Research

My research focuses on identifying pathways to the development of psychopathology, particularly depression and anxiety, by studying variation in neural processing of affective information. In my work, I primarily use event-related potentials (ERPs) derived from electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural processing of affective information in healthy and at-risk samples. Four overarching questions drive my research:

1) How does affective processing change across development?

Affective processing is a cornerstone of emotional and interpersonal functioning across the lifespan and involves multiple processes, such as detecting, encoding, appraising, remembering, and labeling others’ emotions with consideration of the context in which they occur. At the neural level, affective processing is linked to variation in the brain’s ability to process and respond to affective cues in the environment. One focus of my research is to clarify the typical developmental trajectory of neural responses to affective stimuli to enhance our understanding of how these processes relate to social and emotional development and functioning. For instance, I have shown that neural responses to emotional faces decrease from adolescence into adulthood, suggesting that regulation of emotional processing improves during this period. Given that the salience of different affective stimuli changes across development, my work also examines neural responses to more developmentally relevant stimuli. I have found that compared to adults, adolescents allocate more neural resources toward processing subtle differences in peer emotional faces than in adult faces, indicating that peer facial displays of emotion are particularly salient and socially significant during adolescence.

Selected Publications

Sandre, A., Park, J., Freeman, C., Banica, I., Ethridge, P., & Weinberg, A. (2023). Chronic stress in peer relationships moderates the association between pubertal development and neural response to emotional faces in adolescence. Biological Psychology, 181, 108612. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108612

Sandre, A., Morningstar, M., Farrell-Reeves, A., Dirks, M.A., & Weinberg, A. (2022). Adolescents and young adults differ in their neural response to and recognition of peer- and adult-age emotional faces. Psychophysiology, 59(9), e14060. doi:10.1111/psyp.14060

2) How and when does variation in affective processing emerge?

Alterations in neural response to affective cues are observed in individuals with depression and anxiety, suggesting that such neural alterations may serve as promising risk markers for these disorders. However, it is unclear how these alterations in neural response to affective information emerge and whether they might reflect risk markers that predate the onset of psychopathology. To address this, my research explores how well-established familial and environmental risk factors for depression and anxiety relate to neural processing of affective information. In terms of familial risk factors, I have focused on whether a family history of psychopathology and exposure to childhood maltreatment—some of the strongest known risk factors for depression and anxiety—are associated with differences in neural response to affective information. For instance, in one study with mother-infant pairs, I found that infants of mothers with a history of depression showed blunted neural responses to emotional faces portrayed by their own mother, suggesting that diminished processing of affective cues may be a marker of risk for depression. Because family factors are far from the only influence on the development of psychopathology, my research also explores how environmental risk factors, such as exposure to heightened stress and socioeconomic disadvantage, relate to affective processing. In one study exploring this, I found that adolescents girls who experienced high levels of chronic interpersonal stress did not show normative developmental decreases in their neural responses to emotional faces compared to girls who experienced low levels of stress. This suggests that heightened stress enhances risk for psychopathology by interfering with normative developmental differences in affective processing. Combined, my work demonstrates that both familial and environmental risk factors may increase vulnerability for psychopathology by disrupting neural response to affective information. Moreover, these effects may emerge very early in development.

Selected Publications

Sandre, A., Troller-Renfree, S. V., Giebler, M. A., Meyer, J. S., & Noble, K. G. (2024). Prenatal family income, but not parental education, is associated with resting brain activity in 1-month-old infants. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 13638. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-64498-3

Sandre, A., Park, J., Freeman, C., Banica, I., Ethridge, P., & Weinberg, A. (2023). Chronic stress in peer relationships moderates the association between pubertal development and neural response to emotional faces in adolescence. Biological Psychology, 181, 108612. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108612

Sandre, A., Freeman, C., Renault, R., Humphreys, K.L., & Weinberg, A. (2022). Maternal symptoms of depression and anxiety during the postpartum period moderate infants’ neural response to emotional faces of their mother and of female strangers. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 22(6), 1370-1389. doi:10.3758/s13415-022-01022-y

Sandre, A., Ethridge, P., Kim, I., & Weinberg, A. (2018). Childhood maltreatment is associated with increased neural response to ambiguous threatening facial expressions in adulthood: Evidence from the late positive potential. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 18(1), 143-154. doi:10.3758/s13415-017-0559-z

3) How do extremes in affective processing contribute to the emergence of psychopathology?

Although alterations in neural response to affective information have been associated with risk for depression and anxiety, not everyone with such neural vulnerabilities develops these disorders. These effects are often explained by vulnerability-stress models, which propose that pre-existing vulnerabilities become most predictive of psychopathology when individuals with those vulnerabilities are exposed to stress. To explore this, my research examines whether variation in neural response to affective stimuli interacts with real-world stressors to predict increases in depression and anxiety symptoms. For instance, I have found that adults with a blunted neural response to positive social cues at university entry experienced greater symptoms of depression during the stress of their first midterm exams, even after adjusting for baseline depression symptoms. This suggests that alterations in neural responses to affective cues may enhance susceptibility to stress by affecting the extent to which individuals process positive aspects of their environment during stressful conditions. To expand this work, I am interested in examining how variation in neural response to affective content might interfere with coping during stressful circumstances.

Selected Publications

Sandre, A., Banica, I., & Weinberg, A. (2023). Blunted neural response to errors prospectively predicts increased symptoms of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotion. doi:10.1037/emo0001224

Banica, I., Sandre, A., Shields, G.S., Slavich, G.M., & Weinberg, A. (2020). The error-related negativity (ERN) moderates the association between interpersonal stress and anxiety symptoms six months later. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 153, 27-36. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.03.006

Sandre, A., Bagot, R., & Weinberg, A. (2019). Blunted neural response to appetitive images prospectively predicts symptoms of depression, and not anxiety, during the transition to university. Biological Psychology, 145, 31-41. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho. 2019.04.001

4) How reliable are neural measures of affective processing across people and time?

The utility of ERPs as individual difference measures of affective processing and markers of risk for psychopathology depends on their reliability and stability across people and over time. Moreover, researchers must make a number of methodological choices when processing, measuring, and scoring ERPs, and it is unclear to what extent these different choices may impact the reliability and replicability of observed effects. To address this, my research examines the psychometric properties of multiple emotion-related ERPs, as well as explores the extent to which different methodological choices impact the measured amplitude of ERPs, their psychometric properties, and their association with individual differences. Additionally, given the unique challenges associated with collecting and scoring ERPs from developmental populations—such as increased noise and artifacts due to fussiness, fatigue, and movement—I am interested in identifying methods that may optimize the collection and measurement of ERPs in young children and adolescents.

Selected Publications

Troller-Renfree, S.V., Molarles, S., Buzzell, G.A., & Sandre, A. (2024). Heterogeneity in pediatric resting EEG data processing and analysis: A state of the field. Psychophysiology, e14733. doi:10.1111/psyp.14733

Sandre, A., Panier, L., Jussaume, A., & Weinberg, A. (2021). Internal consistency reliability of the P300 to novelty in infants: The influence of trial number and data loss due to artifacts. Developmental Psychobiology, 63(8), e22208. doi:10.1002/dev.22208

Sandre, A., Banica, I., Riesel, A., Flake, J., Klawohn, J., & Weinberg, A. (2020). Comparing the effects of different methodological decisions on the error-related negativity and its association with behavior and gender. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 156, 18-39. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.06.016

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