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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Subject: search.filters.subject.Physiological psychology

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    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 different
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    FEAR CONDITIONING ACROSS DEVELOPMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF FEAR ACQUISITION, EXTINCTION, AND GENERALIZATION IN 5-TO-10 YEAR OLD CHILDREN
    (2013) Hong, Melanie; Fox, Nathan A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The acquisition and extinction of fear is widely studied using fear conditioning (FC) paradigms. Few studies, however, have examined how fear learning emerges across development. Understanding the developmental mechanisms underlying FC can provide a framework to examine disruptions in fear learning, particularly when fears become pervasive as in the case of anxiety disorders. Traditional FC paradigms in adult and animal studies involve aversive stimuli, like shock, which present ethical limitations in youth. The present study aimed to examine the validity of a novel FC paradigm in a sample of sixty-four typically developing 9-to-15 year old children. Results revealed differential learning to the CS+ compared to the CS- during conditioning as evidenced by subjective fear ratings and greater skin conductance response. No differences emerged across pre-conditioning and extinction phases. Results from this study indicate the utility of this novel bell conditioning paradigm at eliciting fear learning and extinction behaviors in children.