Sungeun Kang, assistant professor of school psychology, is the 2026 recipient of the CYFS Signature Research Impact Program (SRIP) award, which was developed to address critical issues affecting Nebraska’s children, youth, families, schools and communities.
Now in its second year, SRIP supports high-impact research in the social, behavioral and educational sciences that benefits Nebraskans, fosters collaboration and generates pilot data to secure external funding. Funding for this program is provided by generous private donations directed to the center through the University of Nebraska Foundation.
Kang’s project, “Connected Calm: Understanding Emotion Regulation and Physiological Responses to Breathing-Based Relaxation in Autistic Children and Their Caregivers,” will assess caregiver and child autonomic function — which governs involuntary bodily processes such as heart rate, breathing, digestion and temperature regulation — through heart rate variability, including independent and synchronized responses to breathing-based relaxation.
She and Carrie Clark, associate professor of developmental and learning sciences, aim to examine associations between child emotional dysregulation — the inability to manage emotional responses — and caregiver stress and heart rate variability.
Researchers will recruit 12 children with autism, ages 7-13, and their primary caregivers to participate in a video-recorded laboratory session. Caregivers will interact with the children while the child is wearing an Actiheart — a compact, chest-worn monitoring device that records heart-rate variability — to determine how the child is coping with stress and other emotions.
Pilot data generated by this project will help inform future research designed to test physiology-informed supports to develop targeted caregiver-assisted interventions tailored to individual children.