Family Adversity and Resilience Research Program

The UConn Health Family Adversity and Resilience Research (FARR) program, led by Drs. Margaret Briggs-Gowan, Damion Grasso, and Carolyn Greene, conducts research that aims to promote healthy child development and family functioning in the context of stressful life events and adversity, as well as to understand the crucial role caregivers play in fostering resilience and positive outcomes.

Adverse childhood experiences are unfortunately common and refer to a broad range of stressful and potentially traumatic events that can reflect physical or psychological threats to safety, as well as deprivation of basic needs, essential resources, or caregiving that have the potential to disrupt or interfere with healthy child development and functioning. These can include family conflict, child maltreatment, community violence, discrimination, traumatic loss, disaster, and medical emergencies, among other experiences.

Adverse childhood experiences can negatively impact children’s development, leading to complications that may include anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress, and other emotional or behavioral problems. Still, some children fare well despite these experiences. While the risk associated with childhood adversity is well documented, less understood are risk and protective mechanisms – what factors play a role in determining whether a child exposed to adversity goes on to develop psychopathology vs. recover and show resilient outcomes? To this end, the FARR program invests in learning about social, biological, psychological, and family influences that shape children’s development and functioning in the context of stress and adversity. We hope that the knowledge gained by our research informs and enhances public health efforts to reduce risk and promote resilience among vulnerable populations.

We are currently enrolling for the following NIH-funded studies:

• Fathers for Change is enrolling fathers with a history of family violence and their children.
• Supporting Teens’ Adjustment and Resilience Study (STARS) is enrolling parents who have experienced something stressful and their 11- to 14-year-old children.
• Cultural Understanding of Emotions Study (CUES) is enrolling parents of Hispanic or Latino backgrounds.

We are currently collecting follow-up data from families already enrolled in the following studies:

• Adaption and Resilience in Childhood Study (ARCS) enrolled mothers and their 4- to 7-year-old children.
• Parenting Infants in the Pandemic Study (PIPS) enrolled mothers who gave birth during the pandemic and their 1- to 3-year-old children.
• Health Equity and Receipt of Care Study (HEARS) enrolled women who participated in PIPS, with a focus on Black and Latina women who navigated pregnancy during the pandemic.

The following studies have completed data collection and are in the analysis phase:

• Parent and Child Emotions Study (PACES) invited parents who have experienced something very stressful and their 9- to 12-year-old children. The goal of the study is to learn more about how children manage their emotions and how parents help their children learn these skills.
• Brains and Voices enrolled 4- to 11-year-old children who were participants in the ARCS study to complete a computer task to understand how the brain reacts to emotional sounds. Some children also visited the Brain Imaging Research Center (BIRC) at the UConn Storrs campus, where they listened to sentences spoken in different tones of voice while in an fMRI scanner.

Visit our study pages linked above to learn more about this research.