Associate Professor of Psychology
About
Additional Research Interests: Hormones/Endocrinology
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 individualized models, such as temporal network maps, 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 ovarian hormones at key developmental periods, such as puberty and the reproductive years, on behaviors that typically show gender 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.
Recent Representative Publications
Weigard, A., Lane, S., Gates, K. M., & Beltz, A. M. (in press). The influence of autoregressive relation strength and search strategy on directionality recovery in GIMME. Psychological Methods. doi: 10.1037/met0000460
Beltz, A. M. (2022). Hormonal contraceptive influences on cognition and psychopathology: Past methods, current inferences, and future directions. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 67, article 101037. doi: 10.1016/j.yfrne.2022.101037
Chaku, N., Kelly, D. P., & Beltz, A. M. (2021). Individualized learning potential in stressful times: How to leverage intensive longitudinal data to inform online learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 121, article 106772. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2021.106772
Beltz, A. M., Loviska, A. M., Weigard, A. (2021). Daily gender expression is associated with psychological adjustment for some people, but mainly men. Scientific Reports, 11, article 9114. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-88279-4
Beltz, A. M., Corley, R. P., Wadsworth, S. J., DiLalla, L. A., & Berenbaum, S. A. (2020). Does puberty affect the development of behavior problems as a mediator, moderator, or unique predictor? Development and Psychopathology, 32(4), 1473-1485. doi: 10.1017/S095457941900141X
