Martha E Wadsworth
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts among teenagers have climbed to record levels, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Youth growing up in poverty, in cities or isolated rural areas, face the heaviest stress and the fewest affordable services.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
adolescent depression
anxiety
suicidality
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Test whether the BaSICS coping and empowerment program reduces depression, anxiety and suicidality in clinically referred low-income young adolescents, using a randomized trial across four central Pennsylvania sites.
- Assess whether BaSICS recalibrates dysregulated stress physiology by integrating measures from multiple biological stress-response systems, building on earlier findings of improved cortisol reactivity.
- Identify moderators of BaSICS effects, such as differences between urban and rural low-income youth, to inform future dissemination of the program.
More about the research
Clinic waitlists can approach a year. Chronic stress can also reshape the body's stress-response systems, which may help explain lasting gaps in health between richer and poorer communities. This work asks whether a program for young adolescents built around coping and empowerment can reduce these problems and help reset stress biology.
Why it matters
Low-income adolescents, including rural youth, face high rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality and have little access to affordable, culturally affirming care. If confirmed, BaSICS could give schools and clinics a group program that treats these problems and may protect against the biological embedding of chronic stress, helping narrow mental health gaps tied to income.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Lau
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Psychology
Test whether a tailored mindfulness program reduces emotion suppression, experiential avoidance and unmodulated perseverance among high-achieving, low-income Black, Latinx and Asian American students, compared with a study-skills control, in a 504-student randomized trial.
Chardée Galán
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Refine the Video-feedback Intervention to Promote Background-Related Communication Competency (VIP-BCC) through repeated feedback rounds with advisory boards of youth, parents, family coaches, researchers, and clinicians.
Jocelyn Meza
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Psychology
Chart the longitudinal trajectories of suicidal thoughts and behaviors from age 10 to 28 in 674 Mexican-origin youth from the California Families Project.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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