Research Studies

Clinically significant, chronic irritability is a major dimension of child and adolescent mental health problems. A promising way to treat irritability is to address negative biases. Irritable youth tend to misjudge neutral or ambiguous social signals as hostile, an intention to do harm. By understanding how clinically irritable youth make these interpretations, we may develop new diagnostic tests and refine treatments for them. This study aims to: 1) Assess asymmetric learning against hostile interpretation bias (HIB) of positive and negative dimensions of ambiguous facial affect and their modulation by irritability; 2) Map neural network associations to HIB of social scenarios and their modulation by irritability.

The Emotion and Development Lab is seeking teen volunteers to research how irritability affects the brain's processing of social information. Our goal is to learn more about how people commonly react to social ambiguity and how irritable mood may relate to negative interpretations of social signals in adolesence. Participation involves a single 2.5 hour study visit. Both the teen and a caregiver will complete interviews and questionnaires. The teen will also complete tasks while in a magnetic resonance imager (MRI). Study visits will be onsite at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Compensation is provided.