Our Research
For 93 years, Judge Baker Children's Center has conducted research that advances understanding about children with mental health and behavioral problems. The Center's innovative research is aimed at developing and improving strategies that address these critical medical issues.
The Legacy of Childhood Malnutrition: Effects on Behavior and Health
Principal Investigator: Janina R. Galler, M.D.
Co-Investigators (Human Studies): Cyralene Bryce, M.D., Deborah Waber, Ph.D., Garrett
Fitzmaurice, Sc.D., Robert Harrison, Ph.D., David Eaglesfield, Ph.D., Gayle Medford, M.D.
Co-Investigators (Animal Studies): David Mokler, Ph.D., Peter Morgane, Ph.D., Douglas Rosene, Ph.D., Jill McGaughy, Ph.D., Jarrett Rushmore, Ph.D.
Research Coordinator: Miriam Zichlin
Malnutrition afflicts nearly half of all children under five years of age who live in developing countries around the world and one in eight children living in the impoverished inner cities and rural areas of the United States. Childhood malnutrition harms the development of a child’s body and mind, threatening the ability to grow into an adult who can learn and earn enough to break the cycle of poverty that perpetuates this condition. Despite its prevalence, we do not yet know enough about which children are likely to suffer most, what contributes to resilience and the best ways of intervening to reverse the long-term effects of childhood malnutrition on growth and development. This research can help to formulate effective public policy recommendations. Dr. Galler conducts a 40-year life-span study of the effects of childhood malnutrition in Barbados on adult survivors and their offspring. She has parallel studies of prenatal malnutrition using animal models, in which she studies behavioral and brain development.
Practice Based Evidence:
Enhancing the Evidence Base for Adolescent Depression
Principal Investigator: Sarah Kate Bearman, Ph.D.
The substantial knowledge gap between research on mental health services and the actual practice of such services has been well documented and has provoked an interest in research collaborations between real-world clinicians and clinical investigators. In addition, recent evidence suggests that certain intervention procedures found in usual clinical care can be as effective as some evidence-based practices (Weisz, Jensen-Doss, & Hawley, 2006). Despite this evidence and the popularity of the collaborative sentiment, there are few examples of active collaboration between practice and research partners, and even fewer examples of efforts to improve intervention by identifying effective components of usual care. In no area of research is this goal more relevant than in the area of adolescent depression, given the high prevalence of this disorder, the well-documented negative effects of depression on various areas of functioning, and the modest treatment effect sizes reported in the literature (Weisz, McCarty, & Valeri, 2006). Read more.
Child System and Treatment Enhancement Projects [Child STEPS]
(A program of the Network on Youth Mental Health, funded by the John D. And Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation)
Network Director: John R. Weisz, Ph.D., ABPP
In youth mental health care, the gap between science and practice is wide and long-standing. Innovative treatments that have been shown to work in clinical trials tend to be used only in additional clinical trials, not in clinical practice. This network and its projects are directed toward bridging the science-practice gap and bringing beneficial treatment practices to youths in mental health service settings. Read
more.
Teaching Middle-School Youth Coping Skills for Depression: A School-Based Intervention Study
(Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH))
Principal Investigator: John R. Weisz, Ph.D., ABPP
Project Directors: Dikla Eckshtain, Ph.D. and Sarah Kate Bearman, Ph.D.
Youth depression is a serious condition that causes genuine impairment and is an archenemy of school performance. It undermines concentration on classwork, saps the energy and motivation needed to do homework, causes significant school absenteeism, and threatens the social connections boys and girls need for emotional well-being. Rates of depression increase sharply following puberty, highlighting the public health significance of treatment in early adolescence. Thus, the middle school years may be an ideal time to help boys and girls build coping skills to ward off depression. Our long-term goal is to develop and refine treatment for youth depression that is effective and deployable in a variety of youth settings. Here we focus on the setting in which evidence suggests that depression may be most likely to be detected and in which a great deal of everyday youth mental health care occurs: the school.
In this clinical trial, 6th and 7th graders who show significant levels of depressive symptoms and those who meet criteria for a depressive disorder are randomly assigned to the two conditions (PASCET or Counselor Intervention), matched for group format and treatment dose. All treatment takes place in the middle schools. We assess levels of depression and other outcomes immediately after the end of treatment, and again at a one-year follow-up, to assess the long-term holding power of the effects. Read more.
Leveraging Scientific Knowledge to Enhance the Delivery of Effective Mental Health Services for Children
(Funded by the Norlien Foundation )
Principal Investigator: John R. Weisz, Ph.D., ABPP
Efforts to bring tested and proven treatments for child mental health problems into everyday clinical practice are hampered by (a) a lack of information on what treatments have been tested and shown to work, and (b) the cumbersome nature of some practices that grow out of research. To address these problems, this project will include a meta-analysis of the outcome research findings on interventions for children, and testing of assessment and intervention procedures designed to be streamlined, efficient, and thus well-suited for use in everyday clinical care of children.
Paths Over Time and Across Generations Project
Founding Principal Investigator: Stuart T. Hauser, MD, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator: Judith A. Crowell, MD
Co-Investigators: Eric Dearing, Ph.D., Brian Gibbs, Ph.D., Christos Mantzoros, MD
Project Director: Dorothy E. Warner, Ph.D.
This longitudinal study, begun in 1978, examines paths to midlife adaptation, based on self-report, interviews, and observations of participants and their families, beginning when they were adolescents. Half of our participants have been intensively studied with their families for the past 31 years; the other half of our sample is a new cohort of demographically-matched participants from African-American and Caribbean-American communities in Boston, who we are recruiting through community-based participatory research methods. In our current phase, we are collaborating with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to study the ways in which aspects of mental health, relationships, and experiences with adversity – including racial discrimination – influence physical health in midlife. We have also studied our participants’ children, from infancy through adolescence. Read more.
Prevention of Depression Project
Principal Investigators: William R. Beardslee, MD and Tracy R. G. Gladstone, Ph.D.
Project Director: Phyllis Rothberg, LICSW
Part of a national multi-state study, this research examines the effectiveness of a group, cognitive-behavioral prevention program that provides strategies to deal with stress and avoid depression to adolescents (ages 13-17) with a family history of depression. As part of the project, small groups of teens attended 8 weekly sessions and 6 monthly follow-up sessions run by a clinician, where they learned classic cognitive-behavioral skills to cope with typical adolescent pressures and tensions unique to growing up with a depressed parent. Additional funding has just been secured to follow these same adolescents across the transition to young adulthood, to determine the long-term effects of participating in this prevention program. (Previously known as TEAMS, Teen Achieving Mastery over Stress.) Read more.
Child Language & Developmental Psychopathology
(Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH))
Principal Investigator: Claudio Toppelberg, MD
The Child Language & Developmental Psychopathology project is studying the relations of language development and mental health in childhood, particularly in English language-learning children. Most English language learners are U.S.-born children of immigrant parents, a rapidly growing segment of the U.S. child population. Approximately 20% of American children are children of immigrant parents. We are interested in these children’s emotional and behavioral lives with a focus on how they influence and are influenced by their language development. The studies conducted have been based in clinics in Cambridge, Mass. and in 16 elementary public schools in Boston. Our studies also include cognitive, social and school factors, and the role of psychosocial and biological stress, in the context of other risk and protective factors. Our approach is trying to disentangle the specific impact of normal and abnormal language development on the lives of these new American children. Read more.
Preventive Intervention Project
Director: William R. Beardslee, MD
The Preventive Intervention Project was originally designed to examine the efficacy of two forms of cognitive, psychoeducational, preventive intervention: clinician-facilitated and lecture discussion group interventions. The project targeted families in which one or both parents had experienced serious affective disorder, and in which there were children in the 9 to 14 year age range who were not acutely ill. Overall, both interventions were found to have long-term positive effects, but the clinician-facilitated intervention was associated with more positive change in parents and in children. Recently, the original clinician-facilitated intervention program has been adapted for new settings and populations locally, nationally and internationally. Current efforts are underway to adapt the revised clinician-facilitated intervention (i.e., Family Talk) for use on the Internet. Read more.
The Stuart T. Hauser Research Training Program in Biological and Social Psychiatry
Full description listed on the Professional Training Page. Please click here to read description.
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