The American Psychological Foundation's Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship program supports graduate research projects and scholarships in child psychology with $25,000 grants. Here's what the 2014 scholars are investigating.
Watching therapy change teenage brains
What is the neuroscience behind psychopathology? Sarah O'Dor, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Northwestern University, is using neuroimaging to better understand the neural basis of adolescent depression and how cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) may cause brain changes.
"I hope to see which neurological factors may signal that treatment will not be successful for an individual, and this can in turn inform more effective and targeted treatments for adolescent depression," she says.
So far, O'Dor and her team have found that teens with major depressive disorder tend to respond better to 36 weeks of treatment (CBT, medication or both) if they have higher expectations that it will be effective. The teens who respond better to treatment, O'Dor has found, are those who have been depressed for shorter amounts of time, are less suicidal and have an overall better level of functioning.
Seeking markers for risky behavior
Sarah Thomas, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park, is working to understand how parent-adolescent conflict and a neurobiological marker of impulsivity may influence adolescents' risk-taking behavior, particularly when it comes to the risk of contracting HIV.
"Adolescence is a time where risk-taking increases, so understanding the factors that distinguish normative from maladaptive risk-taking is essential to prevent harmful health-risk behaviors," Thomas says.
In another study Thomas conducted on how parent-adolescent interactions relate to health-risk behaviors, she found that parent-adolescent interaction characteristics like connection and independence were significantly related to the severity of bulimia nervosa symptoms in adolescents (International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2012).
Identifying underlying aspects of psychopathology
Children with callous-unemotional traits, which are associated with psychopathy, may show a lack of guilt following transgressions and an overall lack of caring for others. Kathleen Crum, a doctoral candidate at Florida International University's Center for Children and Families, is studying how children with these traits respond to other people in distress.
Evidence suggests that children with callous-unemotional traits are more likely to grow to be adults who have higher rates of violent recidivism and also commit more crimes than people who do not have the condition, Crum explains.
"I hope understanding individual differences in empathic expression can improve classification and treatment of children with callous-unemotional traits," she says.
So far, her research shows that poor monitoring and negative discipline tactics in parents and less close relationships with teachers may lead to more behavior problems in children with callous-unemotional traits. This speaks to the importance of caregiver-child relationships as potential entry points for intervention with these children, she says.
Spotting depression risk earlier
Katie Burkhouse, a graduate student at the Mood Disorders Institute at Binghamton University, studies biological markers for adolescent depression. Burkhouse says that once she learned that many depressed adolescents do not respond to current treatments, she was motivated to figure out what might predict who will and to treat them as early as possible.
"Physiological or neural risk factors for this population may help clinicians and researchers identify markers of depression risk early in development, even in the absence of behavioral signs," she says.
In a previous study, Burkhouse and colleagues found that children of depressed mothers showed increased emotional reactivity to sad stimuli when compared with children of nondepressed mothers (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2014).
Understanding how parental PTSD affects children
An increasing number of studies suggest that children whose parents have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be at greater risk for psychological problems, says Alissa Jerud, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington.
For her dissertation, Jerud is leading a study to examine the transmission of underlying fear learning processes from parents with PTSD to their children. Specifically, the research will look at whether these children have impairments in a proposed biomarker of PTSD, known as safety signal learning.
"My hypothesis is that children of parents with PTSD will exhibit excessive fear responding to both danger and safety cues compared to children of parents without any psychological disorder," she says. She hopes her findings can help lead to interventions, such as family skills training that might keep the effects of parents' PTSD from trickling down to their children.
Discovering what contributes to social-emotional skills
In a study she conducted in schools that serve high-poverty areas of New York City, Meghan McCormick discovered that students' behavioral problems and social-emotional skills were a huge challenge for teachers.
"Teachers reported that students had trouble sitting still, listening to instructions and getting along with peers in the classroom," says the New York University doctoral candidate. "Moreover, some students had difficulty recognizing their own or their classmates' emotions and feelings, and regulating their emotions throughout the school day."
Her research was focused on the social-emotional learning program known as INSIGHTS, which seeks to help teachers support the behavioral and social-emotional development of urban children and boost their math and reading achievement, as well as their attention and behavior. McCormick found that kindergarteners and first graders in schools with less-supportive relationships among students, teachers and staff improved most with the program. Policymakers should focus efforts on these schools, she says, rather than assuming all schools have an equal need for social-emotional interventions.
Finding coping behaviors in foster care
Maltreated foster care children face some of life's most adverse events. What factors can help determine who among them will experience the most negative outcomes? Joy Gabrielli seeking to pinpoint which protective factors make a difference for this high-risk and under-studied population.
Gabrielli is following 206 students with a mean age of 13 years who had been in foster care for at least 30 days. So far, her data suggest that maltreatment is a significant predictor of substance use, but that antisocial coping behaviors, such as using resources other than people to manage problems, can moderate its effects.
"The results are surprising at first, but may make sense given the population," Gabrielli says. "These youth may be more likely to access people who would point them toward risk behaviors, and many of these children have biological parents with substance use problems. Use of coping strategies that do not rely on others appears to buffer the relation between maltreatment and substance use behavior for these kids."
Testing ‘learning by thinking'
How do young children learn so much about the world so quickly? Caren Walker, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, is looking at how children build abstract knowledge, learn to develop theories and draw conclusions on more than meets their eyes.
"One of the distinguishing features of human cognition is our ability to change our beliefs and learn something new by thinking alone. How is this possible?" she asks.
To answer these questions, Walker is exploring how children learn and reason about the causal structure of the world without new evidence — a phenomenon known as "learning by thinking." One way to help children learn may be to ask them to generate explanations.
"Simply asking children to explain has a powerful impact on learning, even when no new evidence or feedback is provided," Walker says. In a 2014 paper in Cognition, she showed that children as young as 3 can discover patterns and underlying regularities when prompted to explain their work in a causal learning task.
To apply for a Koppitz fellowship, visit APF Funding. The next deadline is Nov. 15.
