Projects

A digital parenting intervention for high-risk divorced families

This is the FRAME lab’s very first externally funded project! Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health/NIMH (click here for details of the grant), this project will focus on developing digital mindfulness training components and adding them to an existing evidence-based parenting intervention (the electronic New Beginnings Program/eNBP), as a combined, web-based, self-administered intervention for divorced/separated parents reporting psychological distress. The focus on digital interventions has great potential to maximize its reach and impact, reducing the prevalent mental health problems in high-risk divorced families.

Mindfulness in Multi-generational Families

In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of multi-generational families living in the same household in the US. A significant proportion of these families are racial/ethnic minority groups. This project takes a psychological perspective to study mindfulness as a resilience factor among US multi-generational families

GROWING UP WITH AN Anxious parent

The FRAME lab is collaborating with Dr. Golda Ginsburg (UConn School of Medicine) to analyze her data from an NIMH-funded randomized controlled trial aimed to prevent mental disorders in children whose parents have an anxiety disorder. 

family bereavement

The FRAME lab is collaborating with Drs. Irwin Sandler and Sharlene Wolchik (Arizona State University) to study family interventions for parentally bereaved families. We focus on the role of self-compassion in promoting adaptive grief processes.

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

  1. Zhang, N., Sandler, I., Tein, J., Wolchik, S. & Donohue, E. (2022). Caregivers’ self-compassion and bereaved children’s adjustment: Testing caregivers’ mental health and parenting as mediators. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-021-01807-1
  2. Zhang, N., Sandler, I., Tein, J., & Wolchik, S. (2021). Reducing suicide risk in parentally bereaved youth through promoting effective parenting: Testing a developmental cascade model. Development and Psychopathology. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579421001474
  3. Alvis, L., Zhang, N., Sandler, I., & Kaplow, J. (2022). Developmental Manifestations of Grief in Children and Adolescents: Caregivers as Key Grief Facilitators. Journal of Child and Adolescent Trauma. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-021-00435-0
  4. Sandler, I., Tein, J., Zhang, N., Wolchik, S., & Thieleman, K. (2021). Grief as a predictor of long-term suicidality above and beyond PTSD symptoms and other risk factors in parentally bereaved children and adolescents. Journal of Traumatic Stress. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22759