Our Research

The WAVE Lab studies multiple forms of affective variability, with a particular emphasis on understanding dysregulation of positive affect. In other words, we study big emotions in multiple forms, though we’re really interested in understanding not just big shifts of negative affect, like sadness or anger, but also big shifts of positive affect, like happiness and joy.

Our review article in the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry describes why dysregulation of positive emotions may be important in understanding the development of psychopathology.

Studies with Ongoing Recruitment

Neural Correlates of Excitability and Irritability

Ongoing Studies Without Open Recruitment

Neural Correlates of Excitability in the MESY study

This study includes only children with big emotions who are already participating in the Mood, Emotions, and Stress in Youth study in the EEDP. Children responded to and regulated their response to both positive (happy or exciting) and negative (sad or scary) emotional pictures. We are currently analyzing data from this study. Funding was provided by the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation.

Development of Borderline Personality Symptoms in Children with Early Psychopathology

Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by dysregulation in emotions, actions, relationships and identity. Features of BPD can include affective variability with unstable or poorly regulated emotions. We are interested in how emotion dysregulation in childhood may interact with other factors such as adverse life experiences, interpersonal relationships, and emotion regulation skills to perpetuate the cycle of dysregulation and development of associated symptoms.

You can read more about our findings here and here.

Long term outcomes of Childhood Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is characterized by days to weeks long periods of time where someone is either really happy or excited, really angry, or really down and sad. These periods of time are associated with changes in sleep, energy, and activities. Bipolar disorder is relatively rare in children, and the long-term trajectories of children who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder have not been well studied prospectively. We have completed a clinical assessment with a group of children who were followed for 12 years during adolescence to early adulthood, including a number diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the Phenomenology and Course of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Study. This 25-year follow up will allow us to see the long-term trajectory of these participants into middle adulthood.

Completed Studies

Behavioral Characteristics of Excitability

Children were observed during standardized interactions where they did exciting, fun things like pop bubbles and play with cars or frustrating things like not getting access to a prize right away. By looking at their levels of positive affect (or displayed positive emotions like happiness or excitement), activity level, and impulsivity, we were able to characterize their level of behavioral excitability. Having higher behavioral excitability in early childhood predicted having more emotion dysregulation in adolescence. This study was funded by the Elaine Schlosser Lewis American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Pilot Award for Attention Disorders.

Defining Excitability

We used empirical data classification methods to group symptoms of emotion dysregulation in children in the Preschool Depression Study, which defined the novel factor of excitability. Excitability was characterized by high positive affect as well as variations in talkativeness, energy, activity, and sleep. The excitability factor score was related to the likelihood the child was later diagnosed with disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) along with having ongoing problems with emotion dysregulation and lower activations in the emotion regulation brain regions in adolescence.