Current Studies

Music-listening and heart rate variability study for 11-17 year olds

We’re interested in studying how the brain and body react to different types of music, to understand how music can help people with mental health disorders. This study looks at how the heart responds when we listen to different types of music. We are interested in looking at subtle differences in the time between heart beats, also known as heart rate variability. In adults, listening to music can cause changes in heart rate variability, but it’s not known whether children and adolescents respond in the same way. Participants with or without a mental health disorder will listen to four different pieces of music while having their heart rate and breathing monitored. We’ll also measure skin conductance by placing sticker electrodes on the hand. The goals of the study are to learn new information about the responses of youth with and without mental health disorders, and in the long term, to identify new ways of using music to help people.

Movie-watching brain MRI study for 6-10 year olds

Functional MRI (fMRI) scans provide an important tool for researchers that study how children’s brains grow and change. In every fMRI study, all of the brains need to be lined up in a special way so that they can be properly compared to each other. Usually, the brains are lined up using physical landmarks, but a new method has been developed that uses functional information instead. This has worked really well in adult studies, and might be even more important in pediatric studies because of differences across brains that occur naturally during normal brain development. So, this study will test whether this new method (called hyperalignment) works in kids. To get enough data for the hyperalignment analyses, we will scan healthy children at BC Children’s Hospital while they watch movies in the MRI scanner, and we will repeat the scan on two different days.