PIPages
Labs

Erin Thompson

Florida International University, FL·Psychology·Early-career

Getting suspended or expelled from school can affect a teenager long after the punishment ends. Young people who pull away from school face higher risks of mental health problems and substance use, and school discipline that removes students from class may push them further away.

Fields

Psychology

Public Health & Epidemiology

Neuroscience

Topics

school discipline

exclusionary discipline

adolescent mental health

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Examine how exclusionary school discipline, such as suspension, relates to adolescent mental health and substance use in the ABCD Study, accounting for neighborhood, school, behavioral and socioeconomic factors.
  2. Assess whether early childhood adversity, such as exposure to violence, changes the strength of links between school discipline and adolescent mental health and substance use outcomes.
  3. Evaluate how brain functioning and early adversity interact to shape the associations between school discipline and youth health, using neurobiological measures from the ABCD Study.

More about the research

Hard experiences in early childhood, such as exposure to violence, may make some young people more sensitive to stress and change how their brains develop. This could shape how strongly school experiences affect their health.

Why it matters

School discipline is a risk factor that schools can change. Knowing how it combines with childhood adversity and brain development to affect teen mental health and substance use could guide educators, school districts and public health programs. That knowledge may help them reduce long-term health risks for vulnerable adolescents.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

School Discipline and Adolescent Health: The Role of Early Adversity and Neurodevelopment

NIH · Sep 2022 – Jun 2027

Closest labs

Assaf Oshri

University of Georgia, GA·Psychology

Test whether changes in functional connectivity between cognitive control networks and emotion, reward and salience networks explain how early life adversity leads to drug-use vulnerability and drug use, using ABCD Study data on 11,883 youth.

Pamela Madden

Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology

Follow and assess children enrolled at the Washington University site of the ABCD Study with brain imaging, cognitive testing, bioassays and health interviews every two years from age 9–10 into young adulthood.

Bader Chaarani

University of Vermont, VT·Psychology

Identify how active (video gaming), passive (TV and videos) and mixed (social media, texting, video chatting) screen media activity relate to mental health, cognition and brain development across four ABCD time points.

The school

Florida International University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $326M a year on research, 264 research doctorates a year.

More about Florida International University

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