LEARN Lab

Adolescence is characterized by an increase in social motivation and sensitivity to the feedback of peers. While this social sensitivity is hypothesized to make adolescents more prone to negative health outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and risky behaviors, there may also be benefits to being more socially attuned.

In the LEARN lab, we investigate the tradeoffs of high social sensitivity measured via brain activity and behavior. Current studies examine whether showing more neural reactivity to peer feedback will exacerbate both the depression-enhancing effects of peer stress and the wellbeing-enhancing effects of peer support.

Upcoming projects will explore how social sensitivity changes over time and across life transitions that happen as adolescents navigate high school and emerging adulthood. This longitudinal research leverages multiple methods (e.g., fMRI, behavioral tasks, participant interviews) to assess how adolescents respond to a wide range of social experiences, in line with lab goals of studying development across diverse contexts and prioritizing work that centers wellbeing. 

Exposure to adversity is an unfortunately common childhood experience that shapes brain development and increases risk for poor mental health across the lifespan. In past work, we have found that adversity exposure predicts alterations in emotion processing as early as the preschool years and alters brain activity and psychopathology risk into adolescence. 

Projects in the LEARN lab explore how different dimensions of adversity exposure (e.g., threatening experiences, poverty, community and environmental stress) shape social-emotional processing across development. We also study protective factors including executive function and social support. An emerging line of research seeks to characterize positive adaptations youth demonstrate following adversity exposure that allow them to flourish despite these experiences.

A unifying theme of the work we do in the LEARN lab is considering how neural and psychological processes change over time. Towards this end, we leverage longitudinal designs to study the development of brain structure and function and behavioral changes in childhood and adolescence. Past studies have examined how densely assessed changes in brain development in the first years of life predict later executive function ability and have explored the development of  neural regulation of emotion in early adolescence. 

Upcoming projects in the lab will expand on this work and contribute to advances in the field by studying changes in neural activity, emotion processing, and social experience over a variety of timescales. Projects will utilize dense (e.g., weekly) sampling and longitudinal follow-up across multiple years to improve our understanding of stability and change in neural and psychological markers of social sensitivity, emotion processing, and executive function.