Faculty Bibliography

Multilevel mediation analyses test whether students' mid-year reports of classroom experiences of autonomy, relatedness with peers, and competence mediate associations between early in the school year emotionally-supportive teacher-student interactions (independently observed) and student-reported academic year changes in mastery motivation and behavioral engagement. When teachers were observed to be more emotionally-supportive in the beginning of the school year, adolescents reported academic year increases in their behavioral engagement and mastery motivation. Mid-year student reports indicated that in emotionally-supportive classrooms, adolescents experienced more developmentally-appropriate opportunities to exercise autonomy in their day-to-day activities and had more positive relationships with their peers. Analyses of the indirect effects of teacher emotional support on students' engagement and motivation indicated significant mediating effects of autonomy and peer relatedness experiences, but not competence beliefs, in this sample of 960 students (ages 11-17) in the classrooms of 68 middle and high school teachers in 12 U.S. schools.

The GANE (glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects) model proposed by Mather et al. attempts to explain how norepinephrine enhances processing in highly activated brain regions. Careful perusal of the sparse data available from recording studies in animals reveals that noradrenergic neurons are excited mainly by any change in the environment - a salient, novel, or unexpected sensory stimulus or a change in behavioral contingencies. This begets the "network reset hypothesis" supporting the notion that norepinephrine promotes rapid cognitive and behavioral adaption.

BACKGROUND:Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is more prevalent in male than female individuals. Very few studies have examined sex modulations of brain anatomical differences between individuals with ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals, especially in children. The current study aimed to identify sex-dependent and/or sex-independent neuroanatomical mechanisms underlying ASD. METHODS:Magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange. A 2 (diagnosis) × 2 (sex) design was used. Subjects whose ages were between 6 and 20 years were included for analysis, with matched full-scale IQ between groups for each dataset. The resulting effective numbers of subjects were 36 female subjects with ASD, 54 TD female subjects, 182 male subjects with ASD, and 172 TD male subjects. Twenty independent gray matter (GM) and 20 white matter (WM) volume sources were estimated using source-based morphometry. RESULTS:Among all the independent GM and WM sources, none of them showed a significant diagnosis by sex interaction. One GM source of the bilateral inferior and middle temporal lobe showed a significantly larger volume in ASD than TD individuals and in male than in female subjects. This diagnosis effect was age sensitive and was present only in participants between 8 and 14 years of age. CONCLUSIONS:Only sex-independent, large-scale neuroanatomical alterations could be observed in children with ASD. The directionality of bilateral temporal GM alterations was in line with the prediction of the extreme male brain hypothesis, supporting the view that similar neurobiological mechanisms may drive sexual dimorphism and the onset of ASD.

Previous studies conducted in Maryland of the Family-to-Family (FTF) education program of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found that FTF reduced subjective burden and distress and improved empowerment, mental health knowledge, self-care, and family functioning, establishing it as an evidence-based practice. In the study reported here, the FTF program of NAMI-NYC Metro was evaluated. Participants (N=83) completed assessments at baseline and at completion of FTF. Participants had improved family empowerment, family functioning, engagement in self-care activities, self-perception of mental health knowledge, and emotional acceptance as a form of coping. Scores for emotional support and positive reframing also improved significantly. Displeasure in caring for the family member, a measure of subjective burden, significantly declined. Despite the lack of a control group and the limited sample size, this study further supports the efficacy of FTF with a diverse urban population.

Past research has demonstrated links between cortical activity, measured via EEG power, and cognitive processes during infancy. In a separate line of research, family socioeconomic status (SES) has been strongly associated with children's early cognitive development, with socioeconomic disparities emerging during the second year of life for both language and declarative memory skills. The present study examined associations among resting EEG power at birth, SES, and language and memory skills at 15-months in a sample of full-term infants. Results indicate no associations between SES and EEG power at birth. However, EEG power at birth was related to both language and memory outcomes at 15-months. Specifically, frontal power (24-48Hz) was positively correlated with later Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) memory scores. Power (24-35Hz) in the parietal region was positively correlated with later PLS-Auditory Comprehension language scores. These findings suggest that SES disparities in brain activity may not be apparent at birth, but measures of resting neonatal EEG power are correlated with later memory and language skills independently of SES.

The current study examined if bilingual advantages in cognitive control influence memory encoding during a divided attention task. Monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, and sequential bilinguals switched between classifying objects and words, then were tested for their recognition memory of stimuli previously seen during the classification task. Compared to bilingual groups, monolinguals made the most errors on the classification task and simultaneous bilinguals committed the fewest errors. On the memory task, however, no differences were found between the three language groups, but significant correlations were found between the number of errors during switch trials on the classification task and recognition memory for both target and non-target stimuli. For bilinguals, their age of second language acquisition partially accounted for the association between attentional control (number of switch errors) and subsequent memory for non-target stimuli only. These results contribute to our understanding of how individual differences in language acquisition influence interactions between cognitive domains.

Diffusion-weighted (DW) MRI has become a widely adopted imaging modality to reveal the underlying brain connectivity. Long acquisition times and/or non-cooperative patients increase the chances of motion-related artifacts. Whereasslow bulkmotion results in inter-gradient misalignment which can be handled via retrospective motion correction algorithms,fast bulkmotion usually affects data during the application of a single diffusion gradient causing signal dropout artifacts. Common practices opt to discard gradients bearing signal attenuation due to the difficulty of their retrospective correction, with the disadvantage to lose full gradients for further processing. Nonetheless, such attenuation might only affect limited number of slices within a gradient volume. Q-space resampling has recently been proposed to recover corrupted slices while saving gradients for subsequent reconstruction. However, few corrupted gradients are implicitly assumed which might not hold in case of scanning unsedated infants or patients in pain. In this paper, we propose to adopt recent advances in compressive sensing based reconstruction of the diffusion orientation distribution functions (ODF) with under sampled measurements to resample corrupted slices. We make use of Simple Harmonic Oscillator based Reconstruction and Estimation (SHORE) basis functions which can analytically model ODF from arbitrary sampled signals. We demonstrate the impact of the proposed resampling strategy compared to state-of-art resampling and gradient exclusion on simulated intra-gradient motion as well as samples from real DWI data.