Claudia I Lugo-Candelas

My research interests lie in exploring the interaction between the neural and contextual variables that foster the development of adaptive emotion regulatory abilities in children and families from a developmental psychopathology framework. At the individual level, I am interested in studying the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation and its role in the development of psychopathology. Primarily, my research has focused on examining the neural correlates of emotion regulation in young children using Event-Related Potentials. My dissertation, conducted in collaboration with the Learning Lab and Dr. Jennifer McDermott, examined the neural correlates of emotion regulation in young children with hyperactivity, utilizing ERPs. I am also interested in studying emotion regulation development from a familial perspective, trying to understand how both child individual differences and familial context interact in predicting the development of emotion regulation.  Finally, I am interested in exploring how larger contextual factors, such as culture, ethnicity, and social class contribute to children’s emotional competence. I aim, in my future work, to integrate the aforementioned three areas of research by examining the interplay between neural, familial, and contextual functioning and their role in fostering the development of adaptive emotion regulatory abilities in children. I am particularly interested in exploring self-regulation transdiagnostically. It is my goal to utilize a developmental transdiagnostic approach to better understand the developmental trajectories of dysregulation and the thresholds at which dysregulation becomes pathological.

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Biography

Claudia Lugo-Candelas is a graduate student in the clinical psychology program. She obtained a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from UMass Amherst. Her work explored the influence of culture in parents’ emotion socialization practices. She is currently studying the neural correlates of emotion processing in preschoolers with hyperactivity well as typically developing populations. She is primarily interested in better understanding, at the neural and behavioral levels, what factors contribute to emotion dysregulation and the pathways and mechanisms though which dysregulation develops into psychopathology in preschoolers. She is currently completing her clinical internship at the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in New York City and will start a working as a postdoc in the Translational Research Training in Child Psychiatry Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center in September 2016.