1. How do environments shape development?

We examine how specific environments and contextual exposures—such as neighborhood safety, social isolation, or access to resources—shape emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and biological development. This work seeks to identify mechanisms (e.g., patterns of stress reactivity, emotion regulation, social cognition, and indices of physical health) through which environments influence the emergence and course of anxiety, depression, and related mental health difficulties. Prior and ongoing projects include work on cardiovascular risk markers and neuroimaging indicators of stress-related risk and resilience.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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 Adapted from Vargas & Mittal 2022, Annual Review Developmental Psychology​

2. Who is more sensitive, and when?

Using large-scale and intensive longitudinal datasets, we study how environmental and social factors interact with individual differences to predict mental health outcomes, and how developmental stage might inform these links. This includes identifying moderators of risk (for example, who is most affected by a given stressor and under what conditions) and pinpointing modifiable targets that could ultimately be leveraged in prevention and intervention. In this work, we integrate mental health, contextual, and biological data (including cardiovascular risk markers and neuroimaging measures) to better understand how stress “maps onto” both brain and body. By integrating evidence across datasets and methods, we aim to move toward a scalable, contextually sensitive understanding for supporting youth mental health.

 

 

 

 

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       Adapted from Vargas & Mittal 2022, Annual Review Developmental Psychology​

 

3. How can we better capture everyday experiences?

We develop and apply interdisciplinary methods to capture youths’ environments and daily experiences with greater precision. This work includes digital phenotyping (e.g., smartphone-based surveys, phone sensors, GPS), geospatial approaches and street-level mapping and coding of neighborhood features, and qualitative methods to understand how young people experience their contexts. By combining these tools with intensive longitudinal designs, we aim to build more ecologically valid models of risk and resilience that reflect the settings in which youth actually live their lives.

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4. How do developmental processes unfold over childhood and adolescence?

Understanding how environments shape development requires understanding developmental processes themselves. We study normative patterns and trajectories across emotional, cognitive, social and biological domains to characterize how development unfolds over time. This work aims to better understand the processes that underlie developmental change, as well as the diversity of pathways through which young people grow and adapt. 

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​Adapted from Vargas & Mittal 2022, Annual Review Developmental Psychology​​

5. How do stress and context inform serious mental health risk?

A subset of our work focuses on psychosis-spectrum and psychotic-like experiences in youth and young adults. We are interested in how environmental stressors and contextual factors contribute to these experiences and related impairment, and how they intersect with broader patterns of anxiety, mood symptoms, and functioning. This line of research aims to improve early identification of serious mental health risk and to inform developmentally and contextually appropriate supports.

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