Photo by Bia Andrade on Unsplash

The goal of our research is to advance scientific understanding of the regulation of thought, emotion, and behavior to promote mental and behavioral health across the lifespan. We study regulatory processes in different developmental periods, including infants, children, adolescents, emerging adults, and midlife, and in different contexts, such as in the presence of strangers, while bored, or processing emotions.

Infancy and Childhood. Children’s emerging self-regulatory abilities have a foundational role in development, preparing children to enter school, take on challenges, manage stress, and navigate relationships. These early developing self-regulatory abilities impact health across the lifespan. Our lab has several ongoing collaborations with Maria Gartstein, director of the WSU Infant Temperament Lab in the Department of Psychology and expert in temperament, emotion regulation, and parent-infant relationships. Our research is examining the influence of the functional organization of the brain, parent-child interactions, and temperament during infancy on emotion regulation and the emergence of top-down regulatory processes in early childhood. We have followed these children into middle childhood to examine early predictors of the emergence of social anxiety.

Adolescence. Adolescence is a critical transition period in development. Adolescents’ interests are evolving, and they are acquiring increasingly more autonomy. Research by our colleague Dr. Elizabeth Weybright, director of the Adolescent Health Promotion Lab, has shown adolescents are also experiencing more boredom now than years past. Boredom is a negative emotion that induces stress and requires regulatory skills to effectively resolve. People who experience boredom frequently are also more likely to engage in risky behaviors and experience mental health problems. Our research is examining age-related change in boredom and testing whether adolescents appropriately self-regulate when the encounter situations that are understimulating and induce boredom. One important goal of this work is to identify when and why adolescents experience boredom to help promote healthy strategies to mitigate boredom.

Emerging Adulthood. Our lab is investigating the brain basis of individual differences in self-regulation as it relates to emotion regulation, temperament, and mental health in emerging adults, which is an important developmental transition between adolescence and young adulthood. We have several lines of research ongoing with emerging adults. One area of interest is in individual differences in functional brain networks that underlie processing of emotion information and mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.

Midlife. Midlife is the afternoon of life and represents a critical period of development to prepare for good health and well-being in late life. Midlife is a unique period of the lifespan where our health simultaneously reflects our life history and sets the stage for our future health. In collaboration with Dr. Raven Weaver, co-director of the GATHER Lab, our lab is investigating the impact of stress on brain aging, cognition, and mental health in midlife. We hope to advance understanding of the role of stress on preparedness for aging as well.