Research
Our research seeks to understand why people respond differently to stress across the life-span, with a focus on stress occurring in early childhood. We use a cross-disciplinary integrative approach aimed at better understanding the mechanisms underlying individual differences in stress responses. Better understanding the mechanisms that contribute to differences in individuals’ outcomes after stress is key to informing more effective and targeted interventions.
A topological approach towards childhood stress
This lab’s research uses what we have termed a topological framework to elucidate the mechanisms through which stress influences children’s later outcomes. This framework integrates models of childhood stress with those from the broader adult and non-human animal literature, incorporating an important role for children’s perceptions and interpretations of their environment in their responses to stress. As a first step in addressing these questions, we are examining how perceptions of safety, with a focus on perceived social isolation, and predictability influence affective development
Areas of Interest
Safety, predictability, and stress in early childhood
In collaboration with a non-profit organization in Elkhart, Indiana, our lab has conducted research aimed at assessing a wide range of environmental factors linked to perceptions of safety and predictability in families with preschoolers at high-risk for chronic or extreme stress. In this research, we collected repeated measures of children’s self-regulatory behaviors, their home environment, continuous monitoring of autonomic activity, and standardized laboratory tasks. Together this has allowed us to examine what aspects of the early environment contribute to variability in children’s experiences of stress.
Stress and emotional learning
Another line of Dr. Smith’s research is aimed at examining how stress and stress-related perceptions influence how individuals learn about and use emotional information in their environment. In this research, she is finding that stress affects how children and adults use emotional information but not how they learn this information. Additionally, this is most pronounced in children who have been exposed to high levels of stressful events and report high levels of perceived social isolation and perceived unpredictability.
Stress and emotion perception
Our third line of research examines how stress influences emotion perceptions, particularly how perceptions of social isolation influence how individuals perceive emotions in others. We are finding that perceptions of social isolation are associated with changes in how both adults and children recognize negative emotions in facial expressions.