Currently Enrolling…

Ever notice how sometimes conversations between parents and (pre)teens change a lot, even day-to-day? And you know that a lot is going on in both parents’ and (pre)teens’ lives that affect how each person acts and feels during these conversations. Healthy relationships are one of the most important factors in supporting mental health and wellness, but they’re also a moving target, especially the parent-adolescent relationship during the (pre)teen years. We’ve designed a study to help get down to the bottom of how parent-adolescent relationships affect the mental health and wellbeing of children. We think that it has something to do with “synchrony” why is how parents and adolescents feel, act, and even biologically (think stress hormones, heart rate, breathing) respond together – in similar ways or in opposite ways (or don’t actually ‘sync up’ at all!). We also think that patterns of how parents and adolescents sync up – and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing – depends on the context, the kinds of conversations you’re having, how often you have similar conversations in similar contexts, and a bunch of other factors. This research study will help us answer important questions like what kinds of ‘syncing up’ are good vs. bad? In what contexts? And for whom?

Ultimately, the knowledge that we gather through this study will be used to develop ways to help improve parent-adolescent relationship quality and adolescents’ well-being.

If you are in a two-parent family with a mother, a father, and an adolescent child aged 9-13 years, all able to speak English, then…

Check out our parent-adolescent interactions project!

Coming Soon…

While it was initially thought that hair cortisol levels are reportedly stable when stored at room temperature, recent evidence shows degradation in samples stored according to current best practices over the course of a year which creates particular problems balancing storage time with assaying repeated measures together to avoid batch effects (e.g., differences in the assay quality resulting from different people conducting assays on different days, with chemicals from different lots that introduce noise to the final cortisol levels extracted). We are planning a study to understand the performance of ELISA assays under different storage conditions (e.g., room temperature, refrigerated, -4°C, -80°C) to establish new standards for longitudinal research. This study will yield a high-impact methodological publication while also developing our lab protocols, data pipelines, and training materials for students.

We will be looking for volunteers across campus to donate a sample of hair and fill out brief questionnaires to help us in this work! Stay tuned!