All Research Projects

Adolescent Parenting

The Adolescent Parenting Project was launched in the mid-1980s to evaluate the social and psychological consequences of teen parenting for both mothers and their children. This project has been funded by NIMH for over 20 years and the Notre Dame Adolescent Parenting Project staff has gathered data on teen mothers and their children from pregnancy through the first 18 years of life. This project is not recruiting new participants. read more

Adventures in Parenting

The Adventures in Parenting study was funded by Administration for Children and Families (90XP0056-01) and designed to assess a variety of approaches to disseminating and translating empirical information to parents of young children. This project is not recruiting new participants. read more

Children and Marital Aggression

Exposure to marital psychological and physical abuse has been established as a risk factor for children’s socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive problems. This project is not recruiting new participants. read more

Chronic Low Back Pain

Marital Therapy & Research Clinic is now accepting people who experience chronic lower back pain and their spouses into a study called “Chronic Low Back Pain.” The spouses will attend to sessions that last about 1.5 hours each in whi/all-research-projectsch they discuss important topics that come up in their marriage, and the person with chronic pain will perform tasks involving simple movements (bending, sitting) while his or her spouse observes. This project is currently accepting new participants. Read more

Couples & Kids

The Couples and Kids Project is a three-year prospective longitudinal study that investigated the ways couples handle everyday problems and how their interactions affect school-aged children. This project was funded by the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

Emotional Experiences and Behavior Study

The purpose of the Emotional Experiences and Behavior study is to improve how we measure different emotional states, symptoms and personality traits. In particular, in this study we are working on the development of new self-report measures of several different psychological symptoms and traits related to mood and anxiety disorders. Read more

Family Communication Project

The Family Communication Project is an ongoing prevention program that fosters better interpersonal relations, especially around matters of everyday sources of conflict, between the parents and between parents and their adolescent. This project is currently accepting new participants. Read more

Family Lifestyles Project

The overarching goal of the Family Lifestyles Projects is to examine the extent to which early appearing factors in children’s environments—both health-related and psychosocial—are related to childhood overweight and obesity. This project is no longer recruiting participants. Read more

The Fathers’ Project

There has been a growing interest over the last several decades about the role of fathers in their children’s development. Much of the research that addresses the role of the father does so by consulting with mothers about their experiences and perspectives concerning the fathers of their children. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

Get the Lead Out

“Get the Lead Out” is a community-based project that aims to assess the effectiveness of a lead poisoning prevention program for families with young children who have low levels of lead exposure. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

The Heart to Heart Project

The Heart to Heart Project is testing a brief intervention for maltreated preschool-aged children and their mothers to ameliorate the emotional, social, and cognitive effects of abuse and neglect on individual development. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

Me and My Family

The Me and My Family Project is a longitudinal, dual-site study with data collection taking place both under Dr. E. Mark Cummings at the University of Notre Dame and Dr. Patrick Davies at the University of Rochester and is funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

My Baby and Me

The My Baby & Me project is a large scale, multi-site prevention project launched in 2003 with funding from NIH. Collaborators include faculty from Georgetown University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Texas – Houston. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

My Stories

The primary goal of the My Stories Project is to evaluate individual differences in mother-child reminiscing in relation to children’s memory for stressful and nonstressful experiences, and to children’s socio-emotional development. This project is no longer recruiting participants. Read more

Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland Project is a longitudinal study of relations between political violence and the well-being of children living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Utilizing an ecological, process-oriented model, the study seeks to better understand the pathways between political and sectarian community violence and ordinary crime, family functioning, and adolescents’ adjustment within a comprehensive theoretical framework. Read more

Notre Dame Babies and Families

This longitudinal study of the development of emotion regulation from infancy to toddlerhood began in 2001 and was funded by NIH. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

Parenting for the First Time

The Parenting for the First Time project is a four-site (University of Notre Dame, University of Kansas, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Georgetown University), 5-year prospective longitudinal study of 397 adolescent mothers and their children as well as a comparison group of 285 adult mothers. Read more

Personality Puzzle Project

The Personality Puzzle Project, as its name implies, is designed to solve several puzzles about personality. It has three major goals: (1) To improve our understanding of what personality is, how it functions, and how personality affects our daily functioning. (2) To improve how we measure personality and functioning. (3) To determine how best to combine information about personality and functioning so we can describe more clearly the difficulties that some people—but not others—have in their daily lives due to their personality. Read more

Promoting Positive Parenting

The Promoting Positive Parenting project was launched in 2007 to test the effectiveness of a cell-phone enhanced home visitation program in at-risk communities surrounding the University of Notre Dame and the University of Kansas’ Juniper Gardens Children’s Project in Kansas City, KS. This project is not recruiting new participants. Read more

Robot Intervention Study

This study is examining the utility of social robots for enhancing social skills treatments for children with autism spectrum disorders. Read more

Youths’ Emotional Regulation

This NIMH-funded study investigated the influence of culture on family conflict and adolescents’ anger regulation and subsequent internalizing and externalizing symptoms in Korean immigrant families. Read more