Family Adversity and Resilience Research Program

The UConn Health Family Adversity and Resilience Research (FARR) program is led by child psychologists, Margaret Briggs-Gowan, Damion Grasso, and Carolyn Greene. At FARR, we are conducting studies to help us learn ways to promote healthy development in children who have experienced stressful life events and other kinds of adversity.

Many children have stressful or challenging experiences while growing up, such as family conflict or violence, community violence, or other stressful experiences like car accidents or medical emergencies. These experiences can have a negative impact on children’s development. Some children have problems with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, or behavior problems. Other children do well even after these kinds of experiences. The FARR program is working to identify social and biological factors that influence children’s development and behavior. We hope that what we learn will be used to develop better interventions for reducing risk and building resilience.

The FARR program is designed to be comfortable for families with young children as well as older children. We use child-friendly activities that are tailored to each child’s age to learn about their development and behavior.

We are enrolling in the following paid studies:

• Adaption and Resilience in Childhood Study (ARCS) is enrolling mothers and their 4-6 year old children.
• Parent and Child Emotions Study (PACES) is enrolling 9-12 year old children and one of their parents.

Visit our study pages to learn more about eligibility.

To learn about opportunities for training and volunteering in our lab, see Training Opportunities.