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"The disruptive force of the COVID-19 pandemic has presented unpredictable and uncontrollable stressors for all, and potentially compounded the difficulties faced by many adolescents."
Pandemic-related effects, such as access and isolation, may have exacerbated suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
"Despite the prevalence of exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs) among children involved with the child welfare system (CWS), trauma screening is not yet a common practice."
The lecture, sponsored by the College of Health and Human Development, will be presented on Wednesday, March 20, at 3 p.m. in the Edna Bennett Pierce Living Center (110 Henderson Building). The lecture is free and open to the public.
On Friday, Feb 16, 2024, the CSC Training Institute held a Friendship Group training.
"Using human-centered design (HCD) methods, we created activity kits fostering parents’ (a) involvement in and (b) valuing of parent-child play to promote preschoolers’ STEM skills."
“We were looking at space not just as a spatial boundary, but where meaning is being made and relationships and experiences matter,” said Witherspoon.
"In a recent study of adolescents (ages 12-15), we examine social interaction preferences and relations with adolescents’ emotions, their regulation, and anxiety."
The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding APS Members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD.
Penn State World Campus’ comprehensive portfolio of online degree programs has been included in the 2024 U.S. News & World Report “Best Online Programs” rankings, released today (Feb. 7).
This study assesses how different forms of abuse and neglect are associated with juvenile offending, with specific emphasis on whether youth commit offenses analogous to the illicit parental behaviors to which they were exposed.
Parents with young adult children can still make an impact on their children’s mental health, whether those children have left the nest or not.
Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute recently announced new directors for two of their units, the Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center (SLEIC) and the Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction (CSUA), effective July 1.
Penn State researchers have embarked on a five-year, $2.5 million project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study outcomes for adults who participated in the substance misuse prevention system known as PROSPER while they attended middle school. The system, PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience, was developed by Penn State and Iowa State University and has served more than 100,000 children in rural communities throughout Pennsylvania and Iowa since 2001.
Drawing upon race-based traumatic stress models, and following the PRISMA-2020 guidelines, this systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to identify the state of the empirical evidence in the association between racism-related experiences and traumatic stress symptoms in ethnoracially minoritized youth.
Rob has been working to re-envision the educational system for decades and has been at the forefront of understanding how we can best integrate mindfulness and compassion into school settings.
"We investigated perceptions among child welfare professionals given the contributing role they could play in both initiating provider–parent dialogue and connecting families with timely resources to better support early emotional development post-abuse/neglect."
An evaluative review of the field of prenatal substance exposure, with a focus on neurobiological and behavioral outcomes from infancy to young adulthood.
"Family Foundations helps parents handle the physical and emotional challenges of parenthood by building a strong team approach to positive parenting."
While screen time is generally known to affect sleep, new research suggests that interactive engagement, such as texting friends or playing video games, delays and reduces the time spent asleep to a greater extent than passive screen time, like watching television — especially for teens.
"Dawn Witherspoon, professor of psychology, Susan McHale, distinguished emeritus professor of human development and family studies and demography, and Valarie King, emeritus professor of sociology, demography, and human development and family studies, all of Penn State, collaborated on editing this volume of the series."
Three Nutritional Sciences graduate students and a postdoctoral scholar recently presented at one of the nation’s premier conferences on obesity, ObesityWeek.
“Establishing healthy leisure habits in college can contribute to long-term health and well-being, and this research demonstrates the need for universities to actively support student engagement in healthy leisure,” said principal investigator Jennifer Agans.
"Although social competence in children has been linked to the quality of parenting, prior research has typically not accounted for genetic similarities between parents and children, or for interactions between environmental (i.e., parental) and genetic influences."
"Four decades of research have examined the antecedents and consequences of behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperament profile associated with heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli in infancy, reticence toward social cues in childhood, and the later emergence of social anxiety in adolescence. This review proposes that a two-hit model can supplement prior work to better understand these developmental pathways."
"The PROSPER study is the premier study of adolescent peer networks in the world, with a scope of over 12,000 youth in 28 school districts, and with 8 annual waves of data collection covering grades 6-12."
"Findings suggest that alterations in social reward processing may be a key marker for early emerging personality pathology."
This series of PowerPoint slides presents the ideas from SRCD Monographs 88.3.
This study highlights the importance of how researchers operationalize their data and the role dimensions of maltreatment have in further elucidating differential outcomes for youth
exposed to maltreatment.
"This analysis of energy intake at meals consumed over multiple days by preschool children expands our understanding of the food properties involved in the regulation of energy intake."
"We examined whether the developmental timing of exposure to potentially traumatic events is differentially associated with engagement in violence during early adulthood."
The day-long conference showcased national experts in the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice, alongside researchers from Penn State and leaders shaping practice and policy within state systems.
The McCourtney Showcase 2023 reception honored Tracy and Ted McCourtney and exhibited some of the many ways the college has benefited from their generosity.
"The purpose of this monograph was to advance place-based scholarship by integrating neighborhood effects frameworks, activity space approaches, and cultural-developmental models."
A $1.2 million grant awarded to College of Education researchers by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education (OSEP) will prepare doctoral-level university faculty in emotional and behavioral health supports where they will conduct research, prepare special education teachers and serve the community.
iLookOut, a web-based child abuse training for early childcare professionals (ECPs), has been shown to improve knowledge and attitudes related to correctly identifying and reporting suspected cases of child abuse.
McCourtney Professor of Child Studies at The Pennsylvania State University; Member of the SRCD Latinx Caucus.
Informed by the dimensional approach to adversity, this study disaggregated child maltreatment effects to examine how abuse versus neglect influenced cortisol at the baseline assessment and longitudinal changes in diurnal cortisol among a sample of Chinese children and adolescents.
Sarah Myruski, PhD, assistant research professor in psychology at Penn State and the associate lab director in the Emotion Development Lab, provides insights on how digital media use may impact anxiety and emotional regulation in teens.
"Competence with peers and close friendships may matter more for fearful youth."
Evan G. and Helen G. Pattishall Outstanding Research Achievement Award recognizes and rewards a faculty member for advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
"This study examined potential age moderation of contemporaneous primary, threat-based appraisal effects on coping in a large sample of 490 youth in foster care (48% female, ages 8 to 18) using a series of statistical models which were capable of detecting very general forms of effect moderation."
The inaugural luncheon featured a panel discussion with Penn State women leaders.
Findings suggest "that mother–infant RSA synchrony may operate as a resilience factor for the intergenerational transmission of internalizing symptoms in community samples."
This book examines the landscape for using integrated datasets to inform child welfare system efforts.
The Autism Science Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding innovative autism research and supporting families facing autism.
Doan, professor of theatre at Penn State and director of the University’s Arts & Design Research Incubator (ADRI), is collaborating on the project with principal investigator Sarah Myruski, assistant research professor of psychology and associate director of the Emotion Development Lab, and lab director Kristin Buss, professor of psychology and human development and family studies.
An evaluative review of the field of prenatal substance exposure, with a focus on neurobiological and behavioral outcomes from infancy to young adulthood.
"In this paper, we aim to examine whether fluctuations in daily affect of both parents and adolescents are related to adolescents' and parents' perceptions of parenting and discrepancies between them."
Nausea, headaches and difficulty concentrating are just a few of the hangover symptoms that can besiege young adults who drink alcohol to excess.
Dr. Martha Wadsworth steps in as associate director of PACT.
A new economic analysis has linked, for the first time, conduct problems among kindergarten students with significant costs to society in terms of crime and associated medical expenses and lost productivity when they are adults.
More than 50 students, staff, and faculty participated in Penn State’s first ever Open Science Bootcamp August 9-11, 2023.
Shana Ratcliff is an SRCD Federal Executive Branch Fellow in the Office of Head Start (OHS) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Secondhand tobacco smoke continues to be a major source of indoor air pollution that causes more than 41,000 nonsmoking adults to die every year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This study aimed to describe staff perceptions about the feasibility, utility, and potential for distress associated with trauma screening.
Child maltreatment — which includes physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect — affects at least 12% of children under 18 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About Brains On! Universe is a collection of smart, funny shows for kids and curious adults from American Public Media.
"The goal of the current paper is to provide clinical child and adolescent psychologists a guide to the complexity of child maltreatment research and to suggest possible solutions to navigate the challenges associated with research on child maltreatment."
Miglena's winning poster is titled, “Profiles of Co-occurring Internalizing and Externalizing Problems and Adolescent Substance Use.”
"The current study examined two epigenic age acceleration clocks appropriate for the pediatric population, the Horvath and Pediatric Buccal Epigenetic (PedBE) clocks, and their associations with depressive and anxiety symptom severity following child maltreatment."
"Results highlight the complex, bidirectional associations in maternal-infant dyads during the first two years of life, and the importance of considering the co-development of infant reactivity and regulatory processes in the context of maternal internalizing symptoms."
Chad E. Shenk, associate professor of human development and family studies and associate professor of pediatrics, has edited a new book as part of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network book series.
"This study offers a new measure targeting the assessment of parental perceptions, behaviors, and regulation around parent and child screen-based device use."
Genetics play a significant role in how children respond to their adoptive families’ parenting style, according to a new study published by a multi-university team of researchers that includes Jenae Neiderhiser, Penn State distinguished professor of psychology and human development and family studies.
The College of Health and Human Development has announced that Max Crowley, professor of human development and family studies and public policy, has been appointed director of Penn State's Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center (PRC), beginning Aug. 15.
Findings offer contributions to research on maternal discipline and warmth and their relation to children's early emotional and behavioral regulation.
A new $3.3 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) will enable a team of researchers at Penn State to study specific characteristics of individuals with Down syndrome that contribute to swallowing and speech outcomes with the goal of developing interventions tailored to the needs of this population.
"We sought to understand how BI may change over time as a function of the child's genetic and environmental risk for psychopathology, and their interaction."