PhD in Developmental Psychology
About
Faculty Advisors
Primary: Daniel Keating
Secondary: Adriene Beltz
Primary Interests
My research interests span both adolescent theory and measurement of reward processing and risk behaviors. Adolescent neurodevelopment models pose several paths through which poor decision-making arise. However, key tenets of convergence and predictive validity expose questions that are key to the heuristic and modeling framework. My work attempts to evaluate these key principles in adolescent samples in order to determine whether the psychosocial, cognitive and neural mechanisms are or are not generalizable to risk behaviors (see Demidenko et al., 2019, 2020), as previously proposed. Further, I reexamine measurements and theories of reward in development models by considering individual-level characterists (via GIMME), environmental influences (developmental adversity), and fMRI task and analytic variability (for latter, see Demidenko et al., 2021).
Dissertation Committee: Drs. Daniel Keating, Adriene Beltz, Christopher Monk & Mary Heitzeg. Defended: March 2022.
