Research aimed at developing family interventions to promote several interrelated aspects of well-being in families living in diverse communities: strengthening family relationships (including communication, connectedness, and sense of security); promoting a sense of positive family identity and meaning; and enhancing emotion regulation, including emotional flexibility and resourcefulness in the face of both individual and relational challenge and stress. A large part of that effort is embodied in the Family Mindfulness Project, which aims to explore and develop a new area of work in which relationship and mindfulness theories and interventions are integrated and applied to the family context, with the goal of developing assessments and interventions that promote the aspects of family well-being described here. The Family Mindfulness Project is co-directed by Dr. Marcie Goeke-Morey. A second effort in this regard has involved the development of an emotion-coaching group intervention for parents of middle school youth, which is aimed at providing parents with a set of tools for promoting their own and their offsprings’ emotion regulation capacity during challenging/stressful interactions. The intervention largely involves teaching emotion coaching and mindfulness skills to parents, along with psychoeducation about adolescent development. Initial evaluation of uncontrolled trials of the intervention yielded highly encouraging results.
Studies of suicidal youth and their families, with the aim of identifying factors predictive of more negative or positive developmental trajectories of adjustment among youth at risk for suicidal behaviors. A portion of the work involves adolescents who made a serious suicide attempt shortly before recruitment into a longitudinal study tracking them and their parents over a 2-year follow-up period. A few examples of recent and ongoing projects including examining observed parent-adolescent behavioral interactions, parents’ reactions to discovering their teen has made a suicide attempt, comparisons of parental treatment of the suicidal youth vs. a sibling, parent-adolescent attachment, and parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of their problem-solving efficacy. Partnerships include a project to test the feasibility of extending Dr. David Jobes' CAMS intervention to suicidal pre-adolescents which involves Dr. Jobes and researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital, and multiple projects with researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.