Caroline Hoyniak
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Depression can begin far earlier than most people assume — symptoms are recognizable in preschoolers, where they predict trouble functioning and raise the risk of depression for the rest of life. The problem is detection: in very young children these symptoms often go unnoticed and undiagnosed because caregivers and clinicians find them hard to recognize.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
early childhood depression
sleep disturbances
circadian rhythms
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Identify which features of objectively measured sleep at age 3, captured by actigraphy and overnight polysomnography across both daytime naps and nighttime, correlate most strongly with early childhood depressive symptoms.
- Test whether chronodisruption — misalignment between a child's internal daily clock and actual sleep timing — is associated with depressive symptoms in 3-year-olds oversampled for familial risk for depression.
- Determine whether sleep disturbances measured during infancy and toddlerhood precede the onset of depression symptoms at age 3, using the prospectively followed mother-infant cohort tracked annually from birth.
- Combine caregiver sleep diaries with actigraphy and polysomnography to establish feasible methods for characterizing sleep continuity and sleep architecture in preschool-age children.
More about the research
One possible early signal is sleep. In adults and adolescents, sleep problems both precede and predict depression, and particular features — fragmented sleep and abnormal sleep architecture, meaning the structure and sequence of sleep stages across the night — serve as markers of the disorder. Almost nothing is known about whether the same holds in early childhood.
Why it matters
Depressive symptoms in preschool-age children impair functioning and forecast depression across the lifespan, yet they are routinely missed. If specific, objectively measured sleep or circadian features track early childhood depression — or appear before it does — they could offer clinicians an observable way to identify and monitor young children who are struggling or at risk, at an age when symptoms are otherwise hard to spot.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lauren Hartstein
University of Arizona, AZ·Psychology·Early-career
Assess whether families of 5- to 6-year-olds with difficulty falling asleep can implement and accept two evening light-reduction strategies, using adherence measures and qualitative parent interviews after a two-week trial.
Beth Snitz
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Recruit 300 older adults and conduct yearly neuropsychological testing, neurological exams, and assessments of function, behavior and mood, to support studies of cognitive aging.
Judith Morgan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology
Test whether coaching depressed mothers to encourage their child's positive emotions, using PCIT-ED modules, increases 4- to 6-year-olds' neural reward response, measured with the RewP and LPP event-related potentials, in a 180-family randomized trial.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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