Dr. Lisa Gatzke-Kopp, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, investigates the development of externalizing behavior disorders in children, including attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), delinquency, aggression, and substance use. A body of research implicates environmental risk factors such as family processes, peer influence, and neighborhood characteristics in the development of these kinds of problems, and Dr. Gatzke-Kopp extends this research by investigating why some children are more vulnerable than others to environmental influences.
Impulsivity is a risk factor common to all externalizing disorders and describes children who seem to make irrational choices and poor behavioral decisions. Dr. Gatzke-Kopp’s research aims first, to understand the mechanisms behind poor decision making by focusing on the factors that contribute to decisions. Children, like adults, make decisions by weighing costs and benefits. Neurobiological research tells us that costs come in different domains, and are calculated independently within the brain. For instance, a child may want something, but not be willing to wait for it (termed, delay discounting), or not be willing to work for it (termed, effort discounting) or be too willing to take risks for it (termed, failure of probability discounting). Because the calculation of a decision is based on multiple factors, two children who are both considered impulsive may arrive at poor decisions for different reasons. The heterogeneity that underlies childhood impulsivity may help explain why some children respond to intervention better than others, and understanding the mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity may provide mechanistic insight into how interventions can be better tailored to individual children.
The second aim of Dr. Gatzke-Kopp’s research integrates developmental biology and neuroscience perspectives to illuminate the influence of genetic and developmental environmental influences on the development of the dopamine system. Because the dopamine system develops in response to environmental influences, vulnerability may emerge early in life in response to stressors and risk factors in the environment. Dr. Gatzke-Kopp’s research is grounded in the idea that characterizing developmental influences on cost discounting traits will contribute to the design of prevention programs at both the global (public health) and individual levels.