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
Helicopter parenting of children of lesbian parents
Carone, Gartrell, Rothblum, Koh & Bos (2022) published “Helicopter Parenting, Emotional Avoidant Coping, Mental Health, and Homophobic Stigmatization Among Emerging Adult Offspring of Lesbian Parents” in Journal of Family Psychology. I was interested in this study because helicopter parenting has been studied in younger children but I had not seen research on young adults with lesbian parents. Here’s the abstract:
Drug use talk and social learning
Two recent studies utilize social learning theory to investigate drug use. Otten & Ha (2022) published “Drug Use Talk in Adolescent Friendship Interactions: Long-term effects of social learning on lifetime diagnosed substance use disorders” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Here’s their abstract: