studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Three studies of substance abuse
These studies offer interesting perspectives on substance use by teens. First, Adamsons & Russell (2023) published “Longitudinal Transmission of Risk Behaviors Between Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract with bold:
Agreement about cognitive disengagement
Mayes, Calhoun & Waschbusch (2023) published “Agreement Between Mother, Father, and Teacher Ratings of Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome (Sluggish Cognitive Tempo) in Children with Autism and Children with ADHD” in Psychological Assessment.
Attachment through the lifespan
I am going to present four longitudinal studies of attachment with research addressing parental experience before becoming parents, attachment history and friendships, parent-adolescent relationships and successful peer and romantic relationships, and insecure attachment and personality pathology. Each study is nuanced and complex but well worth examining.
Parents’ Reflective Functioning and Conflict Interactions With Their Adolescent Children.
Parents’ Reflective Functioning and Conflict Interactions With Their Adolescent Children.