Overview of Research
We are a team of researchers in the Department of Psychology at McGill University who study the social lives of children, adolescents, and young adults. Broadly, we are interested in (a) identifying the skills needed to develop and maintain high-quality interpersonal relationships; (b) understanding how experiences in relationships contribute to the onset and maintenance of psychological symptoms. Our work focuses on peer relationships, friendships, and sibling relationships. We use different methodologies to answer our research questions, including observational approaches, daily diaries, questionnaires, and tasks examining emotion recognition and production. Ongoing projects are described below.
Ongoing Projects
The Everyday Lives of Adolescents
Annie Dillard famously noted “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” For adolescents, every day is filled with interactions with classmates, friends, siblings, and parents, exchanges that may shape the quality of their relationships, as well as their emotional well-being. We are conducting a series of daily-diary studies in which we ask adolescents to tell us about everyday interactions, including conflict, victimization, prosocial treatment, and support. We are examining the associations between these everyday experiences and emotional (e.g., daily mood and loneliness) and social adjustment (e.g., quality of interpersonal relationships).
Current graduate students: Allison MacNeil, John Cyfko, Nour Haddad, Anik Setti
Collaborators: Kristina McDonald, Kristen Dunfield, Alexa Martin-Storey, Wendy Craig, Holly Recchia, Frank Elgar, William Bukowski
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture
Skills for Success in Friendship
We are interested in understanding skills that contribute to the maintenance of high-quality friendships; that is, those that are high on positive features, like support and companionship, and low on negative features, such as conflict and fighting. We recently created a measure assessing competence in friendship for young adults, and are currently working on projects assessing how provision of social support, as well as emotion recognition and expression skills, are associated with friendship quality during adolescence and young adulthood.
Current graduate students: Erin Macdonald, Ally Zikic, Katya Santucci, Anik Setti
Collaborators: Jennifer Bartz, Lauren Human, Amanda Rose, John Lydon
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Friendship Victimization and Dissolution
Friendship is typically thought of as a positive context, but sometimes friendships are characterized by negative interactions. The most commonly studied negative feature in friendship is conflict (i.e., how often friends argue and disagree); however, more severe negative behaviors, such as victimization, may occur, and may be particularly consequential for well-being. We are currently developing a measure of victimization in friendship for young adults and adolescents. We are also interested in understanding when and why friendships end. For example, we recently published a paper showing that the more strongly young adults endorse destiny beliefs about friendship (e.g., “Potential friends are either destined to get along, or they are not”) the more likely they are to report that they would end a friendship when challenges occur.
Current graduate students: Katya Santucci
Collaborators: Wendy Craig, Alexa Martin-Storey, John Lydon
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada
