Louis Schmidt
- Professor, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University
- Core Member, Offord Centre for Child Studies
- Director, Child Emotion Laboratory, McMaster University
Dr. Schmidt’s research concerns our understanding of how temperament and early life experiences influence the relationship between brain development and behaviour, and also investigates emotional response in children and the processes associated with typical and less typical development. During the past two decades, he has looked frequently at aspects of social anxiety and shyness, testing correlations with, for example, resting brain activity, event-related brain responses, and other stress reactivity measures in typically developing children and adults. . His empirical research has also included negative influences related to extremely low birth weight and extreme prematurity, childhood maltreatment, autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, congenital deafness and selective mutism.
Current Activities
- Several ongoing projects interested in biological and environmental influences on the development of emotional understanding and feeling in normally developing young children, adolescents and young adults, and in children and adults diagnosed with disorders.
Publications
- Poole KL, Saigal S, Van Lieshout RJ, Schmidt LA. Developmental programming of shyness: A longitudinal, prospective study across four decades. Dev Psychopathol. 2019 Mar 29;:1-10. doi: 10.1017/S0954579419000208. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 30924438.
- Poole, K.L., & Schmidt, L.A. (2019). Frontal brain delta-beta correlation, salivary cortisol, and social anxiety in children. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 60, 646-654.
- Poole, K.L., & Schmidt, L.A. (2019). Smiling through the shyness: The adaptive function of positive affect in shy children. Emotion, 19, 160-170.
For further publications click here.
Additional Information
Contact Louis
Research Interests
- temperament, processing and regulation of emotion response
- brain developmental and individual differences in behaviour
- factors related to developmental issues such as childhood shyness and anxiety
Education, Memberships & Certifications
- PhD University of Maryland, Fellow, Association for Psychological Science