Faculty Research
MICHAEL E. ADDIS
Dr. Addis's research focuses on the role of socio-cultural constructions of masculinity in different men's
experience of, expression of, and response to problems in living. His current work, funded by the National
Institute of Mental Health, focuses on understanding psychosocial barriers to men's use of mental health services.
Dr. Addis is also involved in collaborative research with students on masculinity and depression, men's self-
disclosure, the way adolescent boys cope with soft emotions, and a variety of other projects. In addition to
the above work, Dr. Addis has a longstanding interest in the relationships between research and clinical
practice, and the dissemination of research-based psychosocial interventions. More about Dr. Addis and his research.
Visit Dr. Addis' Men's Coping Project.
JEFFREY ARNETT
Dr. Arnett's main scholarly interests include media uses in adolescence, the psychology of globalization,
responses to cigarette advertising, and anything involving "emerging adults" (ages 18-29). He is the author
of numerous articles on emerging adulthood and of the textbook Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A
Cultural Approach (2007, Prentice Hall). His book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late
Teens Through the Twenties, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. He has also edited a book
on emerging adulthood, Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, published in
2006 by APA Books. He is the editor of Journal of Adolescent Research and of two encyclopedias, the
International Encyclopedia of Adolescence (2007, Routledge, 4 volumes) and the Encyclopedia of
Children, Adolescents, and the Media (2007, Sage Publications, 2 volumes). More information on Dr.
Arnett and his research can be found at www.jeffreyarnett.com.
MICHAEL BAMBERG
Dr. Bamberg's research is in the area of Discourse and Identity with an emphasis on how Narratives
(particularly Small-Stories) are embedded in conversations and employed as general sense-making and
identity-building strategies. His current research projects are in the areas of adolescent and gendered
identities in 10- to 15-year-old males. Another, closely related issue is the role of emotions, values
and morality in how people construct their selfhood and identity. He is the
editor of the Journal Narrative Inquiry; his recent book
publications: Selves and Identities in Narrative @ Discourse
(Benjamins, 2007); Discourse @ Identity (Cambridge UP, 2006);
Narrative--State of the Art (Benjamins, 2007)
More about Dr. Bamberg and his research.
GEOFFREY BROWN
Dr. Brown’s research is broadly focused on social and emotional development in infancy and early childhood. His work has taken a family systems perspective, with an interest in how all family members and family relationships may mutually influence one another. Much of his research has explored the role of the father in the family, and the development of the father-child relationship in the early years of life. His past work has explored the correlates of father involvement, paternal sensitivity, and father-child attachment security in early childhood. Relatedly, he has examined aspects of triadic (mother, father, and child) family interactions, such as maternal gatekeeping behaviors and the coparenting relationship, as important contexts for adaptive family functioning and child development. Dr. Brown is also interested in the role that family relationships play in the development of young children’s self-concepts, and how the child’s emergent personality develops within the family. Much of Dr. Brown’s current work is concerned with documenting family processes in diverse populations, including projects examining father-child relationships, emotion socialization processes, and children’s representations of attachment figures among families from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds.
NANCY BUDWIG
Dr. Budwig's research focuses on language development and language socialization. Her research on language
development is grounded in a functionalist perspective, highlighting the ways in which language forms are
acquired in tandem with learning to communicate. This work has aimed to better understand the protracted
nature of children's organization of linguistic forms and the functions they serve. In a second set of
studies, Dr. Budwig has focused on the role of language in socialization. Her emphasis shifts from language
as the domain of study, to viewing language as a system through which the child comes to co-construct meaning.
This research examines ways children's participation in language practice contributes to the construction of
culturally relevant senses of personhood. Current research on language development and language socialization
has drawn upon, within, and between culture comparisons of American, German and Hindi-speaking children
interacting with their caregivers and peers.
More about Dr. Budwig and her research.
ESTEBAN CARDEMIL
Dr. Cardemil's research focuses on the role of race, ethnicity and social class on psychopathology, with a
particular emphasis on the applicability of cognitive and family models to depression. Current research projects
take place in the local community and most typically involve work with
adolescents in school. Projects have begun to examine how emotion regulation
processes, and their sociocultural influences, may be related to the development
of depressive symptoms in urban adolescents.
More about Dr. Cardemil and his research.
Read an interview
with Dr. Cardemil and some of his students.
JAMES CÓRDOVA
The goal of Dr. Córdova's research program is to increase our understanding of the processes that affect
marital/couple health and deterioration, particularly those processes that can be manipulated to promote
greater relationship, mental and physical health. Dr. Córdova's work involves the theoretical delineation of
those processes, the demonstration of their proximal role in relationship health and the construction of
empirically testable procedures for their therapeutic manipulation. The principal processes addressed in
Dr. Córdova's work include intimacy, acceptance, depression and the adoption of healthy relationship practices.
Dr. Córdova's current projects include: (1) the Marriage Checkup, a motivational interviewing approach to
intervening with at-risk couples; (2) observing the process of intimacy development in couples' interactions;
(3) studying the role of emotional skillfulness in relationship health; and (4) developing a couple-based
therapy for depression. Read an interview with Dr. Córdova
and one of his students.
Visit Dr. Córdova's
Center for Couples and Family Research.
MARICELA CORREA-CHÁVEZ
Dr. Correa-Chávez’ research examines learning as a cultural activity tied to
people’s participation in community traditions and institutions (like school).
The focus is on the different cultural ways children use attention in learning,
in social interaction, and in communication. She also examines how patterns of
attention are related to family participation in community traditions and
institutions across generations. Her work with children from a number of
different cultural communities takes place in schools and community
organizations both in the United States and Latin America. She teaches courses
on Developmental Psychology and specialized courses on issues of culture,
development, and learning.
NICOLA CURTIN
Dr. Curtin’s primary line of research examines the role of social identity and
individual differences in commitments to creating social change, with a particular
interest in ally and coalitional activism. In a secondary line of research,
she has examined graduate student socialization to the academy, focusing on working-class
students, as well as comparisons of domestic and international students in the U.S.
Using methods and theoretical foundations from social and personality
psychology, as well as gender and cultural studies, Dr. Curtin takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining social structure,
identity, and personality.
She currently teaches Introduction to Social Psychology and Laboratory in Social
Psychology and is interested in teaching future courses on the Psychology of
Activism (specifically with a focus on gender and race), advanced courses in
social psychology, and Psychology of Gender.
JOSEPH DE RIVERA
Dr. de Rivera is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Psychology
Department. He is interested in emotional experience; when our feelings
and narratives lead us to care for others and act on their behalf (rather than
paralyze us or lead us to be destructive). His research
has focused on describing the structure and dynamics of emotion in individuals and collective life. What is
the role of positive emotions such as joy; when does anger lead to political action; can we measure emotional
climates and cultures of peace; how can love rather than fear govern our imagination and determine our behavior?
Dr. de Rivera is the former Director of the Peace Studies concentration at
Clark.
More about Dr. De Rivera and his research.
Read an interview with Dr. de Rivera
and some of his students.
ABBIE GOLDBERG
Dr. Goldberg is interested in how a variety of contexts (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, social class,
work-family variables) shape processes of development and mental health. Her
research focuses on exploring parenthood, relationship quality, and well-being
in diverse families (e.g., adoptive parent families, lesbian/gay parent
families). She is currently exploring the transition to adoptive parenthood
among a diverse group of couples. she teaches courses on gender and family,
ethics, and developmental psychopathology. Her clinical interests include
adolescent mental health and substance abuse and dependence. She is particularly
interested in understanding these problems in the context of the family. She teaches courses on
gender and family, ethics, and developmental psychopathology.
More about Dr. Goldberg and her research.
WENDY S. GROLNICK
Dr. Grolnick's research interests are in motivational development and the
contexts that facilitate it. Her work has focused on how parent and school
contexts facilitate or undermine children's self-regulation and competence
across a variety of populations including elementary age children, adolescents,
and at-risk youth. Her recent work also addresses factors in the external
environment, such as stress and support, in children, such as temperament, and
in parents' psychologies that enable patents to provide motivationally
supportive environments for their children. Dr. Grolnick is currently involved
in a large-scale study (funded by the William T. Grant Foundation) of how
parents structure the environment for children in various cultural groups and
how this facilitates children's internalization and adjustment. She
is also interested in the development of emotional self-regulation, including its social-contextual, and
temperamental determinants.
RACHEL JOFFE FALMAGNE
Dr. Falmagne's interests focus on (i) the manner in which societal discourses of knowledge, social location,
discursive construction and personal agency are jointly constitutive of subjectivity and thought through their
dialectical interplay; (ii) the gendered foundations of thought, culture, epistemic norms (such as the norm of
rationalism developed in Western societies) and development, and (iii) critical epistemological and methodological
issues for the social sciences. Her research draws on flexible interview methods, and examines the modes of
knowledge and other resources upon which people draw when sorting out contradictory accounts in complex
situations, how those resources interplay with one another in the reasoning process, and how people situate
themselves in relation to the problem. She focuses on the manner in which people appropriate, resist, modulate
or transform various formative cultural discourses of knowledge, and how people's reasoning about everyday
situations can be understood in the context of their social location and cultural history, with particular
attention to gender, social class, 'race' and ethnicity.
DENISE
HINES
Dr. Hines’ research centers on issues of family violence. As a doctoral student
at Boston University, she received an NIMH individual predoctoral National
Research Service Award to conduct a study on genetic and environmental
influences on intimate partner violence, a study that she plans to replicate and
expand on in future research. Through her affiliation with the University of New
Hampshire, she conducts research using data from the International Dating
Violence Study, in which she investigates the cross-cultural validity of various
theories of dating violence. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a
grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the mental health of
men who sustain partner violence from their female partners and seek help. She
also just received a grant, along with Dr. Kathy Palm, to study the efficacy of
a bystander intervention program in preventing sexual and dating violence at
Clark University.
LENE ARNETT JENSEN
One line of Dr. Jensen's research is in the area of moral development. This work takes a "cultural-developmental"
approach, addressing how moral reasoning is both culturally and developmentally situated. Her work has included
members of diverse religious communities in India and the United States. In more recent research, she has
addressed cultural identity formation in the context of migration and globalization. A current project with
adolescents and their parents who have immigrated to the United States from El Salvador and India, examines
their cultural identity development as well as ties between cultural identity and engagement with civil
society, school, and family. Dr. Jensen received her B.A. from Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, in 1989 and
her Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago in 1996. Her dissertation
received The William Henry Dissertation Prize from the University of Chicago, and the 1996 Dissertation
Award from the Association for Moral Education. Dr. Jensen is Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for
Child and Adolescent Development, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Research
on Adolescence.
Visit her web site at
http://www.lenearnettjensen.com
JAMES D. LAIRD
Dr. Laird is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Psychology
Department. His research explores feelings, how they arise, may be controlled, affect behavior and are organized.
In the course of his research on the role of the body in the self-perception of emotional feelings, he has
identified individual differences in the degree to which people's feelings are "embodied." Recent research
has focused on everyday life consequences of these differences, such as differences in women's susceptibility
to PMS, individual differences in pain experience and in the role of autonomic cues in emotional experience.
More about Dr. Laird and his research.
LAURA MCKEE
Broadly, her research examines the development of internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression and anxiety) in
at-risk children and adolescents. She has focused on the impact of parenting style and behaviors on the development
of depression among African American youth from single mother headed families, youth with chronically ill mothers,
and children of depressed caregivers. In addition, she is also committed to the translation of basic research
findings into intervention and prevention programs and the dissemination of information to parents, teachers,
community agencies, health care providers and policy makers. She has contributed to several family-based preventive
interventions, including a prevention trial for children of depressed parents and a prevention manual for children at
risk for obesity. Professor McKee’s clinical interests range from parent management training (therapy for parents with
noncompliant and aggressive children) to work with children and adolescents who have experienced traumatic events.
KATHY
PALM
Dr. Palm's current research interests include examining the role of emotion
regulation (e.g., distress tolerance) in nicotine dependence and other substance
use disorders, and treatment development for co-occurring substance use and
anxiety disorders. On-going research projects include a laboratory study
examining predictors of relapse to smoking after a quit attempt and a treatment
development study evaluating a new smoking cessation treatment for dual-smoking
couples. Student involvement will include reading the latest literature on
substance dependence, running participants in the laboratory study, and
conducting assessments with community smokers.
JAAN VALSINER
Dr. Valsiner's general interests are in the cultural organization of mental and affective processes in human
development across the whole life span. He is also interested in psychology's history as a resource of ideas
for contemporary advancement of the discipline, and in theoretical models of human development. Currently,
his specific research directions include the study of young adults' self as an autodialogic process.
JOHANNA RAY VOLLHARDT
Dr. Vollhardt’s research focuses on the different ways in which members of
victimized groups make sense of their group’s experiences. She is interested in
the underlying social psychological processes and conditions that give rise to
constructive, rather than to destructive outcomes of the experience of
victimization. She is particularly interested in the consequences for relations
between victim groups. Her current research is concerned with the development of
measures of victim consciousness, factors that predict exclusive versus
inclusive victim consciousness, and ways in which inclusive victim consciousness
can be facilitated. Another area of her research involves questions related to
the psychology of genocide, addressing processes among victims, bystanders, and
perpetrators. Most of her work has been conducted among members of various ethnic, racial, and
religious minority groups in the U.S., but she has also worked with groups in
Europe, India, and with the NGO Radio La Benevolencija in Rwanda, Burundi, and
the Congo. She uses multiple methods, ranging from semi- structured interviews
and content analysis of archival materials to survey research and experiments.
MARIANNE WISER
Dr. Wiser is studying conceptual change in children, students and the history of science.
Her work in science education focuses on how children's own understanding of the
physical world can be transformed into scientific understanding. This involves
exploring children's ideas, as well as developing and testing science curricula
in the preschool to 8th grade range. Her research in symbolic development
includes young children's pre-literacy skills, their use of models and maps, and
their understanding of number, counting, and number notations.