CAT Lab Welcomes Visiting Assistant Professor

Welcome to Evin Aktar who joins the lab as a visiting professor!

Evin, who received her doctoral and post-doctoral training in Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Amsterdam, is currently an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology at Leiden University. She is interested in the early transmission of of depression and anxiety from parents to children.

Evin received a Rubicon Grant from De Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek to conduct research with the CAT Lab on the development of anxiety in preschool children. She will asses emotions and attention in parent-child dyads to understand mechanisms underlying intergenerational transmission of anxiety and depression. 

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Explains Why We Don't All View the World the Same Way

Dr. Pérez-Edgar recently contributed to the Blog on Learning Development to explain why people have varied experiences of the world. After highlighting the role of temperament in determining a person's predisposition to approach or withdraw from the environment, she discusses her work on how people use attention to filter their environmental experiences. She discusses how even in infancy we are already beginning to selectively attend to the environmental cues we deem most important. As we develop, temperament by attention interactions may become more apparent, helping researchers to understand why people have such varied experiences even when placed in the same situation.

Read the full article here.

CAT Lab Welcomes New Graduate Students

Welcome to Kelley Gunther and Shane Wise who have joined the CAT Lab as graduate students!

Kelley is a first-year graduate student in the developmental program under the primary mentorship of Dr. Pérez-Edgar. During her undergraduate education in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Kelley worked in the laboratory of Dr. Nathan Fox. She then spent two years as a research assistant for Dr. Dima Amaso at Brown University. Kelley is interested in the interactions between maternal care, attention biases and temperament and the impact of such interaction on the development of anxiety.

Shane is a first-year graduate student in the child clinical program under the primary mentorship of Dr. Cynthia Huang-Pollock. During his undergraduate education in psychology at the University of Maryland, Shane worked in the laboratory of Dr. Andrea Chronis-Tuscano. He then worked as research assistants at the Children's National Medical Center and the University of Maryland. Shane is interested in the relations between ADHD and anxiety and how attention may impact this relation.

Attention Bias to Threat During Infancy Predicted by Maternal Anxiety

Recent research from the CAT Lab published in Emotion examined how infants pay attention to social cues, especially emotion faces. The findings indicate that infants spend more time looking at angry faces compared to other faces. Moreover, we found that this was particularly the case for infants whose mothers reported higher levels of anxiety. Because age and temperament did not relate to looking time, we think that maternal anxiety, in particular, may impact children’s processing of threat-related information from very early in development.   Maternal anxiety therefore may serve as an early marker to predict socioemotional development.

Read the full report here.

Negative Emotion Impacts Emerging Attention Biases in Infants

Recent research from the CAT Lab to be published in Developmental Psychology looked at how temperament may impact how infants pay attention to social cues, especially emotion faces.  We found that older infants spend more time looking at emotion faces than younger infants. Young infants with low levels of negative emotion were faster to look away from angry faces. Attention, emotion, and temperament have all been linked to anxiety in older children and adults.  This study marks an important first step in understanding how these factors first emerge. 

Read the full report here. 

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Receives Prestigious Sabbatical Award

Congratulations to Dr. Pérez-Edgar who was awarded the 2017-2018 Cattell Sabbatical Award.

The Cattel Sabbatical Award is a competitive award sponsored by the James McKeen Cattel Fund and awarded by the Association for Psychological Science. The award will allow Dr. Pérez-Edgar to take time away from teaching to study advanced statistical techniques both at The Pennsylvania State University and national statistical workshops. She will apply these techniques to her current research projects which provide rich, nuanced data about how children navigate their social world.

To learn more about Dr. Pérez-Edgar’s plans, please see the Penn State News.

CAT Lab Welcomes Post-Doctoral Fellow

Welcome to Jin Qu who has joined the CAT Lab as a Post-Doctoral Fellow!

Jin joins the team to work on a longitudinal study assessing attention and temperament in infants. During her time in the lab, Jin will assist with data collection across 5 time points as well as lead behavioral coding. 

Jin graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a PhD in Human Development and Family Studies in 2017. Her research interests include infant socio-emotional development and the impact of caregiving environments on infant behavioral outcomes.

CAT Lab Researcher Eran Auday Defends Dissertation

Congratulations to CAT Lab graduate student Eran Auday who has successfully defended his dissertation!

Dr. Auday is a graduate student in the Child Clinical Psychology program. His program of research assessesstress and anxiety in children and adolescents in environments of violence (family, community, war) or as a result of parental-emotional deprivation.

In July, Dr. Auday will begin his internship at WellSpan Health in York, PA.

CAT Lab Researchers Honored by Society for Research in Child Development

Congratulations to Xiaoxue Fu, Leigha A. MacNeill, and Santiago Morales who received Travel Awards to present their research at the 2017 Society for Research in Child Development Conference.

Xiaoxue is a fifth-year graduate student in developmental psychology who is currently leading a study to assess how visual attention to environmental stimuli is related to social behaviors in children. Her presentation for SRCD described novel mobile eye-tracking technology used to assess attention to social stimuli in children.

Leigha is a fourth-year graduate student in developmental psychology interested in the biological underpinnings of the family’s emotional climate. One of her presentations for SRCD explored how children's baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia moderated the associations between mothers' and fathers' emotional expressiveness and children's observed prosocial behavior, as well as how these relations differed for siblings within the same family.  Her other presentation for SRCD examined how attention biases to emotional stimuli moderated the link between parenting style and child adjustment.

Santiago is a sixth-year graduate student in developmental psychology interested in emotion and emotion regulation in children exhibiting internalizing and externalizing behaviors. His presentation for SRCD explored how temperament and physiological markers of regulation influence how children process rejection and acceptance from peers.

CAT Lab Researcher Honored by Social Affective Neuroscience Society

Congratulations to Alicia Vallorani, first-year graduate student in developmental psychology, whose poster was awarded a 2017 SANS Poster Award.

Alicia and her colleagues examined how temperamental, cognitive, and electrophysiological risk markers combined to potentiate social anxiety symptoms in children between the ages of 9 and 12. Her work was presented at the 2017 SANS Conference.

CAT Lab Researcher Santiago Morales Defends Dissertation

Congratulations to CAT Lab graduate student Santiago Morales who has successfully defended his dissertation!

Dr. Morales is a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program. His program of research uses psychological, neurobiological, and behavioral measures to study emotion and emotion regulation in children predisposed to internalizing and externalizing behaviors.

In May, Dr. Morales will join the lab of Dr. Nathan A. Fox at the University of Maryland where he will use innovative methods to understand the role of attention and motor activity in social and emotional development.

Congratulations, Dr. Morales!

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Discusses Upcoming Project

Image credit: Penn State

Dr. Pérez-Edgar was recently interviewed about her upcoming project in collaboration with Dr. Buss, also of Penn State, and Dr. LoBue, of Rutgers University. Together, these collaborators seek to understand infant development and risks for developing anxiety later in life.

To learn more, please see the original article posted on the Penn State News.

CAT Lab Research Highlighted in US News & World Report

The Science of Shyness, featured in US News & World Report, discusses shyness in children and steps parents can take to aid shy children with social interactions. Dr. Pérez-Edgar describes the subtle differences between shyness and Social Anxiety Disorder.

CAT Lab Researchers Build Mobile Eye Tracker

Image credit: Lauren Ingram

Dr. Pérez-Edgar and Phil Galinsky were interviewed about their work building a mobile eye tracker. Traditional eye tracking requires a research participant to remain seated in a single position; however, this new technology allows participants to move while data about eye movement is collected. The CAT Lab intends to utilize this technology to better understand how children engage with their social world. 

To learn more, please see the original article posted on Penn State IT News.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Describes the Shy Child

Dr. Pérez-Edgar was recently interviewed for the article Born bashful: Psychologists have new insights into the causes and effects of childhood shyness in American Psychological Association Science Watch. She describes characteristics of shy children and how shyness can shape future development.

Funding Awarded to Design Mobile Eye Tracking Device

The CAT Lab received funding from the Center for Online Innovation in Learning (COIL) at PSU to design and test a mobile eye tracking device. The device will allow CAT Lab researchers to assess visual attention in children and adults as they engage in real-world interactions.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar describes this exciting new project in a video on the COIL website.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Discusses the Development of Anxiety

Dr. Pérez-Edgar was recently interviewed about her research on the development of anxiety and her current project assessing the role of attention in social behavior outcomes. She also talks about anxiety in students and steps to take to deal with school related anxiety.

To learn more, please see the original article posted on the Penn State News.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Featured by American Psychological Association

Image credit: Penn State

The APA's new Science in Action campaign highlights the work of psychologists on its website to help illustrate the ways in which science, and the application of psychology, benefits society and improves lives. Dr. Pérez-Edgar is profiled as part of the campaign.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar Interviewed for National Post Article

A recent study from the University of British Columbia suggesting that pessimists may have genetic differences that cause them to view the world less brightly than others was highlighted in the National Post.

Dr. Pérez-Edgar describes how these and other differences may lead children to develop into anxious adults.

Understanding how attention affects socioemotional development

Dr. Pérez-Edgar and the CAT Lab were highlighted by the American Psychological Association for their efforts to understand how attention shapes socioemotional development. By exploring biases in attention, Dr. Pérez-Edgar and her colleagues hope to find ways in which types of attention may predispose children to social anxiety later in life.

To learn more, please read the original story by Dr. Pérez-Edgar.