News

Four new undergraduate research assistants joined the lab this spring:  Roshni Ammanamanchi, Isa Lucarelli, Alex Moffitt, and Lunar Singsomphone. They will be helping the Harrop Lab run studies, recruit participants, and keep everything organized. We are very excited to start working with them come Fall!

Emma McQueen successfully defended her Psychology Honor’s Thesis entitled “Executive Functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Multimodal Approach.” Emma’s research was funded through an Autism Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Grant and the UNC Peele Award for Honors Research. Emma will be starting a post-bac fellowship...

Melissa Cavagnini joined the Harrop Lab in 2020 as a Human Development and Family Studies Intern. Melissa will be with us until she graduates in the Spring and will be working across projects in the lab and conducting an independent study.

Paige Wintermute joined the Harrop Lab in the Fall of 2019. She is a SPHS Masters Student at UNC Chapel Hill. Paige is working on our Auditory Processing Study (with Ayse Belger’s lab) and conducting language assessments on our SAGA project.

The Harrop Lab celebrated the holidays by escaping the Chapel Thrill Escape Room – with a few seconds to spare! Thank you to all our families for you involvement with our lab this past year and happy holidays 🙂

Dr. Harrop was recently awarded a Junior Faculty Development Award from the UNC Provost Office to study biobehavioral markers of anxiety in autistic males and females. We will be using biomarkers (RSA and eye tracking) alongside caregiver and adolescent self report (including EMA) to understand the experience of anxiety in...

Our paper detailing the development of the Behavioral Inflexibility Scales is out now in Autism Research. We outline the steps taken (a lot!) to create our measure. We describe this as a “multi‐step iterative process” which included extensive review of existing measures, expert panel feedback, focus groups, cognitive interviews and...

Our eye tracking study, funded by the Autism Science Foundation, was recently published in Autism Research. This study took all the elements of our other studies – sex differences in attention to faces, sex differences in attention during dynamic scenes and sex differences in the type of images attended to...

Dr. Harrop recently presented at the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development on Sex Differences in ASD. While we are a Tar Heel lab, it was great to see the amazing work going on at Duke. Thank you for the invite!

Emma McQueen was recently awarded the Peele Memorial Research Award from the UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. This prestigious award provides $450 for Emma towards her honors thesis research. In this project, Emma is using EEG and Eye Tracking to examine profiles of executive functioning and reward processing in...