Professor Sam Wass
Professor of Psychology
Professor
Developmental Psychology
Department of Psychology & Human Development , School of Childhood and Social Care
My research examines how stress and emotional arousal influence concentration and learning capacities during early childhood. At UEL, I am Director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth (ISEY).
OVERVIEW
I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who is Director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth (ISEY) at UEL. ISEY is based in Stratford, East London, in one of the most sociodemographically diverse regions in the world. We develop innovative, world-leading methods to study how early environments shape early development. We then use these insights to provide consultancy, training, and policy advice. More details can be found on the ISEY website, and the ISEY accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook. I also have a personal website and an active account on LinkedIn.
CURRENT RESEARCH
My own research examines how early-life home and educational environments influence the 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). 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. More information is available on my personal webpage and the ISEY webpage.
FUNDING
View a list of my 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
I am very active in the public communication of science. I appear regularly as an early years expert on television (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky) and radio (all channels), and in all national newspapers.
I have acted as media spokesperson for public campaigns by the Department of Education, Public Health England, Save the Children, Lego, Nickelodeon, and more. I also appeared as one of the psychologists in the multi-award-winning Channel 4/Wellcome Trust series The Secret Life of 4-, 5- and 6-Year-Olds. See my personal website for more information.
Publications
Browse past publications by year.
Full publications list
Visit the research repository to view a full list of publications
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions Communications Psychology. 3 (Art. 48). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00219-4
- Who Leads and Who Follows? The Pathways to Joint Attention During Free-Flowing Interactions Change Over Developmental Time Child Development. p. In press. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14229
- Foraging and inertia: Understanding the developmental dynamics of overt visual attention Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 169 (Art. 105991). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105991
- Needing to shout to be heard? Caregiver under-responsivity anddisconnection between vocal signaling and autonomic arousal ininfants from chaotic households Child Development. 96 (2), pp. 527-545. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14183
- Finding order in chaos: influences of environmental complexity and predictability on development Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 29 (4), pp. 344-355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.11.012
- Neural signatures of word learning during adult-child interactions Imaging Neuroscience. 3 (Art. imag_a_00407). https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00407
- Contingency and Synchrony: Interactional Pathways Toward Attentional Control and Intentional Communication Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. 6, pp. 63-85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-010923-110459
- Understanding allostasis: Early-life self-regulation involves both up- and down-regulation of arousal Child Development. In Press. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14136
- Why behaviour matters: Studying inter-brain coordination during child-caregiver interaction Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 67 (Art. 101384). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101384v
- Outdoor learning in urban schools: Effects on 4–5 year old children's noise and physiological stress Journal of Environmental Psychology. 97 (Art. 102362). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102362
- 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
- Comparative strengths and challenges on face-to-face and computer-based attention tasks in autistic and neurotypical toddlers Autism Research. 16 (8), pp. 1501-1511. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2983
- 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
- Anxious parents show higher physiological synchrony with their infants Psychological Medicine. 52 (14), p. 3040–3050. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720005085
- Measuring the temporal dynamics of inter-personal neural entrainment in continuous child-adult EEG hyperscanning data Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 54 (Art. 101093). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101093
- Attention and social communication skills of very preterm infants after training attention control: Bayesian analyses of a feasibility study PLoS ONE. 17 (9), p. Art. e0273767
- The effect of perinatal interventions on parent anxiety, infant socio-emotional development and parent-infant relationship outcomes: A systematic review JCPP Advances. 2 (4), p. Art. e12116. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcv2.12116
- Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads eLife. 11 (Art. e77399). https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77399
- 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
