Wisconsin International Adoption Project
Headed by Dr. Seth Pollak, Ph.D., the Wisconsin International Adoption Project (WIAP) is investigating the successes, challenges, and needs of children who spent some early part of their lives in institutional, orphanage, or foster care settings. The research conducted by WIAP will provide answers and aid to families, community agencies, adoption professionals, educators, and medical professionals to help children and families reach their full potential. The WIAP maintains a confidential registry of families who are interested in being contacted about research opportunities. When you register, we will send a questionnaire for you to complete about your child's developmental history and, although our researchers will contact you when a research opportunity arises, you are never obligated to participate.

See and Hear About Our Research

Research projects in our lab are focused upon children's emotional development and the relationship between early emotional experience and child psychopathology. We are particularly interested in understanding two related aspects of emotional development:

• What are the mechanisms of normal emotional development? To what extent are emotions shaped by nature and nurture? Does it make sense to try and separate biology and experience?
  
  
• How are emotions related to the development of psychopathology in children? Might the development of emotional processes help explain the link between people's early experiences and later development of psychological difficulties?
  

• Cognitive and biological aspects of typical emotional development
  
  Several projects explore the processes and patterns of functional specializations of emotion processing in "normal" children aged 3 - 12 years. Our empirical work always begins with samples of typically developing children. These studies then serve as the point of departure for our studies of neuroplasticiy, atypical development, and risk for psychopathology. Ongoing projects include studies of the processing of faces, emotion recognition and perception, memory for emotion, and regulation of emotional states. This approach provides a basic understanding of the architecture and origins of emotion systems/processes.
  
  
• The effects of child maltreatment on emotion processes and risk for psychopathology
  
  A central problem in examining any behavior where nature-nurture interactions are suspected involves the manipulation of these two sources of variance. We use behavioral and psychophysiological measures to study children who have had different kinds of emotional experiences in order to assess the degree to which biological biases in cerebral development depend upon and can be modified by input from the environment. Studies of emotion processing in maltreated children suggest that certain aspects of emotional development are influenced by experience. These include the perception of cues representing threat and the regulation of attention to certain aspects of emotion. These results imply that some neural systems are more modifiable by (and dependent upon) early sensory experience than are others. Using several different experimental approaches, we are exploring the mechanisms that link early emotional experiences with heightened risk for the development of psychopathology.
  
  
• Risk for depression among children with Down Syndrome
  
  Children with Down syndrome are noted to be at a substantially increased risk for the development of psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression. What is yet unknown is how the pathophysiology of Down syndrome is related to emotional development. One possibility is that deviations in these children's anatomical development (e.g., the temporal and posterior portions of the brain) influence how their brains handle emotional information. Studying the emotional difficulties of children with Down syndrome may provide a window into behavior that allows us to better understand how the human brain processes emotions. More immediately, such understanding can lead to the implementation of timed, guided, and focussed forms of intervention specifically directed towards these children's risk for emotional difficulties. By exploring the biological and cognitive basis of emotional functioning children with Down syndrome, we hope to understand links between the neural, cognitive, and social processes associated with psychological disorders with the goal of preventing these problems.
  
  
• Effects of parental depression on children's emotional development
  
  
• Early social deprivation and children's ability to regulate emotion
  

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