Human Development & Quantitative Methodology
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2248
The departments within the College of Education were reorganized and renamed as of July 1, 2011. This department incorporates the former departments of Measurement, Statistics & Evaluation; Human Development; and the Institute for Child Study.
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Item Social Influences of Error Monitoring(2016) Barker, Tyson Vern; Fox, Nathan A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Adolescence is characterized by dramatic hormonal, physical, and psychological changes, and is a period of risk for affective and anxiety disorders. Pubertal development during adolescence plays a major role in the emergence of these disorders, particularly among girls. Thus, it is critical to identify early biomarkers of risk. One potential biomarker, the error-related negativity (ERN), is an event-related potential following an erroneous response. Individuals with an anxiety disorder demonstrate a greater ERN than healthy comparisons, an association which is stronger in adolescence, suggesting that pubertal development may play a role in the ERN as a predictor of anxiety. One form of anxiety often observed in adolescence, particularly among girls, is social anxiety, which is defined as anxiety elicited by social-evaluative contexts. In adults, enhancements of the ERN in social-evaluative contexts is positively related to social anxiety symptoms, suggesting that the ERN in social contexts may serve as a biomarker for social anxiety. This dissertation examined the ERN in and its relation with puberty and social anxiety among 76 adolescent girls. Adolescent girls completed a flanker task in two differentItem Neural Bases of Emotional Language Processing in Individuals with and without Autism(2015) Sand, Lesley Ann; Bolger, Donald J.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A fundamental aspect of successful social interactions is the ability to accurately infer others’ verbal communication, often including information related to the speaker’s feelings. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by language and social-affective impairments, and also aberrant functional neural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The main objective of the current research was to examine the behavioral and neural effects of making affective inferences from language lacking overt prosody or explicit emotional words in individuals with and without autism. In neurotypical individuals, the current data are consistent with previous studies showing that verbal emotional stimuli enhances activation of brain regions generally responsive to discourse, and also “social-affective” brain regions, specifically medial/orbital frontal regions, bilateral middle temporal areas, temporal parietal junction/superior temporal gyri and pCC/PC. Moreover, these regions respond differentially to positive and negative valence, most clearly in the medial frontal area. Further, results suggest that mentalizing alone does not account for the differences between emotional and neutral stories, as all of our stories required similar inferencing of the feelings of the protagonist. In autism, there is general agreement that the neurodevelopmental disorder is marked by impairments in pragmatic language understandings, emotional processes, and the ability to “mentalize,” others’ thoughts, intentions and beliefs. However, findings are mixed regarding the precise nature of emotional language understandings. Results of the present study suggest that autistic individuals are able to make language-based emotional inferences, and that like neurotypical controls, social-affective brain regions show task-related facilitation effects for emotional compared to neutral valence. However, the neural activations in the autism group were generally greater than controls, especially in response to emotion. Additionally, results showed greater difficulty with incongruent judgments in participants with autism. Together, these findings represent a first step toward revealing social-affective abilities in the language context in autism, despite irregular brain response. Such understandings are critical to generating effective intervention strategies and therapeutic practices for autistic individuals and their families. For remediation to be most beneficial, one must understand and utilize areas of skill, and leverage those to positively impact deficits.Item PREFERENCE-FOR-SOLITUDE, FRIENDSHIP SUPPORT, AND INTERNALIZING DIFFICULTIES DURING EARLY ADOLESCENCE IN THE U.S.A. AND CHINA(2014) Wang, Jennifer M.; Rubin, Kenneth H.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social withdrawal has been associated with adjustment difficulties across development. Although much is known about shyness, little is known about preference-for-solitude; even less is known about how friendship might influence its relations with adolescent adjustment across different cultures. In particular, despite the significance of friendship for youth adjustment, not much is known about the ways in which friendship quality might lead to different adjustment outcomes for youth who prefer solitude; even less is known about these relations across different cultures. Accordingly, the overall goal of this research was to examine the relations between preference-for-solitude, friendship support, and internalizing difficulties during early adolescence in the U.S.A. and China. Specifically, this research examined the moderating role of friendship support in the relations between preference-for-solitude and internalizing difficulties (negative affect, negative self-esteem) in early adolescence across the U.S.A. and China. The U.S.A sample comprised 300 American youth (121 boys; M age = 14.28 years, SD = .51) from the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. The China sample comprised 201 youth living in Beijing, China (86 boys; M age = 14.21 years, SD = .62). Participants across both samples completed self- reports of social withdrawal (shyness; preference-for-solitude), friendship support, and internalizing difficulties (negative affect; negative self-esteem). Results from structural equation modeling demonstrated that preference-for-solitude and shyness emerged as related but unique dimensions of withdrawal across both the U.S.A. and China. Consistent with previous research, preference-for-solitude was positively associated with negative affect and negative self-esteem across both samples. In the U.S.A., friendship support significantly moderated the link between preference-for-solitude and negative self-esteem: preference-for-solitude was most associated with negative self-esteem beyond shyness for American youth with low friendship support. This was not found for negative affect; friendship support did not significantly moderate the effect of preference-for-solitude on negative affect in American youth. In China, friendship support did not significantly moderate any of the relations between preference-for-solitude and internalizing difficulties. Rather, for Chinese youth, preference-for-solitude and friendship support contributed independently beyond the effects of shyness to negative affect and negative self-esteem. In summary, preference-for-solitude was positively associated with negative affect and negative self-esteem in early adolescence across the U.S.A. and China. In the U.S.A., preference-for-solitude was most associated with negative self-esteem for youth with low friendship support. In addition to contributing to the developmental literature on preference-for-solitude, findings highlight the role of close interpersonal relationships for understanding the heterogeneity of withdrawal in development and across different cultures.