Sarah Myruski

• Pennsylvania State University

Adolescence is a period of profound biological and social-emotional development during which social anxiety symptoms commonly emerge. Over the past several decades, the social world of teens has been transformed by pervasive digital media use (e.g., social media, messaging apps), highlighting the urgent need to examine links between digital media u...

Adolescence is a critical developmental period of biological and social change during which 1 in 3 youth experience significant anxiety symptoms. The social-emotional lives of the majority of adolescents are largely conducted via digital media use (DMU; e.g., social media, text messaging). Yet the past decade of research on DMU and anxiety has yiel...

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...

Adolescence is a critical period for future health outcomes. Food habits and cognitive development are underway, and it is a period of heightened sensitivity to external influences and emotional shifts. We experimentally test the individual and combined influence of food advertisements and emotional primes (i.e., positive, negative, neutral) on ado...

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...

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...

Objective: Attention bias modification (ABM) aims to decrease anxiety symptom severity through the reduction of threat-related attention bias (AB). Individual differences in treatment response and poor measurement reliability of AB have called its clinical promise into question. The current study examined whether individual differences in anxiety...

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...

Emotion regulation (ER), a key predictor of positive adjustment throughout the lifespan, is forged in development with profound contributions from parents. In particular, parent scaffolding of child cognition and emotion serves to bolster child regulatory abilities beyond what they could achieve alone. Through habitual parent-child interactions, sc...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has been inconsistently associated with exaggerated threat monitoring measured via the error-related negativity (ERN). This suggests the need to consider whether the link between GAD and ERN is influenced by additional processes, such as cognitive inhibition of non-threat. The current study explored this possibili...

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...

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...

Emotion regulation (ER), the ability to flexibly monitor and modify emotions, is related to positive adjustment throughout the lifespan. Biological indexes of ER in childhood that predict behavior are valuable for clinical applications and our understanding of affective neurodevelopment. Delta-beta correlation (DBC), or the coupling between resting...

Anxiety-related attention bias (AB) is the preferential processing of threat observed in clinical and sub-clinical anxiety. Attention bias modification training (ABMT) is a computerized cognitive training technique designed to systematically direct attention away from threat and ameliorate AB, but mixed and null findings have highlighted gaps in ou...

Emotion regulation (ER) is a key facet of positive adjustment throughout the lifespan. Recent theoretical and empirical innovations suggest that current methods for assessing ER are limited, because they measure discrete strategy use instead of ER flexibility and are insensitive to ecologically valid social contexts that influence ER. This is parti...

Anxiety-related attentional bias (AB) is the preferential processing of threat observed in clinical and sub-clinical anxiety. Attention bias modification training (ABMT) is a computerized cognitive training technique designed to systematically direct attention away from threat and ameliorate AB, but mixed and null findings have highlighted gaps in...

Caregiver impact on the efficacy of cognitive emotion regulation (ER; i.e. reappraisal) during childhood is poorly understood, particularly across cultures. We tested the hypothesis that in children from Japan and the U.S., a neurocognitive signature of effective reappraisal, the late positive potential (LPP), will be bolstered by cognitive scaffol...

A growing body of research has examined regulatory flexibility as the ability to dynamically modulate emotional expression and experience (Bonanno & Burton, 2013). The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential reflecting processing of emotionally-evocative stimuli, is sensitive to emotion regulation (ER) or the psychological process...

Despite the pervasive use of computer-mediated communication, relatively little is known about its implications for emotional adjustment. Recent studies suggest that a preference for computer-mediated communication over other types of communication is associated with emotional vulnerabilities, and its active forms (e.g., direct communication) confe...

Anxiety-related attention bias (AB) has been studied for several decades as a clinically relevant output of the dynamic and complex threat-detection and -response system. Despite research enthusiasm for the construct of AB, current theories and measurement approaches cannot adequately account for the growing body of mixed, contradictory, and null f...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by a range of cognitive and affective disruptions, such as pathological worry. There is debate, however, about whether such disruptions are specifically linked to heightened responses to aversive stimuli, or due to overgeneralized threat monitoring leading to deficits in the ability to discriminat...

Mobile device use has become increasingly prevalent, yet its impact on infant development remains largely unknown. When parents use mobile devices in front of infants, the parent is physically present but most likely distracted and unresponsive. Research using the classic Still Face Paradigm (SFP) suggests that parental withdrawal and unresponsiven...

Sensitivity to emotional context is an emerging construct for characterizing adaptive or maladaptive emotion regulation, but few measurement approaches exist. The current study combined behavioral and neurocognitive measures to assess context sensitivity in relation to self-report measures of adaptive emotional flexibility and well-being. Sixty-six...