
Koraly Perez-EdgarPennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Psychology
Koraly Perez-Edgar
AB, MA, PhD
About
210
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2018 - present
January 2018 - June 2018
July 2017 - present
Education
August 1995 - June 2001
September 1992 - June 1995
Publications
Publications (210)
Individual differences in temperament emerge in the first months of life. Some infants display a heightened sensitivity to novelty and uncertainty in the world around them, leading a subset to fearfully withdraw from the social environment. Extreme forms of this temperament, Behavioral Inhibition (BI), are associated with increased risk for social...
Successful developmental neuroimaging efforts require interdisciplinary expertise to ground scientific questions in knowledge of human development, modify and create technologies and data processing pipelines suited to the young brain, and ensure research procedures meet the needs and protect the interests of young children and their caregivers. Th...
Temperament traits are early appearing and relatively stable phenotypic profiles of behavior that are present across space and time. This definition invariably reflects the timescale imposed when gathering repeated measures of our variables of interest and our reliance on aggregate, mean-level values. However, if the time scale of observations is s...
Researchers have proposed that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms that facilitate the detection, rapid response, and subsequent avoidance of potential threats. However, some inconsistent results in the literature have called into question the robustness of these responses. Here, we sought to replicate previous findings on the rapid detect...
This special issue of Developmental Psychology is dedicated to the legacy of Jerome Kagan, whose pioneering work profoundly shaped the field of developmental psychology. Kagan’s groundbreaking research on temperament, emotional development, and the role of biology in shaping human behavior provided a foundation for understanding individual differen...
Introduction
Early child development occurs within an interactive environment, initially dominated by parents or caregivers, and is heavily influenced by the dynamics of this social context. The current study probed the neurobiology of “family personality”, or family functioning, in the context of parent–child dyadic interaction using a two‐person...
The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, a multi-site prospective longitudinal cohort study, will examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development beginning prenatally and planned through early childhood. Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of two brain imaging modalities central to the HBCD Study. EEG reco...
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a marker of self‐regulation, has been linked to developmental outcomes in young children. Although positive emotions may have the potential to facilitate physiological self‐regulation, and enhanced self‐regulation could underlie the development of positive emotions in early childhood, the relation between positiv...
This study examined individual differences in affective attention trajectories in infancy and relations with competence and social reticence at 24 months. Data collection spanned 2017 to 2021. Infants (N = 297, 53% White, 49% reported as assigned male at birth) recruited in South Central and Central Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey provided eye...
Eye tracking provides direct, temporally and spatially sensitive measures of eye gaze. It can capture visual attention patterns from infancy through adulthood. However, commonly used screen-based eye tracking (SET) paradigms are limited in their depiction of how individuals process information as they interact with the environment in “real life”. M...
Parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information about strangers may induce fears of these strangers in adolescents. In this multi-method experimental study, utilizing a within-subject design, parents provided standardized verbal threat or safety information to their offspring (N = 77, M age = 11.62 years, 42 girls) regarding two strangers in the la...
Witnessing emotional expressions in others triggers physiological arousal in humans. The current study focused on pupil responses to emotional expressions in a community sample as a physiological index of arousal and attention. We explored the associations between parents’ and offspring's responses to dynamic facial expressions of emotion, as well...
This study used a naturalistic neuroscience method to examine relations between perspective, shared affect, social anxiety symptoms and neural similarity in mentalizing regions. Undergraduate students (N = 34, 85% White, 65% Women) came to the lab as platonic friend, same gender-identity pairs and engaged in a guided conversation while each of thei...
Dopamine is a versatile neurotransmitter with implications in many domains, including anxiety and effortful control. Where high levels of effortful control are often regarded as adaptive, other work suggests that high levels of effortful control may be a risk factor for anxiety. Dopamine signaling may be key in understanding these relations. Eye bl...
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented changes and uncertainty to the daily lives of youth. The range of adjustment in light of a near-universal experience of COVID restrictions highlights the importance of identifying factors that may render some individuals more susceptible to heightened levels of anxiety during stressful life events t...
This article examines the patterns, and consequences, of infant temperamental reactivity to novel sensory input in a large (N = 357; 271 in current analysis) and diverse longitudinal sample through two approaches. First, we examined profiles of reactivity in 4-month-old infants using the traditional theory-driven analytic approach laid out by Jerom...
Making friends is fun! But for some children, it is hard and even scary. Children who are shy (behaviorally inhibited) are nervous about meeting new people. Happy feelings help people make friends. Looking at people to talk to them also helps people make friends. We wanted to know more about what happens when children play together for the first ti...
Introduction
Adolescence is a sensitive period during which stressors and social disruptions uniquely contribute to anxiety symptoms. Adolescent's coping strategies (i.e., avoidance and approach) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic may be differentially related to anxiety symptom changes. Further, social media use (SMU) is ubiqu...
Introduction
Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits are at high lifetime risk of antisocial behaviour. Low affiliation (ie, social bonding difficulties) and fearlessness (ie, low threat sensitivity) are proposed risk factors for CU traits. Parenting practices (eg, harshness and low warmth) also predict risk for CU traits. However, few studie...
The current study examined transactional associations between maternal internalizing symptoms, infant negative emotionality, and infant resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). We used data from the Longitudinal Attention and Temperament Study (N=217) to examine the associations between maternal internalizing symptoms, infant negative emotionali...
Social anxiety disorder is among the most common forms of pediatric psychopathology. Social anxiety symptoms peak in adolescence and are associated with significant impairment encompassing familial, social, and academic domains. Considerable heterogeneity in symptomatology, risk factors, and biological underpinnings exists across anxious adolescent...
Four decades of research have examined the antecedents and consequences of behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperament profile associated with heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli in infancy, reticence toward social cues in childhood, and the later emergence of social anxiety in adolescence. This review proposes that a two-hit model can supplemen...
Earlier depression onsets are associated with more debilitating courses and poorer life quality, highlighting the importance of effective early intervention. Many youths fail to improve with evidence-based treatments for depression, likely due in part to heterogeneity within the disorder. Multi-method assessment of individual differences in positiv...
Four decades of research has examined the antecedents and consequences of behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperament profile associated with heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli in infancy, reticence towards social cues in childhood, and the later emergence of social anxiety in adolescence. This review proposes that a two-hit model can supplemen...
The present study leveraged data from a longitudinal adoption study of 361 families recruited between 2003 and 2010 in the United States. We investigated how psychopathology symptoms in birth parents (BP; Mage = 24.1 years; 50.5–62.9% completed high school) and adoptive parents (AP; Mage = 37.8 years; 80.9% completed college; 94% mother–father coup...
Asymmetry of EEG alpha power in the frontal lobe has been extensively studied over the past 30 years as a potential marker of emotion and motivational state. However, most studies rely on time consuming manipulations in which participants are placed in anxiety-provoking situations. Relatively fewer studies have examined alpha asymmetry in response...
The prefrontal cortex and the frontoparietal network are associated with a variety of regulatory behaviors. Functional connections between these brain regions and the amygdala are implicated in risk for anxiety disorders. The prefrontal cortex and frontoparietal network are also linked to executive functioning, or behaviors that help orient action...
Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms using a Random Intercepts Cro...
Importance
The early childhood temperament of behavioral inhibition (BI), characterized by inhibited and fearful behaviors, has been associated with heightened risk for anxiety and depression across the lifespan. Although several neurocognitive correlates underlying vulnerability to the development of anxiety among inhibited children have been iden...
We examined individual differences in infant affect-biased attention trajectories and relations with caregiver anxiety symptoms, temperamental negative affect and social behavior. Infants (N = 278, 53% White, 49% assigned male at birth) recruited in Central Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey provided eye-tracking data at 4-, 8-, 12-, 18- and 24-m...
Cross-frequency coupling between delta and beta EEG power may reflect dynamic crosstalk between limbic and cortical regions underlying emotion regulation. Stronger, positive delta-beta coupling is associated with childhood anxiety and fearful temperament, potentially tracking dysregulation. However, most studies have reported on adult populations o...
Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. Attention bias variability (ABV) quantifies intraindividual fluctuations in attention biases and may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk versus mean levels of attention bias. ABV to threat has been associated with attention...
Temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) is a robust endophenotype for anxiety characterized by increased sensitivity to novelty. Controlling parenting can reinforce children’s wariness by rewarding signs of distress. Fine-grained, dynamic measures are needed to better understand both how children perceive their parent’s behaviors and the mechanism...
This study examined longitudinal relations between attention and social fear across the first two years of life. Our sample consisted of 357 infants and their caregivers across three sites. Data was collected at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age. At all 5 assessments, the infants participated in 2 eye-tracking tasks (Vigilance and Overlap) which m...
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a key brain area in considering adaptive regulatory behaviors. This includes regulatory projections to regions of the limbic system such as the amygdala, where the nature of functional connections may confer lower risk for anxiety disorders. The PFC is also associated with behaviors like executive functioning. Inhibit...
Flexible social attention, including visually attending to social interaction partners, coupled with positive affect may facilitate adaptive social functioning. However, most research assessing social attention relies on static computer-based paradigms, overlooking the dynamics of social interactions and limiting understanding of individual differe...
This study examined patterns of attention toward affective stimuli in a longitudinal sample of typically developing infants (N = 357, 147 females, 50% White, 22% Latinx, 16% African American/Black, 3% Asian, 8% mixed race, 1% not reported) using two eye-tracking tasks that measure vigilance to (rapid detection), engagement with (total looking towar...
Temperament involves stable behavioral and emotional tendencies that differ between individuals, which can be first observed in infancy or early childhood and relate to behavior in many contexts and over many years.1 One of the most rigorously characterized temperament classifications relates to the tendency of individuals to avoid the unfamiliar a...
‘Six solutions for more reliable infant research’ outlines important steps in improving research with the youngest of participants. Here, we suggest that a complimentary avenue for further improving reliability can be found in employing more ecologically valid tasks. Because laboratory tasks are often designed as simple, heavily controlled represen...
Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms. Infant-mother pairs (N = 342...
Age and gender differences are prominent in the temperament literature, with the former particularly salient in infancy and the latter noted as early as the first year of life. This study represents a meta-analysis utilizing Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R) data collected across multiple laboratories (N = 4438) to overcome limitations...
Attentional bias to threat, the process of preferentially attending to potentially threatening environmental stimuli over neutral stimuli, is positively associated with behavioral inhibition (BI) and trait anxiety. However, the most used measure of attentional bias to threat, the dot-probe task, has been criticized for demonstrating poor reliabilit...
Parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information regarding the social world may impact a child's fear responses, evident in subjective, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological indices of fear. In this study, primary caregivers provided standardized verbal threat or safety information to their child (N = 68, M = 5.27 years; 34 girls) regarding two s...
To better understand the development of externalizing behavior, the current study examines how multiple levels of influence (child temperament, negative parenting, and dyadic interactions) work together to increase externalizing behaviors over time. Negative parenting (NP) and observed dynamic dyadic behavioral variability (DBV) in parent-child int...
The intergenerational transmission of psychopathology is one of the strongest known risk factors for childhood disorder and may be a malleable target for prevention and intervention. Anxious parents have distinct parenting profiles that impact socioemotional development, and these parenting effects may result in broad alterations to the biological...
Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. The dot probe task is frequently used to assess attention biases, however traditional bias scores may not be reliable. Attention bias variability (ABV) may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk, versus mean levels of attentio...
An attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development,
including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2010). Although some attention biases to threat are
normative, it remains unclear how these biases diverge into maladaptive patterns of emotion
processing for some infants. Here, we examined the relation between household...
A growing body of literature suggests that the explicit parameterization of neural power spectra is important for the appropriate physiological interpretation of periodic and aperiodic electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. In this paper, we discuss why parameterization is an imperative step for developmental cognitive neuroscientists interested in c...
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a key brain area in considering adaptive regulatory behaviors. This includes regulatory projections to regions of the limbic system such as the amygdala, where the nature of functional connections may confer lower risk for anxiety disorders. The PFC is also associated with behaviors like executive functioning. Inhibit...
Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and disabling but seem particularly tractable to investigation with translational neuroscience methodologies. Neuroimaging has informed our understanding of the neurobiology of anxiety disorders, but research has been limited by small sample sizes and low statistical power, as well as heterogenous imaging meth...
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is an innovative approach designed to explore dimensions of human behavior. This approach aims to move beyond the limits of psychiatric categories in hopes of aligning the identification of psychological health and dysfunction with clinical neuroscience. Despite its contributions to adult psychopathology research...
We investigated whether infant temperament was predicted by level and change in maternal hostility, a putative transdiagnostic vulnerability for psychopathology, substance use, and insensitive parenting. A sample of women (N = 247) who were primarily young, low-income, and had varying levels of substance use prenatally (69 non-smokers, 81 tobacco o...
Attentional biases to and away from threat are considered hallmarks of temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI), which is a documented risk factor for social anxiety disorder. However, most research on affective attentional biases has traditionally been constrained to computer screens, where stimuli often lack ecological validity. Moreover, prior r...
Observing others’ emotions triggers physiological arousal in infants as well as in adults, reflected in dilated pupil sizes. This study is the first to examine parents’ and infants’ pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions. Moreover, the links between pupil responses and negative emotional dispositions were explored among in...
Objective: The objective of the current study was to complete a systematic review of the relationship between prenatal maternal stress due to potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and child temperament.
Method: Eligible studies through June 2020 were identified utilizing a search strategy in PubMed and PsycInfo. Included studies examined associations...
Early behavioural inhibition, a temperamental characteristic defined by fearful, overly-sensitive, avoidant, or withdrawn reactions to the unknown, is a predictor of later social anxiety. However, not all behaviourally inhibited children develop anxiety problems, and attentional bias to threat has been proposed to moderate the relation between beha...
Background: Eye-tracking measures attention patterns, which may offer insight into evaluating procedural expertise. The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of using eye-tracking to assess visual fixation patterns when performing an ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia (UGRA) procedure, and to assess for differences between exper...
SYNOPSIS
Objective. The current study examines whether associations between mothers’ and fathers’ emotional expressiveness and children’s observed sharing behavior differ for two young children in the same family and whether children’s baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) moderates relations between emotional expressiveness and sharing. Desi...
Parent-to-child transmission of information processing biases to threat is a potential causal mechanism in the family aggregation of anxiety symptoms and traits. This study is the first to investigate the link between infants’ and parents’ attention bias to dynamic threat-relevant (versus happy) emotional expressions. Moreover, the associations bet...
Parent-to-child transmission of information processing biases to threat is a potential causal mechanism in the family aggregation of anxiety symptoms and traits. This study is the first to investigate the link between infants’ and parents’ attention bias to dynamic threat-relevant (versus happy) emotional expressions. Moreover, the associations bet...
The temperament profile Behavioral Inhibition (BI) is a strong predictor of internalizing behavior in childhood. Patterns of attention towards or away from threat are a commonality of both BI and internalizing behaviors. Attention biases are traditionally measured with computer tasks presenting affective stimuli, which can lack ecological validity....
Dopamine is a versatile neurotransmitter with implications in many domains, including anxiety and effortful control. Where high levels of effortful control are often regarded as adaptive, other work suggests that high levels of effortful control may be a risk factor for anxiety. Dopamine signaling may be key in understanding these relations. Eye bl...
Background
While taxonomy segregates anxiety symptoms into diagnoses, patients typically present with multiple diagnoses; this poses major challenges, particularly for youth, where mixed presentation is particularly common. Anxiety comorbidity could reflect multivariate, cross-domain interactions insufficiently emphasized in current taxonomy. We ut...
Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) provides developmental neuroscientists a non-invasive view into the neural underpinnings of cognition and emotion. Recently, the psychometric properties of two widely used neural measures in early childhood – frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling – have come under scrutiny. Despite their growing...
Background: Attention processes may play a central role in shaping trajectories of socioemotional development. Individuals who are clinically anxious or have high levels of trait anxiety sometimes show attention biases to threat. There is emerging evidence that young children also demonstrate a link between attention bias to salient stimuli and bro...
A growing body of literature points to the importance of the explicit parameterization of neural power spectra for the appropriate physiological interpretation of periodic and aperiodic electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. In this paper, we discuss why parameterization is an imperative step for developmental cognitive neuroscientists interested in...
Temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI) is a well-documented risk factor for social anxiety in development. However, not all BI children will ultimately demonstrate anxious symptomology. Levels of inhibitory control have been proposed as a possible risk or protective factor for these children, but research remains mixed on whether higher levels of...
Behavioral synchrony during social interactions is foundational for the development of social relationships. Behavioral inhibition (BI), characterized by wariness to social novelty and increased anxiety, may influence how children engage in moment-to-moment behavioral synchrony. EEG-derived frontal Alpha asymmetry and Delta-Beta coupling reflect ap...
Affect-biased attention is an automatic process that prioritizes emotionally or motivationally salient stimuli. Several models of affect-biased attention and its development suggest that it comprises an individual’s ability to both engage with and disengage from emotional stimuli. Researchers typically rely on singular tasks to measure affect-biase...
Elevated levels of anxiety are associated with attentional threat biases and inefficient attentional control, with the latter requiring sustained cognitive effort. The current study assessed self-reported and behavioral evidence of attentional functioning, along with electrodermal activity (EDA measured via skin conductance level [SCL]) as an index...
Background
Variation in EEG‐derived delta–beta coupling has recently emerged as a potential neural marker of emotion regulation, providing a novel and noninvasive method for assessing a risk factor for anxiety. However, our understanding of delta–beta coupling has been limited to group‐level comparisons, which provide limited information about an i...
The ability to interpret others’ emotions is a critical skill for children’s socioemotional functioning. While research has emphasized facial emotion expressions, children are also constantly required to interpret vocal emotion expressed at or around them by individuals who are both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The present study examined how sp...
Within the developmental literature, there is an often unspoken tension between studies that aim to capture broad scale, fairly universal nomothetic traits, and studies that focus on mechanisms and trajectories that are idiographic and bounded to some extent by systematic individual differences. The suitability of these approaches vary as a functio...
Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and...
Researchers are acutely interested in how people engage in social interactions and navigate our environment. However, in striving for experimental or laboratory control, we often instead present individuals with representations of social and environmental constructs and infer how they would behave in more dynamic and contingent interactions. Mobile...
Shyness is a commonly observed state or trait that can incorporate a wide array of socially-oriented behaviors. This broad term of shyness can be more precisely grouped into behavioral sub-types, each of which may be associated with distinct neurological and physiological markers and long-term outcomes. Shy individuals typically show a hypersensiti...