RESEARCH | kaip

My Research

Broadly, I study cultural diversity, children and adolescents' mental health and the developing brain. In particular, my research bridges knowledges from developmental psychopathology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and cultural psychology to understand socio-cultural factors that influence children and adolescents' development of emotion regulation (including executive function), underlying frontolimbic circuitry, and risk for developmental psychopathology (e.g., anxiety and substance uses). My research places a strong focus on parsing out heterogeneous effects of transcultural (e.g., early life stress and socioeconomic disadvantages) and culturally-salient (e.g., discrimination and achievement failure) stressors that may contribute to health disparities among children from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds, as well as understanding the interplay of emotion socialization, language and mental health from a cross-cultural perspective.

To address these goals, I employ a multidisciplinary approach involving longitudinal and intervention studies of young children and adolescents at different risk levels using a variety of methods at multiple levels of analysis: self-reports, behavioral observation, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), neurophysiologcial (EEG/ERP, fMRI) and cortisol.

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CURRENT RESEARCH

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Early Adversity, Self-regulation and Longitudinal Outcomes

Longitudinal studies are considered as "golden standards" for understanding the development of an individual. In this ongoing multi-wave study, we follow the behavioral development of children across ages 3, 6, and 10 years using multi-informant and multi-method assessments. Using a ecological-transactional model, my research focuses on understanding how early life stress, parenting, children's self-regulation (i.e., cognitive control and emotion regulation) and emotion knowledge relate to long-term behavioral and socio-emotional adjustment.

My colleagues and I have just finished our latest follow-up in which these "kids" have turned age 18 - 21!

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Brain Mechanisms of Early Self-regulation

Building on my findings from the Michigan Longitudinal study (Ip et al., 2019), I also examined the neural mechanisms associated cognitive control and emotion regulation using EEG/ERP assessments. In one of my projects (funded by the Strategic Translational Research Award), I studied preschoolers' error-related negativity (ERN) which is thought to index error-signaling for cognitive control. I also studied preschoolers' Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is thought to index emotion processing and regulation. My goal is to understand how early neurophysiological markers of self-regulation are influenced by social factors (e.g., parenting), and are related to the development of anxiety and impulsivity in young children.

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Executive Function Intervention among Preschoolers

Building on Project 2 findings, my colleagues and I are conducting an ongoing study to examine the role of executive function (EF) training interventions for anxious preschoolers. This intervention study consists of pre-and-post assessments (using ERP, self-report and behavioral measures) and KidPower camp (4 days) with games (such as red light green light, Simon Says) that are designed to improve EF. Our goal is to examine whether EF intervention could improve EF, reduce anxiety and modulate ERN amplitude among clinically anxious preschoolers.

My future direction involves examining whether EF intervention training could be beneficial for ethnic minority children with comorbid ADHD and anxiety, and how EF training may modulate their emotion-related neural responses.

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Emotion Regulation and Culture

Despite 35 years of research on emotion regulation (ER), we have a limited understanding of how situational contexts and their associated cultural meanings influence children’s ER development. To address this gap, this line of research conceptualizes children’s ER as a complex system that involves extrinsic inputs such as contexts and socialization and intrinsic top-down (e.g., cognitive control and ER strategies) and bottom-up processes (e.g., biological reactivity). My research examines how cultural contexts may shape these different components of ER.

For example, one of my projects involves studying preschoolers’ ER as a complex system through multiple levels (emotional expression and cortisol), contexts (interpersonal-related vs achievement-related environments) and cultures (US, China and Japan). The goal to carefully determine how cultural contexts might shape emotion regulation at different levels of processing.

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Parental Concepts of Childhood Maladjustment Across Cultures

In every culture, parents have intuitive ideas (i.e., ethnotheories) about what are undesirable child characteristics , why their children misbehave and how do they manage these behaviors. Despite this, comparative cross-cultural research on this topic has been sparse. Even though parents’ reports of child maladaptive behaviors have been compared across different cultures, most investigators only used translated versions of instruments that have been developed on Western samples. However, simply translating an instrument into another language does not mean that it has cross-cultural validity.

Collaborating with international colleagues from China, Spain and the US, our team uses a mixed-method (i.e., open-ended interview and thematic analysis) to understand cross-cultural variations of parents' ethnotheories about the nature and cause of preschoolers' deviant behavior that motivate their socialization practices.