Funded the National Institutes of Health, FUSS explores how sleep patterns change and develop during and after the college transition. This study begins data collection during first year orientation to capture the development of sleep patterns as soon as students arrive at campus and continues through all four years of college. Teasing apart sociodemographic and environmental impacts of sleep behavior, this study explores systematic differences by ethnicity/race, age, gender, 1st-generation college students, SES, and commuters versus on-campus residents.

As part of this study, participants wear a wrist actigraph for 2 weeks and complete daily reports of activities, feelings and behaviors. In addition, participants also provide hair and dried blood spot samples to measure physiological stress and biological functioning. FUSS is designed to investigate how sleep behaviors and patterns in college impact the downstream development of health disparities.

For more information or if you are a current participant in FUSS, please visit our FUSS website!

This study aims to investigate how graduates’ mental and physical well-being and resources change during the post-college transition period. Participants complete two online surveys: the first survey approximately 1 month before college graduation, and the second survey approximately 6 months after graduation.

The ADAPT study builds on the work of the Fordham University Sleep Study (FUSS), expanding our research to include graduation as an important transitional time with many changes in resources and stressors.

As AI technology rapidly develops, people are increasingly turning to AI not only to answer questions or complete tasks, but also to have personal or meaningful conversations. Funded by a Fordham Faculty Research Grant, the CHAT Study examines individuals’ experiences and attitudes toward using AI chatbots for conversational purposes, aiming to understand who is most likely to seek AI support and how these interactions relate to mental health and interpersonal relationships. The study also explores how past experiences and values shape these choices, and how human-AI conversation quality varies by topic and across individuals.

As part of this study, participants complete a baseline survey assessing their mental health, relationship quality, and attitudes toward AI, and take part in an experimenter-facilitated Zoom session with three short conversations with a lab-managed ChatGPT account. In addition, participants complete a brief survey after each conversation and a short follow-up survey two weeks later to capture how their experiences and attitudes change over time.The CHAT Study is among the first to examine how people experience AI chatbot conversations. The study findings may inform understanding of the conditions under which AI engagement is supportive versus risky to mental health and guide educational institutions, mental health professionals, and policymakers.

The impact of discrimination on mental health is particularly salient to Asian American (AA) parents and children given the current social and political context. During the pandemic, covert and overt anti-Asian discrimination – such as referencing COVID-19 as “China virus” or “Kung Flu,” and physical assaults – skyrocketed by 145% in 2020, and spiked by 164% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020. From March 19, 2020 to March 31, 2021, a national bias reporting clearinghouse, “Stop AAPI Hate,” received 6,603 reports of anti-Asian incidents, with 83.3% reflecting virulent animosity and 43.7% of reported incidents targeting Chinese individuals.

It is unknown the extent to which these experiences affect mental health in AA families, how youth approach racial bias and discrimination, and how such issues are discussed among AA parents and children. This project aims to assess how racial discrimination experiences are associated with mental health and biological measures of stress among Chinese American adolescents and their parents. We also examine the moderating role of internalized model minority beliefs, ethnic identity, and coping. The study considers family-level, bidirectional, and intergenerational effects of discrimination stress and mental health.

In 2024, the BOBA Project received additional NIH funding to examine how Asian American adolescents respond in the moment to social media content that portrays Asian Americans in stereotypic or counter-stereotypic ways. This companion study, involving Asian American teens, investigates how viewing such content shapes teens’ self-concept and, in turn, their mental health, with the goal of informing evidence-based guidance for parents, clinicians, and communities.

The project draws from the on-going, national, longitudinal study of Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), the largest national study of its kind, which follows 11,875 children (9-10 years old) through adolescence. The project examines three research aims.

First, the study investigates temporal, prospective, and reciprocal linkages between discrimination and substance use, from late childhood to early adolescence, disentangling whether discrimination is a contributing or a resulting factor of substance use initiation and continuation. Sources of discrimination include: ethnicity/race, immigration status, sexual orientation, and body shape.

Second, the study investigates the mediating and moderating role of sleep in discrimination-substance use associations.

Finally, building upon meta-analyses showing that the influence of discrimination on mental health is stronger in childhood and early to middle adolescence than other developmental periods, the study investigates developmental differences in temporal associations (e.g., discrimination-substance use, sleep as a mediator and moderator) from late childhood to middle adolescence.

This project seeks to improve the overall health and well-being of racial/ethnic minority youths and their families by reducing the effects of racism and discrimination. The central focus of this study is how emotion regulation and cognitive strategies, coping resources, and family/neighborhood influences explain or help condition these associations.

The study used community-based collaboration to recruit a targeted sample of Mexican-origin adolescents, mothers, and fathers, contributing to a literature where fathers (particularly Latino fathers) have been largely missing. Through the innovative integration of both longitudinal (macro-time) and daily diary (micro-time) research design features, important questions about cause and effect, and how mediating and moderating processes unfold over time, will be addressed.

The proposed analyses also reflect the multi-layered sociocultural niches occupied by Latino adolescents by employing individual-level methods as well as dyadic (adolescent-mother; adolescent-father) and triadic (adolescent-mother-father) analyses to test key study hypotheses.

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Funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, The Ad Sleep Project is a longitudinal investigation of how stress impacts health, academic outcomes, and development through sleep processes among a diverse sample of adolescents from New York City public high schools.

As part of this project, participants wore wrist actigraphs to collect data on sleep behaviors and patterns during a two-week period each year, and completed longer surveys several times a year along with nightly diary surveys during the two-week actigraph period, providing information on their demographics and daily stress, activities, and feelings.

The Ad Sleep Project explores how sleep serves as a mediating pathway between stress and health and academic outcomes among minority adolescents.

Funded by an Interdisciplinary and a Faculty Research Grant, this project explores the physiological embodiment of stress. This study includes a sample of over 700 diverse college students who completed a preliminary demographic survey, and a subsample of over 200 students who completed an experimental manipulation of stress in the research lab.

As part of the experimental study, participants were exposed to vignettes depicting varying degrees of stress. A psychological monitor (Biopac) assessed real-time heart-rate and skin response reactions to the vignettes. In addition, participants provided salivary and hair cortisol samples.

The College Stress Study explores how real-time responses to stress vary by sociodemographic and physiological variables, with the aim of unpacking health and academic disparities.

This longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, recruited 400 New York adolescent participants of diverse ethnic backgrounds from several high schools in the area.

Students completed three longer surveys each year, as well as a one-week mini-study. During that week, participants answered a nightly survey about their activities and mood that day. They were also beeped at random on phones distributed by the researchers five times during the day and prompted to answer questions about their feelings at that moment.

The daily diary design of the YES project allowed for investigation of how ethnic identity development, school context, and other factors affected everyday developmental outcomes, including mood and academic engagement.