🚨My brainchild of the last 1.5yrs is now available to read in @jaacap! Let’s break ‘reward processing’ down into its building blocks, and study them systematically in infants & toddlers. 1/5 🧵

In honor of the album announcement, I am endeavoring to write “Taylor Swift” into the current manuscript I’m drafting. If it gets past co-authors, it will be my crowning accomplishment as an academic and as a swiftie. 🫶🎓.

Very fun to watch people at #INSAR2025 trying out pressMORE, our musical bubble machine where you press the button more and more to turn it on.

Hiring! Please RT and send to anyone who is looking for a research coordinator position in a psych lab! .

RT @DrJessicaPhd: 🌟Recruiting for study!. We aim to study the experiences of autistic & gender diverse teens! We hope to recruit 50 teens t….

📣 I'm hiring a research coordinator! Would you enjoy working with preschool age autistic children during study visits, & a wonderful group of grad students & staff in the developmental and clinical psych programs at ND? If yes, pls email your resume/CV to cclemen2@nd.edu!.

Many thanks to the families who traveled with their child with TSC from around the country to Boston Children’s or UCLA for this EEG and other assessments. I’m so fortunate for the time I spent learning from them, as well as from @drcarolw in careful analysis of resting EEG. 9/9.

I’m working on a stats approach to disentangle the effects of meds on EEG. In the meantime, we recommend that resting EEG studies across psychiatry are sure to collect medication data from participants. 8/x.

EEG is a great tool for psychiatric & neurodevelopmental biomarkers because it is low-cost, noninvasive, and feasible for all ages & abilities. But if people are on meds that alter their EEG (antiepileptics, benzos for anxiety), EEG’s utility as a biomarker is threatened. 7/x.

To see this, look in the beta range: the red dashed line is higher (amplitude), and peaks more to the left (at a lower frequency), compared to the height and peak of the gray line. Why does this matter? For biomarker studies, especially in autism and anxiety. 6/x.

Children with TSC not on meds (red solid line) looked shockingly similar to typically developing children (gray line). So I think the most interesting finding is that GABAergic medications were associated with a large change in beta power (lower peak freq, higher peak amp). 5/x

the finding of greater beta power in toddlers with TSC was driven by those children with high seizure severity (Fig B: red=high, yellow=low, gray=matched typical children) or those taking GABAergic antiepileptic medication (Fig D), or both. 4/x

Toddlers with TSC showed greater periodic beta power compared to age- and sex-matched typically developing children. That means more neural oscillations at frequencies between 12-30 Hz: compare the red and gray lines above the gray bar on the x-axis. But… 3/x

We intended to characterize the resting EEG power spectrum in a cohort of toddlers with TSC (Tuberous Sclerosis Complex), a rare genetic disorder with ~50% autism rate, ~90% epilepsy rate, and tubers throughout the brain and body. 2/x.

New paper alert! A story where secondary findings were perhaps more interesting than our original question. Before I start, I extend deep thanks to the families in the study. 🧵 1/x.

NIMH data portal to access NDAR and other data has been down for over 2 months and our project has been stalled. Any idea when we can expect NDA back up and running @NIMHgov ? Thanks!

Now also seems like a good time to announce here that I’m taking a clinical grad student(s) this year. If you’re interested in how reward processing develops in the young brain, or in genetic syndromes, come talk to me! I’ll be at the @ABCTAutism happy hour tonight.

Heading to @ABCTNOW ! Excited for @McellinMik48849 to present her first conference poster on effort in 3-5 year olds. They loved our new progressive ratio task with a musical bubble machine! .(Pic of a 6-year-old cheetah who loved the bubble task 🐆🫧)

RT @rwcarpenterphd: I'm so fortunate to be part of a cohort of amazing new faculty in the psych department at Notre Dame. Read about them b….

RT @ClaMassaccesi: New commentary by @C_C_Clements about our recent work on autism and reward processing (. ➡️https….

Wrote a commentary on Chiappini et al's multimodal assessment of reward processing in autism. They assessed effort (grip force), liking and wanting (self-report, facial EMG, and fMRI), and preference/valuation (pref. asst).