Dr. Schmidt’s research concerns our understanding of how temperament and early life experiences influence the relationship between brain development and behaviour, and also investigates emotional response in children and the processes associated with typical and less typical development. During the past two decades, he has looked frequently at aspects of social anxiety and shyness, testing correlations with, for example, resting brain activity, event-related brain responses, and other stress reactivity measures in typically developing children and adults. His empirical research has also included negative influences related to extremely low birth weight and extreme prematurity, childhood maltreatment, autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, congenital deafness and selective mutism.