Professor Sam Wass
Lecturer
Developmental Psychology
Department of Psychological Sciences , School Of Psychology
Sam's research examines how stress and emotional arousal influence concentration and learning capacities during early childhood. At UEL, he is the leader of the BabyDevLab and the Developmental Group.
OVERVIEW
I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who leads the BabyDevLab at the University of East London.
I am a previous holder of research fellowships from the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council, and a current holder of a 5-year research fellowship from the European Research Council. I am also active in running training for Early Years practitioners, and as a media spokesperson with expertise in early childhood.
More details can be found on my website, and I am also
CURRENT RESEARCH
My research examines the early development of attention and stress. I try to do this based entirely on naturalistic real-world observations of real-world behaviours, and corresponding fluctuations in physiology and brain activity.
I am interested in the development of attention control (how we choose to allocate our attention, second by second) and arousal control (how we change our behaviours to ‘correct for’ exogenously caused increases and decreases in physiological stress). I used to think that the common theme was that these both involved executive processes. But nowadays I'm not so sure about that.
But there are still lots of common themes between the two. In particular, I am interested in exploring the time dynamics of attention control and arousal control - taking ideas from how we observe and study weather systems to study how attention and arousal states build up and then dissipate.
And I am interested in trying to identify active, effortful processes through which attention and arousal states are either cancelled earlier than they would otherwise, or actively prolonged.
Finally I am interested in how a child's early interactions with caregivers (co-regulation) and their everyday environments influence how attention and arousal states develop. There is more information available on my personal webpage and the lab webpage.
PUBLICATIONS
Key publications are listed below. Full, up-to-date publication lists are available on Google Scholar and Researchgate.
Key publications
- Phillips, E.A.M., Goupil, L., Marriott-Haresign, I., Bruce-Gardyne, E., Csolsim, F.A., Whitehorn, M., Leong, V. & Wass, S.V. (2023). Proactive or reactive? Neural oscillatory insight into the leader-follower dynamics of early infant-caregiver interaction. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
- Wass, S.V., Phillips, E., Smith, C., Goupil, L. (2022) Vocalisations and the Dynamics of Interpersonal Arousal Coupling in Caregiver-Infant dyads. eLife.
- Wass, S.V., Whitehorn, M., Marriot Haresign, I., Phillips, E., Leong, V. (2020) Interpersonal neural entrainment during early social interaction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
- Wass., S.V., Smith, C.G., Clackson, K., Gibb, C., Eitzenberger, J., Mirza, F. U. (2019). Parents mimic and influence their infant’s autonomic state through dynamic affective state matching. Current Biology.
- Wass, S.V., Noreika, V., Georgieva, S., Clackson, K., Brightman, L., Nutbrown, R., Santamaria, L., Leong, V. (2018) Parental neural responsivity to infants’ visual attention: how mature brains scaffold immature brains during social interaction. PLoS Biology.
- Leong, V., Byrne, E., Clackson, K., Lam, S. & Wass, S.V. (2017). Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
FUNDING
View a list of Sam’s currently funded projects.
TEACHING
I am always happy to receive research proposals from students in any of my areas of interest.
MEDIA and PR WORK
Sam is very active in the public communication of science. He appears regularly as an early years expert on television (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky) and radio (all channels), and in all national newspapers.
He has acted as media spokesperson for public campaigns by the Department of Education, Public Health England, Save the Children, Lego, Nickelodeon, and more. He also appeared as one of the psychologists in the multi-award-winning Channel 4 series The Secret Life of 4-, 5- and 6-Year-Olds, produced by Teresa Watkins for RDF Television and supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Publications
The last four years of publications can be viewed below.
Full publications list
Visit the research repository to view a full list of publications
- Learning to imitate facial expressions through sound Developmental Review. 73 (Art. 101137). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2024.101137
- The neural and physiological substrates of real-world attention change across development. eLife. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.92171.2
- Annual Research Review: ‘There, the dance is – at the still point of the turning world’ – dynamic systems perspectives on coregulation and dysregulation during early development Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 65 (4), pp. 481-507. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13960
- Editorial perspective: Leaving the baby in the bathwater in neurodevelopmental research Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 64 (8), pp. 1256-1259. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13750
- Sing to me, baby: Infants show neural tracking and rhythmic movements to live and dynamic maternal singing Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 64 (Art. 101313). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101313
- The development of the relationship between auditory and visual neural sensitivity and autonomic arousal from 6 m to 12 m Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 63 (Art. 101289). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101289
- DEEP: A dual EEG pipeline for developmental hyperscanning studies Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 54 (Art. 101104). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101104
- Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 54 (Art. 101102). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101102
- Multimodal hyperscanning reveals that synchrony of body and mind are distinct in mother-child dyads NeuroImage. 251 (Art. 118982). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.118982
- Infant Effortful Control Mediates Relations Between Nondirective Parenting and Internalising-Related Child Behaviours in an Autism-Enriched Infant Cohort Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 52, p. 3496–3511. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05219-x
- Automatic classification of ICA components from infant EEG using MARA Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 52 (Art. 101024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2021.101024
- The origins of effortful control: How early development within arousal/regulatory systems influences attentional and affective control Developmental Review. 61 (Art. 100978). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2021.100978
- Very preterm infants engage in an intervention to train their control of attention: results from the feasibility study of the Attention Control Training (ACT) randomised trial Pilot and Feasibility Studies. 7 (Art. 66). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-021-00809-z