Behavioral Foundations of Friendship Study (BFFs)
NIMH F31 MH121035 - PI Alicia Vallorani; Sponsor Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar - January 2020 - December 2022
The primary training goal of the fellowship is to provide experience in neuroimaging data collection, processing and modeling from both a clinical and social neuroscience perspective, with two planned studies. Collaborators on the grant include Drs. Michael Hallquist, Kristin A. Buss, Erika Forbes and Johanna Jarcho.
Study 1 is designed to measure within-person variation in behavior, social attention to and mentalizing system connectivity during a naturalistic social interaction. Undergraduates high or low in social anxiety will visit the lab with a close friend to engage in a social interaction while mobile eye-tracking data are collected. Participants will then ‘relive’ the experience in the scanner from both their, and their friend's, perspective (as collected via the mobile eye-tracking system). I will use multilevel modeling to examine how second-by-second behavior and attention relates to changes in mentalizing system connectivity over time.
Study 2 is designed to assess relations between behavioral synchrony and mentalizing system connectivity during a naturalistic social interaction. Data were collected at the ANDP Lab led by Dr. Erika Forbes. Adolescents engaged in a social interaction with a close friend and then relived the experience from their perspective in the scanner. I will use multilevel modeling to examine how second-by-second behavioral synchrony relates to changes in mentalizing system connectivity over time.
Development of Social Attention
NIMH R01 MH109692 - PIs Drs. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Kristin A. Buss & Vanessa LoBue
Study 1 examines how bi-directional relations between affect-biased attention (as measured across three stationary eye-tracking tasks), maternal anxiety and infant negative affect influence social attention development across the first year of life.
Study 2 examines how individual differences in developmental trajectories of social attention, as measured by stationary eyetracking, across the first two years of life relate to behavior during a social dyad at 24-months as well as how this relation is moderated by infant temperament.
Attention and Emotion During Play
NIMH R21 MH111980 - PI Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar
In collaboration with fellow Penn State graduate student Kayla M. Brown, I am examining how second-by-second changes in social attention, as measured by dyadic mobile eye-tracking, and emotion influences where children gaze during play.
