The BRAVE project is a community-based participatory research project designed to (1) determine the factors associated with increases in anxiety symptoms for preschool and young school-aged children in Harrisburg; and (2) to develop and test a preventive intervention to reduce these symptoms and positive outcomes as children transition to school.
Buss, Teti, Woodhouse, Witherspoon & Bierman, PIs
Funder: Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute
Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS) is a new coping and empowerment intervention for preadolescent children who face significant chronic stress.
Wadsworth, PI
Funder: National Institute of Mental Health
The CERC Community Research Day, an event planned for the Harrisburg Community through the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the Community-Engaged Research Core, is an opportunity for Community-Based Organization (CBO) leaders to make connections with Penn State faculty from University Park, Harrisburg, and Hershey, with CERC accepting applications for small planning grants and/or small pilot studies (up to $5K) to foster sustainable partnerships between faculty and CBOs after our event.
Wadsworth, PI
Funder: Penn State’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute
This randomized clinical trial implements and evaluates the effects of a sleep-enhanced adaptation of an evidence-based transition-to-parenting coparenting intervention [Family Foundations (FF)] on quality of coparenting, parental well-being, parent and infant sleep, and infant-parent relationships.
Teti, PI
Funder: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development
The Longitudinal Attention and Temperament study is a longitudinal study examining attention to threat, biological markers, and early patterns of emotion across varying socioemotional contexts in children between the ages of 4 and 24 months.
Pérez-Edgar, Buss, and LoBue, PIs
Funder: National Institute of Mental Health
The goal of the Fam Best study is to understand how parents and teens in the modern family support each other, by observing family interaction at home.
Bai, PI
Funder: Penn State SSRI and College of Health and Human Development
This project will collect pilot data to support the premise that delays in neurocognitive development among at-risk adolescents compromise their ability to respond favorably to a widely used juvenile justice intervention- Multisystemic Therapy (MST) – compared to adolescents with higher levels of functioning.
Fishbein, Wadsworth, PIs
Funder: Social Science Research Institute
The goals of the PA-PREG project are to understand patterns of substance use risk in our communities, connect women to community-based services, and to understand the psychological, biological, and environmental determinants of substance use, as well as the intergenerational effect it has in our communities.
Eiden, PI
Funder: Penn State
The PARADE projects explore African American and Latino families’ daily experiences in Harrisburg and surrounding areas in order to understand more about how teens and parents interact with their environment, how they feel about the places they go, and how environment and culture shape parenting and youth behaviors.
Witherspoon, PI
Funder: Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, Department of Psychology, and McCourtney Family Early Career Professorship Funds
The PRISM project is pilot study designed to better understand how parents regulate themselves, and how parents and children regulate each other, when parents discipline child misbehavior at home.
Lunkenheimer, PI
Funder: Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute
This study addresses how parents experience and manage stress in their lives and how stress affects parenting and engagement in community supports.
Lunkenheimer, PI
Funder: NICHD
The goal of this project is to reduce violence and improve safety within the middle school and in the UpTown neighborhood of Harrisburg, PA. The RiseUp multicomponent program combines school-embedded stress-and-trauma informed coping intervention (BaSICS) with a community-driven neighborhood crime and blight reduction initiative in which the youth are actively engaged. Study goals: (1) Identifying and eradicating crime hotspots and blight via improvements to the built environment, (2) addressing the need for transformative trauma-informed educational practices and preventive mental health services in the public schools, and (3) mobilizing community coalitions of parents and youth to work together on solutions for crime hotspots.
Wadsworth, Lee, and Tri-County Community Action, PIs
Funder: Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency
The TEENS project is a longitudinal study aiming to understand the complex systems involved in the development of social anxiety in adolescents.
Buss, PI
Funder: National Institute of Mental Health