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 AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF IBI VIZEDIT: AN RSHINY APPLICATION FOR OBTAINING ACCURATE ESTIMATES OF AUTONOMIC REGULATION OF CARDIAC ACTIVITY(2018) Barstead, Matthew; Rubin, Kenneth H; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensors are increasingly used to collect individual heart rate data during laboratory assessments and psychological experiments. PPG sensors are relatively cheap, easy to use, and non-invasive alternatives to the more common electrodes used to produce electrocardiogram recordings. The downside is that these sensors are more susceptible to signal distortion. Often, the most relevant measures for understanding psychological processes that underlie emotions and behaviors are measures of heart rate variability. As with all measures of variability, outliers (i.e., signal artifacts) can have outsized effects on the final estimates; and, given that these scores represent a primary variable of interest in many research contexts, the successful elimination of artefactual points is critical to the ability to make valid inferences with the data. Prior to the development of IBI VizEdit, there was no single, integrated processing and editing pipeline for PPG data. The present pair of studies offers and initial evaluation of the program’s performance. Study 1 is focused on the efficacy of a novel approach to imputing sections of particularly corrupted PPG signal. Study 2 tests the ability of trained editors to reliably use IBI VizEdit as well as the validity of estimates of cardiac activity during a prescribed set of laboratory tasks. Study 1 suggests that the novel imputation approach, under certain conditions and using certain parameterizations may hold promise as a means of accurately imputing missing sections of data. However, Study 1 also clearly demonstrates the need for further refinement and the consideration of alternative implementations. The results from Study 2 indicate that IBI VizEdit can be reliably used by trained editors and that estimates of cardiac activity derived from its output are likely valid.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.