Research

At the Brain, AI, and Child (BAIC) Center, we study how AI systems like chatbots and virtual agents are shaping the lives, minds, and relationships of today’s children. Our research explores one of the most urgent and exciting questions in developmental science: How do children form relationships with AI, and what does this mean for their emotional, cognitive, and social development?

Our current projects focus on how AI transparency, emotional intelligence, and anthropomorphism affect children’s trust, social relationships, and well-being. We use innovative methods, such as experimental design and neuroimaging to study the evolving child–AI relationship from developmental perspectives.

By joining the BAIC Center, you’ll be at the forefront of a research movement that aims to unlock the potential of AI to support child development while also identifying and mitigating risks. Our work contributes to real-world solutions, including the design of safer, developmentally appropriate AI systems for families, educators, and developers.

Our minds exist in bodies and social contexts. Our psychological processes intertwine this reality, so that we may understand and behave effectively. In the Mind And Body (MAB) Lab, we explore ways thinking, feeling, and moving are connected to psychological and social functioning. In particular, we focus on embodied emotion and cognition, religion and spirituality, and well-being. We take a social psychological and affective science perspective, using experimental and qualitative methods to understand psychological processes involved as people act on and engage with the world. How does movement influence our perception of others and our own emotional experiences? How do social situations influence our thinking and feeling, and vice versa?

Our lab uses behavioral and brain-based methods to answer questions about how we feel, how we think (thought), and how feelings and thoughts can change each other. AACT stands for automaticity, affect, control and thought. Our lab members conduct research on these affective, or emotional, and cognitive processes among individuals of many diverse backgrounds. Some of these processes are relatively automatic and occur without effort, but others are more deliberate or controlled. Our main focus has been the way that different types of cognitive processes influence emotional responding, such as individuals’ emotional responses when distracted, reinterpreting emotional events or providing a verbal label for their emotional experience.

Our research lab aims to improve treatments for children and adolescents with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and related problems. We study processes that underlie these conditions, including how youth think, feel and act. Then, our goal is to adapt or develop treatments to modify these processes. We study anxiety mechanisms, including cognitive bias, distress tolerance, associative learning, psychophysiological reactivity during acute stress, and avoidance and approach behavior, in both cross-sectional investigations and clinical trials. We are committed to improving the evidence-base for anxiety assessment and intervention with methods that have potential for translation into practical, clinical community settings outside the laboratory. Our ultimate goal is to help kids and teens feel brave so that they can do the things they want and have to do.

Amid discussions of nature versus nurture, we're broadly interested in how these forces work together — how experiences in our environments can change biological processes and how biological risk can modify the effects of experiences. Our lab examines how these features of social relationships interact with biological processes to predict mental and physical health in families. We are particularly interested in how important relationships affect immune processes in ways that increase risk for depression during adolescence; however, we also examine risk across other developmental periods (e.g., prenatal, young childhood, adulthood) and consider additional biological pathways (e.g., epigenetic modifications, somatic fitness, metabolomic profiles) that may confer or buffer risk. The BEAMS Lab believes the best science is built from diverse perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment in our lab, our classrooms and our community.

The Center for Marital and Family Studies builds knowledge of risk and protective factors that contribute to martial distress and divorce, studies the effectiveness of marriage and relationship education for couples, examines couple dynamics and cohabitation, and continually develops intervention programs to enhance the quality of martial and family relationships. We use large, randomized effectiveness relationship educations trials and national, longitudinal research samples to strengthen our understanding of how to best improve the quality of relationships. Some of our current studies include the Army Marital Project, the Relationship Development Study, and the Fatherhood, Relationship, and Marriage and Education Project.

Phone: 303-871-3062

In this lab, we study the many factors that affect children's health and development — from observing children in care centers to assessing and measuring health and stress levels in our lab. We work to understand how risk and protective factors become embedded in the body, and develop and test interventions to support resilience. We are interested in factors that influence cortisol patterns and reactivity in early childhood including factors within the child and those in their caregiving environments. We are also interested in what individual differences in cortisol patterns and reactivity during early childhood might have for later development. We are deeply committed to science in the service of public good, in line with the mission of the University of Denver, and to helping translate scientific findings to inform policy and practice decisions for and with families.

Phone: 303-871-7774

In our lab, we are working to learn more about children, adolescents and families. We want to learn how they grow over time, how their experiences shape who they are and how biology (e.g., genes, brain, the body's response to stress) influences how they develop. We believe that high-quality science should be the basis for interventions and should inform policy. We are committed to conducting high-quality research and translating those findings to help children, adolescents and families. The goal of our research on social buffering is to find out which relationship figures can serve as a buffer from stress at different ages so that we can use this information to improve public health.

Phone: 303-871-7768

In the Family and Child Neuroscience Lab, we study how early experience in family influences the development of a child's brain that involves in emotion regulation. We also investigate how exposure to stress influences parental brain and emotional bond to their children, how everyday stress impacts mental and emotional demands related to pregnancy and parenting in mothers, and understanding how stress impacts a newborn's body and brain development. Mothers' and fathers' brains change during the early postpartum period and their childhood and current stress can impact the neural adaptation to parenthood. As the infant's brain develops rapidly, maternal stress and parenting can impact brain development and have long-term influence. Our research aims to provide scientific information for optimal ways to support infant brain development and provide scientific information for optimal ways to support new parents' adjustment to parenthood.

Suicide is a leading cause of death globally, and non-fatal self-harming behaviors are leading causes of injury and suffering. The Fox Lab is broadly focused on understanding the causes of suicide and self-harming behaviors (broadly defined) so that we can better predict and prevent these outcomes. Toward these aims, we often focus our research on adolescents and people who identify as LGBTQ+ given their disproportionate experience of these outcomes. We are also interested in increasing access to quality mental health care, including via the creation of brief and easily disseminated treatments, and via identifying and reducing treatment biases and barriers that disproportionately impact BIPoC. 

We study [L]earning [E]xceptionalities [a]nd [R]elated [N]europsychology (L.E.a.R.N.) and focus on understanding the cognitive, genetic and environmental contributions to learning disabilities and related developmental disorders. We take a cross-disciplinary approach to our research questions, integrating perspectives and methods from neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, child clinical psychology, behavior genetics and special education.  The goal of our work is to develop a deeper understanding of learning that spans multiple levels of analysis (genetics, environment, brain, cognition, behavior) in order to improve early identification and intervention for children. We are conducting studies to investigate the brain, cognitive and developmental factors that contribute to risk and resilience in children with comorbidities.  Our current work is focusing on the comorbidity of dyslexia with ADHD and anxiety.  

Our lab investigates the psychological and neural mechanisms by which motivation and affect influence human cognition and behavior, with a specific focus on cognitive control and episodic memory processes. Through a combination of methods, including behavioral paradigms, psychophysiological measures, functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and video analysis of behavior, we investigate these relationships in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. We seek to characterize the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms by which these influences take effect on cognition, focusing on cognitive control and episodic memory. In our studies, we have investigated cognitive control and memory processes separately as well as in interaction with one another, taking the view that these processes interact and work in concert to support adaptive human behavior.

Our focus is on studying the role of the prenatal and postnatal environments on health and development across an individual’s lifespan. Our lab evaluates psychological and biological processes during pregnancy and investigate the role that fetal exposure to stress and stress hormones play in programming individual differences in stress and emotional regulation, cognitive functioning and brain development. These projects, supported by grants from NICHD and NIMH, use two complementary approaches to evaluate the influence of prenatal stress and stress hormones for development. The first approach evaluates the effects of prenatal exposure to synthetic glucocorticoids and the second identifies the consequences of natural variations in maternal psychosocial stress and stress hormones.

In the PROTECT Lab, we study the intergenerational transmission of risk and resilience across families and generations from developmental psychopathology and trauma-informed perspectives. We are particularly interested in understanding how early childhood experiences shape lifespan pathways to developmental adaptation and maladaptation, and specifically, how promotive and protective factors buffer children and parents from experiencing stress, psychological impairment and relationship difficulties. Our research seeks to promote resilience in parents and children by deterring the intergenerational transmission of maltreatment, violence exposure and poverty in low-income families. Current projects center on the pregnancy and early childhood periods, and examine family processes such as romantic relationship functioning, parenting behavior, the transition to fatherhood and infant attachment. We are as much interested in the early experiences of parents – how a parent's childhood shapes his or her parenting – as we are interested in how parenting shapes childhood experiences of offspring in the next generation.

The Reducing Inequities in Student Education (RISE) Lab investigates ways individual and institutional racial biases impact youth academic performance and social-emotional and identity development. Using a combination of methods including physiological, observational and interview data, we investigate ways racial biases are perpetuated within schools as well as the influence of these biases on development from early childhood through adolescence. The goal of this work is to inform effective interventions, school policy changes and teacher preparation programs to optimize healthy child development.

We are a group of researchers and students interested in learning more about how the people we interact with, our biology and the experiences we have shape our development. In particular, we are interested in parent-child relationships, the effect of childhood and adolescent experience in predicting college adjustment, and how the transition into college is important for later adjustment. We study these questions in a variety of ways and have several projects going on within the University of Denver, as well as within the community. One study aims to see how people make decisions throughout the developmental spectrum and investigates how adolescents and adults discuss life decisions with high school friends. Analysis includes how individuals feel about these decisions, social influences that drive the outcome and the cognitive processes involved.

Phone: 303-871-3979

The Social Context and Inequality Lab works to expand understanding of the psychology of place, particularly as it pertains to intergroup dynamics and social perceptions. For example, we investigate how inequality across contexts influences social judgments, perceptual biases, and behavior. We ask questions like: are implicit biases linked to environmental features, particularly those signaling inequality? What explains geographical differences in bias? How do people perceive places and the people who live there? How do places shape behavior?

We also focus on the psychology of time. We examine how perceptions of time shape beliefs and behavior. We focus on questions such as: What are people’s estimates of how long it takes to develop certain skills? How do those perceptions shape what they prioritize and how they view themselves? Are there social inequities in time affordances and social differences in time perceptions? How do these differences impact outcomes?

Our lab investigates the determinants and consequences of person perception, with an emphasis on implications for social inequality and discrimination. We form impressions of others with surprising ease, and with shockingly little information. Others’ faces, bodies and language all command attention, combining to provide rich impressions of others’ traits, emotional states, motives and social status. But not all cues are created equal, and similarly, not all people are treated equally. Some of our studies have examined race-based biases in deception judgements, gender stereotypes explaining disparities in pain care and equitable policies, and race-based differences in mental representations of police.

The Social Perception and Attitudes (SPA) Lab examines how attitudes, stereotypes and personality are shaped by visual perception of the social world. We have discovered that individuals' self-esteem, attitudes and stereotypes are shaped by the patterns of facial expressions, clothing and facial diversity they encounter. We also take an ecological approach to social thought. We assume that people respond to the self-relevant meaning conveyed by combinations of social cues. For example, we have demonstrated that perceivers' responses to subliminal emotion expressions depend on the (social) identity of the emoter. The SPA lab emphasizes the early stages of social thought but we do so with an eye towards identifying and solving social problems. For that reason, we examine whether and how the "basic" phenomena uncovered in the lab might be applied to problems in the "real world."

Phone: 303-871-4893

This lab studies the psychology and neuroscience of affect and decision-making. Our research combines computational behavioral models of value and learning with psychological theories of affect and self-regulation. By leveraging psychology, economics and neuroscience, we seek to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of affect and decision-making. The lab's approach is captured in two main goals: first, to identify links between unique components of affect and specific decision processes, and second, to understand how techniques used to change affect can be used to change choices. Our work here combines quantitative economic models of decision-making with physiological measurements and/or brain imaging to shed light on how affective phenomena interact with specific decision processes. Other work of ours uses computational modeling to think about self-control success and failure as the result of optimal choices based on evaluations of the limits of our options and environment.

The Relationship Center studies children's and adolescent's relationships with friends, parents, siblings and romantic partners in order to understand and improve them. Thousands of families have participated in our projects and our goal is to understand their relationships - what makes them healthy and happy, and what causes problems. By understanding more about relationships, we can help people to improve their relationships and how we may be able to prevent problems or help those who are having relationship difficulties. We give workshops to schools and consult with teachers and other professionals about ways of improving relationships among children and adolescents in the community.

Phone: 303-871-3806

The TSS Group pursues several lines of research with both youth and adults to understand the consequences of trauma on individuals, particularly violence exposure. We are a community-engaged, feminist, anti-racist research team committed to intersectional research that disrupts gender-based violence and other forms of oppression. Living up to these values is a goal and a process for all members of our team, and leads to better trauma science. For example, collaborating with community partners enables our team to be part of addressing questions of public concern from public perspectives for impact. We apply our basic research findings to intervention and prevention work and our research draws on multiple methodologies (e.g., cognitive tasks, clinical interviews, survey methodology) as well as theories from diverse psychological perspectives to address both basic and intervention questions.

Phone: 303-871-7407

The VPEC Lab studies visual perception in order to understand how neural and cognitive mechanisms shape what we see and hear, and how perceptual processes guide our social and emotional behaviors. We also collaborate to examine the role of perceptual processes in clinical and social contexts. We use psychophysics and modeling to understand how basic visual processes allow people to see and understand both simple and complex patterns like shapes, facial expressions and gaze. We collaborate with researchers at DU and other institutions to examine clinical, affective and social outcomes. Our goal is to use vision science to answer core questions about the human mind and the nature of visual awareness while making an impact on multiple disciplines within psychology via collaboration.

Phone: 303-871-2191