Studies

This study examines the way attention may be linked to temperament and emotional behavior starting in infancy.

Infants ages 3-months to 24-months with a variety of temperaments will be included in the study.  Infants will view pictures of faces and children’s videos in order to examine patterns of attention.

We will use state-of-the-art eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to assess how infants attend to different emotions.  Infants will also play with a variety of objects and toys as a part of a standard assessment of temperament.  These data will allow us to see how patterns of visual attention may be associated with social and emotional behavior.  Since this is a multi-step study, participating families will be paid for their time and effort.

If you want to participate please contact us at beadlab@usc.edu

Young children navigate a complex social world, in which they give and receive both positive and negative feedback from their peers. In this study, 5- and 8-year-old children will participate in a computer-based ‘play date’ task modeled on daily social encounters.

Previous studies from our lab have shown that individual differences in attention may shape how children respond to social feedback. We will therefore ask children to complete two computer-based attention tasks involving faces and symbols. During each task, heart rate and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings will be measured. These measures will allow us to examine how the body and brain respond to social feedback among healthy young children. We hope to use the results of this study to better understand the difficulties faced by socially anxious children.

If you want to participate please contact us at beadlab@usc.edu

The BEAD Lab is joining in a nationwide effort to explore the impact of early adversity on infant and childhood development. In collaboration with 25 institutions across the United States, this 6-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) aims to examine the influence of prenatal substance use and other environmental impacts on brain development and behavior in infants and children and provide new insights on healthy brain development overall. Behavioral measures and neurological measures, such as EEG and MRI, will be collected from babies across the first 5 years of life to analyze how prenatal and postnatal exposure to alcohol, drugs and other adversities impact the structure and function of the brain, as well as the development of social, emotional and cognitive processes. This project is done in collaboration with Drs. Pat Levitt, Beth Smith, and Jessica Wisnowski at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA).

The BEAD Lab is part of NIH’s ECHO program, which supports multiple, synergistic, longitudinal studies using existing cohorts to investigate environmental exposures — including physical, chemical, biological, social, behavioral, natural and built environments — on child health and development. The BEAD is part of The Safe Passage Study in South Dakota. This study is a longitudinal investigation that includes individuals on whom there is extensive physiological and behavioral data during the infancy period. These children will be assessed at 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 14 years of age on several EEG and ERP tasks. The BEAD Lab is working with Avera Health and University of Maryland to oversee testing, analysis, and publication. The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of how early exposures influence children’s neural, cognitive, and emotional development.

Project SPACE examines child development in different global contexts of adversity. SPACE aims to test when and how early EEG measures may predict later child socioemotional development related to school-readiness. Using existing large developmental datasets, we seek to build and compare predictive biomarker profiles of both risk and resilience across different contexts of adversity. Specifically, we focus on: 1) psychosocial deprivation that occurs with institutional care through data from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project in Bucharest, Romania, and 2) urban poverty in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where adverse conditions may include frequent inflammation and chronic illness, malnutrition, polution, and psychosocial stress. The ultimate goal for Project SPACE is to develop EEG profiles that may be used in randomized control trials in low-middle income countries to evaluate intervention efficacy in contexts of early adversity.