Briah Glover

Briah Glover (she/her) is a fifth-year graduate student and Bunton-Waller Graduate Fellow in the Developmental Psychology program at Penn State. Briah previously attended Howard University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2020. As an undergraduate, she realized that much more work needed to be done representing Black Americans in research. She was drawn to the work of Dr. Dawn Witherspoon at Penn State on place-based contexts, such as neighborhoods and schools, because these environments directly shape the inequities faced by Black families and how those inequities are navigated.

Briah’s research at Penn State explores the ways that Black youth and families navigate general and race-based stressors in the United States. Her first-year project showed that youth who experience more discrimination report lower confidence in their ability to combat that discrimination, as well as lower confidence in academic contexts. Subsequently, Briah became interested in the impact of discrimination on Black youth’s expression of emotion and the supports that buffer negative effects. Through her master’s thesis, she discovered a need for more culturally sensitive measures of emotion socialization, such as measures that better capture how parents scaffold their child’s emotional response to discrimination. Moreover, Briah found that the relation between ethnic-racial socialization and emotional reactivity differs based on the sociohistorical context (for example, Black Caribbean versus Black American youth).

Briah’s dissertation will explore Black American youth and parents’ daily experiences of stress and how they relate to emotion regulation, coping, and parenting practices. In addition, Briah received the Irene E. Harms award in 2024 to advance her goal to increase the equitable and respectful inclusion of Black Americans in research. Specifically, she is developing a culturally sensitive measure of research participants’ experiences with the research process. This measure will be developed through collaboration with community members and then tested in a sample of Black American parents and caregivers, alongside measures of coping and parenting practices. After graduation, Briah would like to serve Black American and other marginalized populations through community-engaged research, with the goal of implementing tailored supports to help these families be resilient to and resist attacks to their communities.