Research Projects

Data Collection Phase

(we are actively recruiting and testing participants)

Examines the relation between pain, emotion regulation, and beliefs of injustice in a pediatric pain sample.
Project manager: Megan Nguyen

Schools have a reputation of being the best route to “success”; unfortunately, this is not the case for many urban high school students. Houston ISD is the 7th largest school district in the United States, with a demographic breakdown of 91% minority and 80% economically disadvantaged.
The Grifted Project aims to collect qualitative data on the experiences of students attending urban Houston schools, specifically, on the topic of academic goal valuation. Given the underrepresentation of such students in the research literature, these experiences might be the key to revealing unexplored contextual factors contributing to the historic achievement gap between poor minority students and their counterparts.
Project manager: Christine Richie
Vistit the project Facebook page for more information

Examine parents’ tolerance of risky play behaviors during early childhood (ages 1-5-years-old), with a specific focus in rough-and-tumble play perspectives.
In collaboration with Becky Gates Children’s Center for data collection.
Project manager: Paige Williams

While humans have an incredible capacity to acquire new knowledge or skills and alter their behavior as a result of experience, enhancements in performance are typically narrowly restricted to the training environment, with little evidence of generalization to different, even highly related, tasks.Such specificity is a significant obstacle to developing many real-world training programs.
The transfer project seeks to interpret and unify our understanding of transfer, focusing on what is transferred, when and where it occurs, and why some transfers fail to transfer to a new context. The project will use the category learning paradigm for learning relational categories to examine how the manipulation of the variability of category members’ features, or the variability of contexts in which stimuli are presented, would facilitate the transfer of learning.
Project manager: Minchao Wang

(We are actively working with the data and/or writing up key research questions)

Examines the role of emotion regulation at neural and behavioral levels during a math task.
Project manager: Mahati Kopparla

Examines physiological correlates of social and cognitive stressors in a sample of college students high in anxiety and whether these measures change with a biofeedback/mindfulness intervention.
Project manager: Brenna Lin

Examines the relation between emotion regulation and literacy development in early problematic readers using physiological and behavioral measures.
Project manager: Qinxin Shi (and co-manager Linda Sun)

(Key manuscripts published and/or submitted. We still publish from these data)

Examines emotion recognition ability from body and faces using eye-tracking in subjects with autism spectrum disorder.
Project manager: Christopher Prickett

Examines the characterization and treatment of child problem behaviors using physiological and behavioral measures.
Datasets from the University of Toronto
Project manager: Steven Woltering

Examines the characterization and treatment of ADHD using the working memory intervention program using neural and behavioral measures.
Datasets from the University of Toronto
Project manager: Steven Woltering

Examines the physiological correlates of sleep in patients with mild cognitive impairments and relates them to executive functions and memory function.
Project manager: Yajun (Mia) Jia

Examines (co)development of externalizing and internalizing behaviors and their relation with measures of self-regulation.
Datasets from Jan Hughes’ project Achieve
Project manager: Qinxin Shi