About
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University
About:
The goal of my research is to leverage network analysis techniques to uncover how the brain mediates sex hormone influences on gendered behavior across the lifespan. Thus, there are quantitative and substantive components to the work being conducted in the Methods, Sex differences, and Development – M(SD) – lab that I direct. Quantitative work concerns creating and applying connectivity analyses, such as unified structural equation models, to time series data; these are intensive longitudinal data, including functional neuroimages, daily diaries, and observations. Substantive work concerns investigating the links between androgens (e.g., testosterone) and estradiol at key developmental periods, such as puberty, on behaviors that typically show sex differences, including aspects of cognition (e.g., mental rotations and verbal fluency) and psychopathology (e.g., substance use and depression). Most of my research comes from a person-specific perspective, owing to the heterogeneity that exists across people, gendered processes, and time.
Representative Publications:
Beltz, A. M., & Molenaar, P. C. M. (in press). Dealing with multiple solutions in structural vector autoregressive models. Multivariate Behavioral Research. doi: 10.1080/00273171.2016.1151333
Beltz, A. M., & Molenaar, P. C. M. (2015). A posteriori model validation for the temporal order of directed functional connectivity maps. Frontiers in Neuroscience: Brain Imaging Methods, 9, article 304. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2015.00304
Beltz, A. M., Hampson, E., & Berenbaum, S. A. (2015). Oral contraceptives and cognition: A role for ethinyl estradiol. Hormones and Behavior, 74, 209-217. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2015.06.012
Beltz, A. M., Corley, R. P., Bricker, J. B., Wadsworth, S. J., & Berenbaum, S. A. (2014). Modeling pubertal timing and tempo and examining links to behavior problems. Developmental Psychology, 50, 2715-2726. doi: 10.1037/a0038096
Beltz, A. M., Beekman, C., Molenaar, P. C. M., & Buss, K. A. (2013). Mapping temporal dynamics in social interactions with unified structural equation modeling: A description and demonstration revealing time-dependent sex differences in play behavior. Applied Developmental Science, 17, 152-168. doi: 10.1080/10888691.2013.805953.
Beltz, A. M., Gates, K. M., Engels, A. S., Molenaar, P. C. M., Turrisi, R., Berenbaum, S. A., Gilmore, R. O., & Wilson, S. J. (2013). Changes in alcohol-related brain networks across the first year of college: A prospective pilot study using fMRI effective connectivity mapping. Addictive Behaviors, 38, 2052-2059. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2012.12.023.
Beltz, A. M., & Berenbaum, S. A. (2013). Cognitive effects of variations in pubertal timing: Is puberty a period of brain reorganization for human sex-typed cognition? Hormones and Behavior, 63, 823-828. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2013.04.002.
