yeon
    Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament classified as fearful reactions or withdrawal from unfamiliar situations. BI can be detected as early as four months, and it has been found to lead to many negative developmental outcomes. Children who exhibit BI tend to have limited formative interactions, which could hinder development. There is a significant amount of research regarding how early BI can predict socioemotional outcomes, such as social anxiety disorder; however, there is less information on how early BI may affect other developmental processes, such as language development. To address this gap in research, this project assessed the relation between BI at age 3 and language outcomes at ages 3 and 7. The data for this research project were obtained through the Temperament Over Time Study (TOTS), a longitudinal study investigating the individual and environmental factors associated with social development from infancy through childhood. Correlation matrices were performed to analyze the relation between the reported levels of BI at age 3 and the language scores from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory at age 3 and the Woodcock-Johnson-IV at age 7. The results from these analyses indicated a statistically significant correlation between BI and Sentence Complexity scores at age 3, which suggests a potential relation between BI and expressive language outcomes in the short term.
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    Maternal Anxiety, Temperament & Brain Morphometry in Infancy
    (2020) Margolis, Emma; Filippi, Courtney; Ravi, Sanjana; Bracy, Maya; Pine, Daniel; Fox, Nathan; Filippi, Courtney; Fox, Nathan
    Maternal 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.
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    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, Courtney
    Negative 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.
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    Personality Parallels: Parent Neuroticism Predicts Child Social Anxiety
    (2020) Patel, Harshi; Seddio, Kaylee; Fox, Nathan
    Social 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.
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    Children’s Evaluations of Ingroup and Outgroup Members Following Accusations of Wrongdoing
    (2020) Ackerman, Elizabeth; D'Esterre, Alexander; Glidden, Jacqueline; Butler, Luke; Killen, Melanie
    Children 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.
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    Parasympathetic Nervous System Functioning in Adolescents with Anxiety
    (2020) Modico, Maggie; Fox, Nathan; Zeytinoglu, Selin
    Based 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.
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    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, Donald
    Background: 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.