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 NEURAL CHRONOMETRY OF VISUAL ATTENTION & THREAT PROCESSING(2018) Haas, Sara A; Fox, Nathan A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most anxiety disorders in adults emerge during adolescence, and if left untreated, pediatric anxiety disorders predict adverse mental and physical health outcomes in adolescents and adults. While genetic heritability is a contributing risk factor, a heightened tendency to direct attention preferentially to threat represents one of the strongest information-processing correlates of anxiety; such an attention bias may shape both the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms. Attentional performance differences have been observed on emotion cueing visual attention tasks as a function of both clinical and sub-clinical anxiety levels. Previous work in adults observed that for adults with higher anxiety symptoms, efficiency of visual search was degraded by threat-cueing faces. However, further work is required to clarify the emergence attentional biases in adolescents, to inform methods for early identification, intervention and treatment of individuals at risk for anxiety. The present study examined the impact of emotional priming on attention as a function of anxiety using a task in which emotional faces were used as primes for a visual search task. Event Related Potentials (ERP) (P1, N170 and N2pc) were recorded in concert with behavioral responses to address the chronometry and quality of attentional processing as a function of anxiety symptoms in adolescents, 12-17 years of age. Early P1 and N170 processing in the first few hundred milliseconds of viewing face primes, differed as a function of both anxiety and prime emotion. Moreover, these anxiety-related early processing differences related to subsequent behavior. Variability in the N2pc attention-related processing during visual search also varied as a function of anxiety and prime type, as well as affected subsequent behavior. This dissertation found both early and later occurring attentional processes have significant ramifications for individuals with higher anxiety scores, such that in addition to neural differences, high anxious individuals also display significant differences in behavior. While early and late neural processes varied in lower anxious individuals as a function of face prime type, relations with behavior were minimal in comparison. These findings are discussed as they relate to emotion processing, threat responsivity to facial stimuli, and applicability to pediatric and adult clinical anxiety.Item The impact of stress on the prefrontal cortex: a view of how socioeconomic status impacts executive function(2017) Feola, Brandee; Bolger, Donald J; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By the time they reach kindergarten, children from low Socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds lag behind their high SES peers in a host of cognitive abilities including executive function. The mechanism of how SES impacts executive function is still unclear; however, recent research eludes to the effects of stress regulation of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis on cortical development as a promising explanation. Children raised in low SES backgrounds are exposed to a multitude of environmental stressors that can impact the child’s development of their stress response and regulation within the HPA axis. Alterations within the HPA axis, particularly cortisol levels, are shown to impact brain development especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which is a major region supporting executive function. Although the stress regulation mechanism seems valid, the influence of early life stress on the PFC and subsequent executive function outcomes have not been directly tested. The current study aimed to examine how earlier and concurrent responses to stress, as reflected in measures of cortisol reactivity, relate to neural and behavioral measures of executive function within the framework of how SES impacts executive function. This longitudinal study consisted of two waves of data collection, the first wave was collected when the children were 3-5 years old and the second wave when the children were 7-10 years old. Measures of executive functioning and cortisol stress response were collected during both waves, whereas structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain were collected at the second wave. Although multiple analyses were conducted and numerous nonsignificant results were present, the significant results suggest variations in cortisol reactivity relate to executive function, overall brain volume, and regional differences in cortical thickness within the PFC including middle frontal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. Within the bigger SES framework, SES was related to cortisol reactivity and executive function. SES differences were found in total grey matter and regional cortical thickness within the PFC including the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. The cortical thickness of the right inferior frontal cortex mediated the association between SES and executive function. The inferior frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex were associated with both cortisol reactivity and SES suggesting these regions may contribute to the mechanism of how SES impacts executive function via stress regulation or dysregulation. Although future studies are necessary to replicate findings on a larger scale, the current study is an encouraging step towards understanding how differential stress responses along the socio-economic ladder impact brain and cognitive development.Item 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 Development of the Mu Rhythm: Understanding Function Through Translational Research(2012) Vanderwert, Ross Edwin; Fox, Nathan A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The incidental discovery of mirror neurons (MN) has renewed interest in motor theories of development and has sparked considerable debate as to the existence and potential function of mirror neurons in humans. The use of invasive single-cell recordings, however, has precluded identification of single MNs in humans or developmental populations of non-human primates. Non-invasive techniques, such as the modulation of the mu rhythm in the electroencephalogram (EEG) of young infants and children, have demonstrated the existence of an action observation/execution matching system in humans. Moreover, the mu rhythm has become an effective tool for addressing questions of MN system ontogeny in other species. The aim of this project is to address two questions that have thus far remained untested. The goal of study one is to address the question of whether or not we can identify activation of the human action observation/execution system under conditions in which the participants cannot see themselves executing a grasping action. Evidence from study one further validates our EEG measures as representing activation of the putative human MN system. The goal of study two is to examine the origins of MNs in 3-day-old mother- and nursery-reared infant rhesus macaques and the extent to which differential experience may contribute to the MN system during episodes of neonatal imitation. The results of study one demonstrated activation of the putative human MN system to actions completed in the absence of visual feedback in both human adults and infants. The magnitude of mu rhythm activity in infants was significantly less than in the adults suggesting a role of experience in the formation of the putative human MN system. The results from study two further emphasized the role of early experience showing significantly greater modulation of the mu rhythm in the mother-reared compared to the nursery-reared infants to the observation of socio-affiliative facial gestures. The evidence of studies one and two are discussed within a developmental framework of ongoing behavioral development and highlight the role experience plays, not in the foundation of, but rather the elaboration of the MN system.