Publications

Improving teaching quality is widely recognized as critical to addressing deficiencies in secondary school education, yet the field has struggled to identify rigorously evaluated teacher-development approaches that can produce reliable gains in student achievement. A randomized controlled trial of My Teaching Partner–Secondary—a Web-mediated approach focused on improving teacherstudent interactions in the classroom—examined the efficacy of the approach in improving teacher quality and student achievement with 78 secondary school teachers and 2237 students. The intervention produced substantial gains in measured student achievement in the year following its completion, equivalent to moving the average student from the 50th to the 59th percentile in achievement test scores. Gains appeared to be mediated by changes in teacher-student interaction qualities targeted by the intervention.

With substantive evidence suggesting that adolescents’ disclosure is likely a protective factor against problem behaviors, as well as evidence that many adolescents will go to great lengths to avoid sharing information with parents, one may conclude that parents’ face a formidable task. Previous studies have identified parental acceptance as a concurrent correlate of adolescents’ behavioral disclosure, but have neglected to investigate potential ways that parents could encourage their adolescents to feel comfortable disclosing emotional information. The present study extends the literature by using a longitudinal, multi-method, multi-reporter design to examine whether maternal acceptance is predictive of emotional disclosure over time among a racially/socioeconomically diverse sample of 184 adolescents (53% female). Results indicate that adolescents who perceive their mothers as high in acceptance during early adolescence exhibit greater relative increases in both self-reported emotional communication and observed emotional disclosure to their mothers 3 years later. Interestingly, mothers’ perceptions of their own acceptance does not provide any additional predictive value. These findings support the notion that adolescents’ emotional disclosure is an ongoing process that can be fostered in early adolescence, and emphasize the importance of considering adolescents’ perceptions of the relationship to successfully do so.

We investigated the effects of My Teaching Partner—Secondary (MTP-S), a teacher professional development intervention, on students’ peer relationships in middle and high school classrooms. MTP-S targets increasing teachers’ positive interactions with students and sensitive instructional practices and has demonstrated improvements in students’ academic achievement and motivation. The current study tested the prediction from systems theory that effects of MTP-S on students would extend beyond the academic domain—that is, the ecology of teachers’ behaviors towards students should also influence the ecology of students’ behaviors towards one another. Participants were 88 teachers (43 randomly assigned to MTP-S and 45 assigned to a control group that received the regular professional development offerings in their school) and 1423 students in their classrooms. Observations and student self-report of classroom peer interactions were collected at the start and at the end of the course. Results indicated that in MTP-S classrooms, students were observed to show improvement in positive peer interactions, although this pattern was not found in self-report data. However, moderation analyses suggested that for students with high disruptive behavior at the start of the course, teacher participation in MTP-S mitigated a typical decline towards poorer self-reported peer relationships. The relevance of findings for the social ecology of classrooms is discussed.

This prospective study used longitudinal, multi-reporter data to examine the influence of parents’ marital relationship functioning on subsequent adolescent romantic relationships. Consistent with Bryant and Conger’s model for the development of early adult romantic relationships (DEARR; 2002), we found that interactional styles, more specifically paternal aggression and satisfaction, exhibited in parents’ marital relationship when their adolescents were age 13, were predictive of qualities of the adolescent’s romantic relationships five years later. Continuities were domain specific: paternal satisfaction predicted adolescent satisfaction and paternal aggression predicted adolescent aggression. Attachment security moderated the link between paternal aggression and subsequent adolescent aggression, with continuities between negative conflictual styles across relationships reduced for secure adolescents. Results are interpreted as suggesting that attachment may help attenuated the transmission of destructive conflict strategies across generations.

The legacy of Stuart Hauser's research into the developmental transformation that takes place from the adolescent living within his or her family to the young adult functioning independently is assessed. Four major themes are identified in this work: the interplay between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal; the need to understand the family in developmental context; the links between development and psychopathology; and the role of resilience in human psychological functioning. Hauser's broad, integrative, and fundamentally optimistic perspective on human nature is discussed as providing a roadmap to guide future research in this area.

The early adolescent’s state of mind in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is more closely linked to social interactions with peers, who are unlikely to serve as attachment figures, than it is to (i) qualities of the adolescent’s interactions with parents, (ii) the AAI of the adolescent’s mother, or (iii) the adolescent’s prior Strange Situation behavior. This unexpected finding suggests the value of reconceptualizing AAI autonomy/security as a marker of the adolescent’s capacity for emotion regulation in social interactions. Supporting this, we note that the AAI was originally validated not as a marker of attachment experiences or expectations with one’s caregivers, but as a predictor of caregiving capacity sufficient to produce secure offspring. As such, the AAI may be fruitfully viewed as primarily assessing social emotion regulation capacities that support both strong caregiving skills and strong skills relating with peers.

The frequently observed link between maternal depressive symptoms and heightened maternal reporting of adolescent externalizing behavior was examined from an integrative, systems perspective using a community sample of 180 adolescents, their mothers, fathers, and close peers, assessed twice over a three-year period. Consistent with this perspective, the maternal depressionadolescent externalizing link was found to reflect not simply maternal reporting biases, but heightened maternal sensitivity to independently observable teen misbehavior as well as longterm, predictive links between maternal symptoms and teen behavior. Maternal depressive symptoms predicted relative increases over time in teen externalizing behavior. Child effects were also found, however, in which teen externalizing behavior predicted future relative increases in maternal depressive symptoms. Findings are interpreted as revealing a tightly-linked behavioralaffective system in families with mothers experiencing depressive symptoms and teens engaged in externalizing behavior, and further suggest that research on depressive symptoms in women with adolescent offspring should now consider offspring externalizing behaviors as a significant risk factor.

This study used longitudinal, multi-reporter data, in a community sample, to examine the role of rejection sensitivity in late adolescents’ social and emotional development. Rejection sensitivity was linked to a relative increase in adolescent depressive and anxiety symptoms over a three-year period, even after accounting for teens’ baseline level of social competence. Additionally, reciprocal relationships emerged between rejection sensitivity and internalizing symptoms. Rejection sensitivity was also linked to relative decreases in peer-reports of teens’ social competence over a three-year period. Consistent with research on gendered socialization, males reported higher levels of rejection sensitivity than females at age 16 and 17. Results are interpreted as highlighting the importance of rejection sensitivity in understanding late adolescent social and emotional development.

This study examined online communication on social networking web pages in a longitudinal sample of 92 youths (39 male, 53 female). Participants' social and behavioral adjustment was assessed when they were ages 13–14 years and again at ages 20–22 years. At ages 20–22 years, participants' social networking website use and indicators of friendship quality on their web pages were coded by observers. Results suggested that youths who had been better adjusted at ages 13–14 years were more likely to be using social networking web pages at ages 20–22 years, after statistically controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and parental income. Overall, youths' patterns of peer relationships, friendship quality, and behavioral adjustment at ages 13–14 years and at ages 20–22 years predicted similar qualities of interaction and problem behavior on their social networking websites at ages 20–22 years. Findings are consistent with developmental theory asserting that youths display cross-situational continuity in their social behaviors and suggest that the conceptualization of continuity may be extended into the online domain.