Washington University Affective Variability and Excitability Lab

The WAVE Lab is a component of the Early Emotion Development Program focusing on understanding the neural basis, predictors, and developmental outcomes of big emotions in children.

A person’s “emotion ocean” might have big waves, with large shifts in positive (happiness, excitement) and negative (anger, sadness, anxiety) affect, or smaller waves with less dramatic or exciting shifts. People may also have a big ship to sail their emotion ocean, with lots of emotion regulation skills, or abilities to modulate or tone their emotional response and behaviors to be most helpful in a given situation. Or, they may have smaller boats that are more easily overwhelmed by emotion waves. The WAVE Lab works to understand children with big emotions, or those with an imbalance between the size of their emotion waves and their regulation boat.

We use behavioral and functional MRI studies to understand the neural (brain) basis of the variability in affect or emotion (the emotion ocean waves) and how this interacts with emotion regulation (the boat).

We also study how big emotions are related to temperament (a child’s early tendencies for interacting with the environment) and psychopathology (psychiatric/psychological diagnoses).

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