Youth Emotion Study (YES)

Research Summary

The Youth Emotion Study (YES), in partnership with the UNC Girls Health Study, is a research study at UNC Chapel Hill designed to explore how stressful life experiences affect brain development in adolescence and to elucidate neural risk markers for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (STBs). This study involved fMRI scanning of adolescent girls (9-16 years) while they completed cognitive control, emotion regulation/reactivity, and social processing tasks. Our future analyses will explore the effects of maltreatment on cognitive and reward processing mechanisms, examine the effects of interpersonal stress on emotion reactivity and regulation, and determine how mechanistic changes in these processes may be linked to or confer risk for STBs. We are also interested in learning about neurodevelopmental pathways that underlie the relationship between childhood maltreatment and suicidal ideation. Additionally, we collected longitudinal fMRI data for a subset of the sample, which will allow us to analyze changes in neural processes throughout adolescence.

**This study is now closed to enrollment, and is in the data analysis phase.**

People

PIs: Adam Miller, Margaret Sheridan
RAs: Emily Munier, Srishti Goel, Adrienne Bonar, Kinjal Patel [data collection and analyses]
Graduate students: Anais Rodriguez-Thompson, Laura Machlin, Madeline Robertson [data analyses]

Participation

Participants and their parents/guardians will complete a set of questionnaires and interviews. Additionally, youth participants will be asked to play some games inside and outside of an MRI scanner. Youth will participate in an MRI scan that will take ~1hour, The total time of the appointment is ~4hours and families will be compensated for their time. We are scheduling on days, evenings, and weekends!

**This study is now closed to enrollment.**