- Minneapolis, United States
Madeline Harms
University of Minnesota, Institute of Child Development, Graduate Student
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Every day, we encounter situations in which we must decide whether to continue what we are doing or move on to a potentially better option (e.g., going to the same place as last year for vacation or traveling somewhere new; staying in a... more
Every day, we encounter situations in which we must decide whether to continue what we are doing or move on to a potentially better option (e.g., going to the same place as last year for vacation or traveling somewhere new; staying in a secure but unsatisfying job or embarking on a new career path). These types of decisions are examples of the explore/exploit problem. Exploration is defined as choosing an option about which we have less information, whereas exploitation is sticking with an option about which we know more. The decisions people ultimately make in these situations depend upon their past experiences, which create expectations about the type and likelihood of rewards and punishments that a given environment will yield. For example, if an individual perceives that the world has been harsh and unfair, she might expect that any choice she makes will lead to an undesirable outcome. This individual may therefore be more likely to exploit a familiar, but nonoptimal, option tha...
The family environment has strong impacts on children’s emotional development.Although children can adapt to a high degree of variation in the type of input they receive, child maltreatment is a species-atypical experience that disrupts... more
The family environment has strong impacts on children’s emotional development.Although children can adapt to a high degree of variation in the type of input they receive, child maltreatment is a species-atypical experience that disrupts the biological systems that underlie children’s social and emotional development. In this chapter we describe the consequences of maltreatment on children’s emotional development, focusing on alterations in 1) emotion perception, recognition, and attention, 2) emotion expression, 3) regulation of negative emotions and stress, and 4) reward processing. We consider several target mechanisms through which child maltreatment impacts these aspects of emotion processing, including behavioral, physiological, cognitive, and neurobiological, pathways. We also discuss clinical implications of this body of research, including the potential for designing effective interventions aimed at targeting specific emotional biases associated with the experience of maltreatment.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Individuals who have experienced high levels of childhood stress are at increased risk for a wide range of behavioral problems that persist into adulthood, yet the neurobiological and molecular mechanisms underlying these associations... more
Individuals who have experienced high levels of childhood stress are at increased risk for a wide range of behavioral problems that persist into adulthood, yet the neurobiological and molecular mechanisms underlying these associations remain poorly understood. Many of the difficulties observed in stress-exposed children involve problems with learning and inhibitory control. This experiment was designed to test individuals' ability to learn to inhibit responding during a laboratory task. To do so, we measured stress exposure among a community sample of school-aged children, and then followed these children for a decade. Those from the highest and lowest quintiles of childhood stress exposure were invited to return to our laboratory as young adults. At that time, we reassessed their life stress exposure, acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging data during an inhibitory control task, and assayed these individuals' levels of methylation in the FK506 binding protein 5 (FKB...
Research Interests:
The shift from childhood to adolescence is characterized by rapid remodeling of the brain and increased risk-taking behaviors. Current theories hypothesize that developmental enhancements in sensitivity to affective environmental cues in... more
The shift from childhood to adolescence is characterized by rapid remodeling of the brain and increased risk-taking behaviors. Current theories hypothesize that developmental enhancements in sensitivity to affective environmental cues in adolescence may undermine executive function (EF) and increase the likelihood of problematic behaviors. In the current study, we examined the extent to which EF in childhood predicts EF in early adolescence. We also tested whether individual differences in neural responses to affective cues (rewards/punishments) in childhood serve as a biological marker for EF, sensation-seeking, academic performance, and social skills in early adolescence. At age 8, 84 children completed a gambling task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We examined the extent to which selections resulting in rewards or losses in this task elicited (i) the P300, a post-stimulus waveform reflecting the allocation of attentional resources toward a stimulus, and (ii) the SPN, a pre-stimulus anticipatory waveform reflecting a neural representation of a " hunch " about an outcome that originates in insula and ventromedial PFC. Children also completed a Dimensional Change Card-Sort (DCCS) and Flanker task to measure EF. At age 12, 78 children repeated the DCCS and Flanker and completed a battery of questionnaires. Flanker and DCCS accuracy at age 8 predicted Flanker and DCCS performance at age 12, respectively. Individual differences in the magnitude of P300 (to losses vs. rewards) and SPN (preceding outcomes with a high probability of punishment) at age 8 predicted self-reported sensation seeking (lower) and teacher-rated academic performance (higher) at age 12. We suggest there is stability in EF from age 8 to 12, and that childhood neural sensitivity to reward and punishment predicts individual differences in sensation seeking and adaptive behaviors in children entering adolescence.