Susan G. O'Leary, Ph.D.

Email: soleary@notes.cc.sunysb.edu Background Information Professor Co-Principal Investigator: Models of Partner and Parent Aggression Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1972 B.S., University of Illinois Research Interests Common and unique factors in child abuse and partner abuse Dysfunctional parenting (Also check out Susan O'Leary's lab home page) - The most prevalent mental health and social problem for children is the set of behaviors known as externalizing disorders. In adolescence, the problems include aggression, delinquency, and general flaunting of family and societal rules and expectations. Such behavior patterns are established early in childhood and their precursors are evident in toddlers who are defiant, disobedient, and aggressive. One major cause of externalizing problems in toddlers is inept parental discipline. Inept discipline comprises a range of parenting methods that are ineffective and often counterproductive in managing toddlers' inappropriate behavior and in teaching them to behave in accordance with reasonable family and societal expectations for appropriate behavior. My interests lie in: Clarifying which discipline strategies are effective and which are not, understanding how parents develop strategies for managing inappropriate child behavior. identifying environmental and parent characteristics that mitigate against parents' developing and/or implementing effective discipline strategies teaching at-risk parents to discipline successfully before their children develop behavior problems, and providing effective early interventions for parents whose toddlers are defiant, disobedient, and aggressive. Research being conducted by our group addresses these areas of interest in a variety of ways. Current projects are designed: to identify factors that can be assessed when infants are 7-9 months old and that predict how well mothers will manage inappropriate behavior when their children are 24 months old (C). This should prepare us to conduct primary prevention work (D). to test the hypothesis that marital conflict affects children's behavior via its impact on parenting skill and to elucidate the mechanisms that may account for the affect of conflict on parenting (C). to further our understanding of how maternal attributions for the causes of child misbehavior influence mothers' parenting (C) to develop a means of assessing mothers' awareness of functional contingencies in parent-child interactions (C). to improve our ability to assess parents' skills in managing children's misbehavior (A). to evaluate the stability of general discipline styles and the causal relations between discipline styles and children's behavior problems (A). to test a multivariate model of the unique and shared predictors of partner and parent aggression. We have recently completed an outcome study evaluating the effects of two one-session treatments for children's bed-time and night-time behavioral problems. We are in the process of designing brief treatments for other discrete and common problems that toddlers' parents find particularly challenging. These studies focus on area D. While we have not conducted research explicitly dealing with the development of parenting (B), we talk about it at length and think are B is closely related to what we are learning about area C.