Affiliation(s):

• Wayne State University, Department of Psychology

In my Adolescent Relationships in Context (ARC) Lab, we study how adolescents’ social relationships affect their mental and physical health. We’re particularly interested in adolescents’ peer relationships, which become increasingly important and influential during the teenage years. Much of our research focuses on understanding how both positive peer relationships (e.g., friendships) and negative peer experiences (e.g., bullying) contribute to adolescents’ overall adjustment. We recently concluded a five-wave longitudinal survey study that tracked changes in adolescents’ social experiences, identity development, and health as they navigated their first year of high school during the COVID-19 pandem

As early as high school, I was always fascinated by child development. I did a lot of babysitting and worked as a counselor at summer camps, where I became increasingly interested in kids’ social dynamics. In college, I got involved with psychology research after failing my first economics exam, dropping the course, and needing to find a way to make up the credits. My academic advisor was a developmental psychologist studying children’s aggressive behavior, and she suggested I earn back my credits by doing a directed study in her lab. I also took many psychology courses to fulfill my major, including a Developmental Psychology class, and became fascinated by the social, biological, and psychological changes that take place during adolescence. By the time I was applying to graduate school, I knew I wanted to study how adolescents’ peer experiences—particularly with bullying—could shape their developmental outcomes and to understand what protective factors might help alleviate the emotional distress of victims. After graduate school, I also did a postdoctoral fellowship where I was introduced to new methods for studying connections between social relationships and health, such as physiological monitoring and ecological momentary assessments that allow for “real-time” tracking of relationship dynamics in everyday life. Together these experiences have provided a critical foundation for my current research that investigates how and why adolescents’ peer relationships contribute to their health and well-being in both the short- and long-term.

I’m very interested in leveraging the power of peer relationships to create and implement interventions that can promote adolescent health. For example, some of our recent research has focused on peer relationships among youth with chronic medical conditions, such as asthma. We’ve found that whereas experiences of peer stress (e.g., conflict, exclusion) can amplify asthma symptoms, peer support appears to serve a protective function for adolescents with asthma. Now we’re in the early stages of designing a peer mentoring intervention that will match teens with asthma to older peers with the same condition as a source of informational and emotional support.

My graduate school advisor, Jaana Juvonen, and my postdoctoral mentor, Gayla Margolin, are incredible academic role models and endless sources of support. I also attribute a lot of my passion for psychology to early exposure from my parents, who are both psychologists. I have always looked up to them both professionally and personally.