Kristin Buss

Biography:

Dr. Kristin Buss is interested in temperament and emotional development, with particular focus on fear and emotion regulation, with the goal of identifying risk trajectories to anxiety development. Her work highlights the importance of early-emerging and stable individual difference markers of vulnerability. Her research utilizes a multi-method approach including endocrine and autonomic physiology, EEG, ERP, eye-tracking and observations of emotion challenge laboratory tasks from infancy to adolescence. She has over 30 years of experience with observational methodology, and multi-method assessment of behavior focused largely on fear reactivity and regulation, including expertise in micro-analytic coding and analyses of these behaviors. The current research in Dr. Buss' lab focuses on uncovering the physiological and contextual mechanisms underlying developmental trajectories of risk for extremely fearful children who are at heightened risk for social anxiety symptoms. This work takes a biopsychosocial approach to examine variation in trajectories for fearful children because the etiology and developmental course is complex and multifaceted. In one line of research, funded by two NIMH grants, Dr. Buss examines the developmental trajectories of toddlers identified as dysregulated in fear through kindergarten and the factors that contribute to risk for anxious symptoms and adjustment problems across childhood and into early adolescence. Over the past decade, she has built strong collaborations with Drs. Koraly Pérez-Edgar and Vanessa LoBue to examine the role of attention biases, emotion regulatory processes, and anxiety development across infancy. Most recently, her work has focused on a recently completed NIMH-funded study of adolescent trajectories of anxiety with a particular focus on neural processes and a new NIMH-funded study of contextual factors such as digital media use in collaboration with Dr. Sarah Myruski.