Publications by authors named "Christine Lackner"

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have diverse effects on physical development and mental health. This study aimed to clarify the relationship between the quantity of ACE exposure, type of ACE exposure, and subjective level of stress felt, correlated with event-related potential activity across the scalp, while controlling for relevant confounding variables. Fifty-three participants aged 18-32 years completed questionnaires assessing their current mental health, self-regulation, childhood socioeconomic status, and history of traumatic events.

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The Centre for Disease Control recommends vaccination of children against SARS-CoV-2 to reduce the severity of COVID-19 disease and reduce the likelihood of associated complications. Vaccination of children requires the consent of parents or guardians, and levels of consent may ebb and flow over the course of the pandemic. This exploratory study examines predictors of parental intentions to vaccinate their children and the speed with which they would have them vaccinated during the fifth wave of the pandemic when vaccines were just being approved for use in children using a convenience sample of 641 parents reporting on 962 children.

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Nicotine exposure is associated with negative consequences on the developing brain, both in utero and after birth. We investigated the relationship between perinatal nicotine exposure and electroencephalographic brain activity recorded during an emotional faces Go/No-Go task among adolescents. Seventy-one adolescents aged 12-15 years completed a Go/No-Go task using fearful and happy faces.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for close to a year, with second waves occurring presently and many viewing vaccine uptake as the most likely way to curb successive waves and promote herd immunity. Reaching herd immunity status likely necessitates that children, as well as their parents, receive a vaccine targeting SARS-CoV-2. In this exploratory study, we investigated the demographic, experiential, and psychological factors associated with the anticipated likelihood and speed of having children receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in a sample of 455 Canadian families (858 children; parents' mean age = 38.

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Cerebral palsy (CP) is a movement and posture disorder often accompanied by cognitive difficulties which can be assessed using event-related potentials (ERPs), an often-overlooked tool in this population. Here we describe our assessment protocol, examine its feasibility, and validate the use of single-subject ERP analyses in adolescents and young adults with CP, an analysis approach which recognizes the heterogeneity of the clinical population. This study involved a final sample of 9 adolescents/young adults with CP participating in the "MyStory" study (age range 16-29 years, = 25.

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Trauma and stress, like that which occurs as a result of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), can change brain structure and function, especially in medial prefrontal and hippocampal areas, and can impact self-regulatory skill. The error-related negativity (ERN) is a medial frontal negative event-related potential (ERP) component that is more negative when a participant makes an erroneous versus correct response. We investigated the association of ACEs to adolescents' ERN and self-regulation.

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Youth with ADHD and comorbid anxiety (ADHD+ANX) experience increased social and academic impairment compared with youth with ADHD without anxiety (ADHD). Group differences in attentional and impulse control may underlie this increased impairment. Examination of group differences using behavioral measures of attentional and impulse control has yielded inconsistent findings.

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Cortical activity is maintained by neural networks working in tandem. Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals across two sites are said to be coherent with one another when they show consistent phase relations. However, periods of desynchrony beginning with a shift in phase relations are a necessary aspect of information processing.

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Executive functioning is considered a powerful predictor of behavioral and mental health outcomes during adolescence. Our question was whether executive functioning skills, normally considered "top-down" processes, are related to automatic aspects of selective attention. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from typically-developing 12-14-year-old adolescents as they responded to tones presented in attended and unattended channels in an auditory selective attention task.

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Individual differences in preschoolers' understanding that human action is caused by internal mental states, or representational theory of mind (RTM), are heritable, as are developmental disorders such as autism in which RTM is particularly impaired. We investigated whether polymorphisms of genes affecting dopamine (DA) utilization and metabolism constitute part of the molecular basis of this heritability. Seventy-three 42- to 54-month-olds were given a battery of RTM tasks along with other task batteries that measured executive functioning and representational understanding more generally.

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Representational theory of mind (RTM) development follows a universal developmental timetable whereby major advances in reasoning about mental representations occur between the ages of 3 and 5 years old. This progression appears to be only absent in the case of specific neurodevelopmental impairments, such as autism. Taken together, this suggests that neuromaturational factors may play a role in RTM development.

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A novel method was used to investigate developmental changes in face processing: attractiveness aftereffects. Consistent with the norm-based coding model, viewing consistently distorted faces shifts adults' attractiveness preferences toward the adapting stimuli. Thus, adults' attractiveness judgments are influenced by a continuously updated face prototype.

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