PULSE Lab
Depression and anxiety are common among young people, yet many do not receive timely or effective care. The PULSE Lab studies how changes in emotions, behaviors and relationships can help identify periods of increased risk earlier, with the goal of developing more timely and personalized approaches to prevention and intervention.
Inside PULSE Lab
Our Research
At the Processes UnderLying Social-Emotional functioning (PULSE) Lab, our core mission is to advance the understanding of dynamic processes that confer risk for psychopathology and translate this knowledge into more precise and timely approaches to assessment, prediction and prevention. We use a multimodal approach that leverages methodological innovation to capture clinically meaningful changes in behavior and functioning as they unfold across interpersonal and real-world contexts, including EEG hyperscanning and mobile sensing.
Featured Publications
- Smartphone language and resting-state EEG indicators of self-focused attention prospectively predict major depressive disorder risk in adolescents
- Siblings' similarity in neural responses to loss reflects mechanisms of familial transmission for depression
- Capturing mood dynamics through adolescent smartphone social communication
- A longitudinal study of objective dating app usage and its relation to mental health in adolescents
- An Effortful Approach to Social Affiliation in Schizophrenia: Preliminary Evidence of Increased Theta and Alpha Connectivity during a Live Social Interaction
Collaborate With Our Team
If you are interested in collaborating with the PULSE Lab, please email Lilian.Li@NationwideChildrens.org.
Join Our Team
The PULSE lab is actively recruiting, please email PulseLabShared@NationwideChildrens.org if you are interested in joining our team.
Featured Research Project
The goal of SYNC is to understand how patterns of interaction between close friends may contribute to risk for depression. The project focuses on co-rumination, or repeatedly discussing and dwelling on problems with another person, and examines whether synchrony in language and brain activity during these interactions helps explain why co-rumination can strengthen relationships while also increasing vulnerability to depression.
This project uses a combination of behavioral and EEG methods to study interpersonal processes associated with depression. During the K99 phase, adult friend pairs completed a laboratory interaction while their brain activity was recorded simultaneously using EEG, allowing us to examine how closely partners’ language and neural activity become synchronized during conversations about personal problems. The R00 phase extends this work to adolescent close friends, a developmental period when both depression and co-rumination become increasingly common. By examining how interpersonal synchrony relates to changes in mood, closeness and depression symptoms, the project seeks to clarify when and how close relationships may contribute to vulnerability or resilience.
Funding: NIMH K99/R00 MH133991