Research-related Material
Sandra T. Azar
Relevant projects
- Human capacity building in Child Protective System for parents with cognitive challenges.
- Termination of parental rights and bias towards parents from underrepresented groups.
- Social cognitive model of child maltreatment and fine grained understanding of neglectful mothers.
Karen Bierman
Relevant projects
- School Readiness Initiative at the CSC is oriented toward reducing educational disparities. Specific projects within that initiative include:
- The predoctoral training grant (TIES). The program highlights the educational needs of children and schools at risk due to socio-economic disadvantage. Project website: http://csc.psych.psu.edu/research/training-interdisciplinary-educational-scientists-ties-progam
- Head Start REDI. An intervention focused on reducing educational disparities among children growing up in poverty. Project website: http://csc.psych.psu.edu/research/head-start-redi-project
- Fast Track program. This intervention study focused on aggressive children living in poor and high crime areas. Project website: http://csc.psych.psu.edu/research/head-start-redi-project
Kristin Buss
Lab website
Relevant projects
- BRAVE Transitions to School (Co-PIs Karen Bierman, Dawn Witherspoon, Laureen Teti, and Robin Perry-Smith, community partner). Community-Based Participatory Project designed to develop and test a culturally sensitive preventive intervention in underserved children, some of whom are exposed to neighborhood violence. Overarching goal is to improve adaptive transitions to school, decrease school avoidance, increase social engagement and decrease anxiety symptoms.
Pamela Marie Cole
Relevant projects
- Development of emotion regulation in early childhood. SES-related factors in understanding the interplay between language development and the development of emotion regulation.
- Cross-national study of maternal beliefs about the nature of young school age children's competence. Mothers were from India, Nepal, Korea, Germany, and the U.S.
Alicia A. Grandey
Relevant projects
- Dr. Grandey’s lab has sought to understand differences in the customer service performance ratings of Black and White employees by examining group-occupational emotional stereotype misfit (e.g., Blacks tend to be stereotyped as less polite and more aggressive than Whites as a group). These results help to explain the reason for racial disparity in performance ratings and career progression, and provide proactive ways that members of stereotyped groups try to overcome these barriers that may potentially have long-term costs to the self.
- She also studies newcomer adjustment to organizations, and how impression management by Blacks may be more necessary to be socially accepted but with costs to the self.
Sam Hunter
Lab Website
Relevant projects
- Dr. Hunter has projects focused on understanding the experiences of employees with autism (e.g., leadership approaches for engaging employees on the autism spectrum).
Rick Jacobs
Relevant projects
- The causes and measurement of adverse impact (i.e., the situation where a specific group is shown to be disadvantaged when it comes to selection or promotion) are complex with numerous associated questions. Dr. Jacobs focuses on the exploration of questions regarding adverse impact measurement and mechanisms that may help to decrease the disparity in selection rates across various subgroups.
Kisha Jones
Relevant projects
- Dr. Jones’ lab explores factors influencing race and gender differences in occupational and organizational entry (e.g., differences in vocational interests and occupational stereotypes, attraction to diversity recruitment advertisements, differences in selection rates).
Her lab also explores factors related to the retention and career success of women and racial/ethnic minorities in organizations (e.g., perceptions of career
Ping Li
Relevant projects
- Dr. Li’s lab examines the relationships between language, brain, and culture. Cross-language and cross-cultural experiments are conducted to understand neurocognitive mechanisms underlying processes of speaking and learning in native speakers and second languages learners.
Jenae Neiderhiser
Relevant projects
- Advisory board for new twin study in Germany (TwinLife) focused on issues of social inequality and development.
- EGDS (adoption study) focused on siblings of the adopted child in our study whose economic, parent education and neighborhood circumstances are often very different for the adopted child and the birthmother-reared child.
Stephanie A. Shields
Lab Website
Relevant projects
- See information on Dr. Shield’s WAGES project (http://wages.la.psu.edu), as well the other projects listed on her website.
José A. Soto
Lab Website
Relevant projects
- Understanding African American’s transition to Predominantly White Institutes
- Cultural variations in physiological and psychological consequences of emotion regulation to negative stimuli
Janet van Hell
Lab Website
Relevant projects
- Dr. van Hell’s research focuses on second language learning and processing in two languages, including immigrant populations and heritage speakers who often face issues of social inequality/disparities or poverty.
- She also studies foreign-accented speech and language comprehension in monolingual speakers (both children and adults); this research has implications for understanding the social stereotypes individuals face due to their non-standard accent (e.g., immigrants, other speakers of a non-standard dialect).
Martha Wadsworth
Lab Website
Projects
- Preadolescent Stress and Coping Project. NICHD-funded study of physiologic correlates of coping in rural, low-income preadolescents. Goal is to understand malleable targets for interventions to reduce SES- and race-based health disparities.
- Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills program. Social justice intervention developed for preadolescent children growing up in poverty. The intervention teaches a variety of individual and collective coping skills for addressing both everyday stress as well as stress resulting from inequality and discrimination--includes social identity development and community social action. Goal is to prevent development of delinquency, depression, and substance use.
- FUERTE and FRAME. FRAME is a family strengthening intervention program developed for families living in poverty that targets stress-and-coping, interparental conflict and communication, and parenting, including co-parenting. FUERTE is a linguistic and cultural adaptation of FRAME developed specifically for Spanish-speaking Latino parents. Goal is to improve family functioning and prevent child adjustment problems.
Dawn Paula Witherspoon
Lab Website
Relevant projects
- Understanding Families, Adolescents, and Neighborhoods in Context (FAN-C) Study
- Navigating Environments of Latino Families (NELF, co-PI Mayra Bamaca, focuses on place, acculturation, and Latino youth Substance Use).
- LEGACY Together project (with Emilie Smith, PI), a randomized trial that focuses on afterschool sites as places of intervention for diverse youth, examined on how place affects youth problem behavior and substance use.