Behavioral Foundations of Friendship Study (BFFs)
NIMH F31 MH121035 - PI Alicia Vallorani; Sponsor Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar - January 2020 - December 2022
This study is designed to measure within-person variation in behavior during, attention to and neural processing of a naturalistic social interaction. Individuals either high or low in social anxiety will visit the lab with a close friend of the same gender identity. They will engage in a 25 minute 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). 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.
Collaborators on the grant include Drs. Michael Hallquist, Kristin A. Buss, Erika Forbes and Johanna Jarcho.
Development of Social Attention
NIMH R01 MH109692 - PIs Drs. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Kristin A. Buss & Vanessa LoBue
I am using growth based trajectory modeling to examine individual differences in developmental trajectories of orienting to socio-emotional stimuli, as measured by stationary eye-tracking, in infants from 4- to 24-months. I will then examine how different trajectories relate to behavior during a social dyad at 24-months and how this relation is moderated by infant temperament.
Attention and Emotion During Play
NIMH R21 MH111980 - PI Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar
I am collaborating with fellow Penn State graduate student Kayla M. Brown to use vector auto-regressive models to examine how second-by-second changes in self and other attention, as measured by dyadic mobile eye-tracking, and emotion influences where a child is looking during play.
