Research Labs

The Department of Psychology faculty advances research and theory on underrepresented minority groups in their work that spans health and mental health, intergroup relations and conflict, and diversity in development across the lifespan and across social contexts.

Dr. JoAnn Farver

JoAnn Farver has been studying the effects of acculturation on children and their families in relation to psychological outcomes, adolescent well-being, and family functioning with Asian and Latino families.

She is also a co-Principal Investigator of a large scale emergent literacy intervention with multi-ethnic children funded by the NIH and US Department of Education in the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

She collaborates with Mainland and Hong Kong Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian colleagues on projects involving cultural issues in developmental psychology and on violence against women and children in Beirut, Lebanon. Latino immigrant families and the implications for the early literacy skill development of their preschool children using examples from a large-scale early literacy study carried out in the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

In the past three years, JoAnn Farver has been working on several projects with colleagues on Hong Kong. The first involves a cyberbullying intervention to examine witnesses of cyberbullying funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, General Research Fund with Dr. Angel Leung at the Education University of Hong Kong (2018-2020), an early literacy intervention with Dr. Cammie Mc Bride the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and a study of “affluenza” with wealthy Hong Kong families carried out with her graduate student Jackie Tilley. Dr. Farver also developed an undergraduate semester abroad exchange program between the USC Psychology Program and the Psychology Department at CUHK.

Dr. Stanley Huey

Stan Huey investigates culture-responsive treatments for ethnic minorities. He is currently studying the effects of a behavioral employment program with juvenile gang offenders and emancipating foster care youth, as well as brief interventions for ethnic minorities with depression and anxiety-related problems.

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Dr. Steven Lopez

Steven Lopez carries out research that provides a critical cultural perspective to the study of psychopathology, assessment, and intervention of Latinos and other ethnic minority groups. In one line of research, his research team has developed a heuristic model of cultural competence for clinical practice, which, with NIMH support, they are currently testing. In a second line of research, Professor López studies the relationship of family factors and the course of schizophrenia, particularly among Mexican American families. One of their aims is to identify what family members do to prevent relapse. In collaboration with Dr. Carmen Lara at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in México, Dr. López has developed a public education campaign to help Spanish speaking family members recognize the key signs of psychosis so that they will be able to seek services promptly.

Lopez, S.R., Gamez, D., Mejia, Y., Calderon, V., Lopez, D., Ullman, J., & Kopelowicz, A. (2018). Psychosis literacy of U.S. Latinos with first episode psychosis and their caregivers. Psychiatric Services, Published online: 17 September 2018

            https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201700400

 Audiofile of manuscript

16: First-Episode Psychosis Care and Recovery Colleges

Download audio file (mp3, 34:46 min, 45.0 MB)

September 17, 2018

Dr. Dixon and Dr. Berezin discuss racial and ethnic differences in treatment outcomes among participants in a randomized controlled trial of an intervention for first-episode psychosis; psychosis literacy among Latinos with first-episode psychosis and their caregivers; and recovery colleges, which involve supporting people living with mental health problems through adult education.

Dr. Daphna Oyserman

Dr. Oyserman has multiple collaboartions across the world in different fields of gender and social status, culture-as-situated cognition, effects of cultural mindset on cognition, identity-based motivation and culture-as-situated cognition. Just to name a few.