I am currently looking for talented and hard working graduate students to join my laboratory for the 2011/2012 academic year.

I am a member of the Developmental Psychology Program, with special interests in the area of Developmental Psychopathology. 
I am affiliated with the Children at Risk Research Group. More information about this group is available here http://www.uky.edu/CAR/ . 
I am also a Faculty Associate of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women. More information about the Center can be found here: www.research.uky.edu/crvaw/

At the most general level, my research concerns how family stress contributes to children’s risk for physical and mental health problems. More specifically, I study how family stress affects children’s psychological and physiological coping, which in turn is associated with emotional, behavioral, and other problems. My research has explored children’s emotional security as a mechanism of risk in the context of parental problem drinking and parental depression. I have also studied how maladaptive stress response by the autonomic nervous system makes children more susceptible to the negative effects of marital conflict. Recently, I have developed an interest in the role of family functioning for children’s sleep quality and amount. 

A secondary line of my research involves causes and consequences of marital and other romantic relationship problems for adult functioning. For example, I have studied links between problem drinking and marital aggression. My work in this area has focused on establishing the direction of effects, but I am also interested in the possible processes accounting for these relations. Further, I have an ongoing study of the bidirectional associations between romantic relationship problems and sleep.