Our research suggests that there are age-related changes in neural response to emotional faces and voices, in regions and networks involved in the processing of social information. We also investigate how the neural representation of these socio-emotional cues may differ in youth with chronic health conditions that are associated with social cognitive deficits, such as epilepsy.
Morningstar, M., Mattson, W.I., Singer, Jr., S., Venticinque, J., & Nelson, E.E. (In press). Children and adolescents’ neural response to emotional faces and voices: Age-related changes in common regions of activation. Social Neuroscience. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2020.1832572
Morningstar, M., Grannis, C., Mattson, W.I., & Nelson, E.E. (2019). Associations between adolescents’ social re-orientation towards peers over caregivers and neural response to teenage faces. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13(108). doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00108
Morningstar, M., Mattson, W.I., Venticinque, J., Singer, Jr., S., Selvaraj, B., Hu, H.H., & Nelson, E.E. (2019). Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. doi: 10.3758/s13415-019-00742-y
Morningstar, M., Hung, A., Grannis, C., French, R.C., Mattson, W.I., Ostendorf, A.P., Gedela, S., Englot, D.J., & Nelson, E.E. (2020). Blunted neural response to emotional faces in the fusiform and superior temporal gyrus may be marker of emotion recognition deficits in youth with epilepsy. Epilepsy & Behavior, 112, 107432. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2020.107432
Morningstar, M., Hung, A., Mattson, W.I., Gedela, S., Ostendorf, A.P., & Nelson, E.E. (2020). Internalizing symptoms in intractable pediatric epilepsy: Structural and functional brain correlates. Epilepsy & Behavior, 103, 1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2019.106845