Graduate Student. UConn, Social Psychology.

School suspension and expulsion predict juvenile detention, educational attainment, earnings, incarceration, and recidivism. Suspension/expulsion impacts children’s development, contributing to cumulative disadvantages for students, families, and communities. Black students face more suspension/expulsion: 20% of Black boys are suspended, compared to 12% of Black girls, 9% of Latinx/Hispanic boys, 6% of White boys, and 3% of Black girls.

Yet, we do not fully understand the causes of these racial disparities in school exclusion. Neither higher incidence of infraction nor lesser responsiveness to restorative discipline practices (like tutoring or counseling) fully accounts for Black boys’ higher suspension/expulsion rates. Both structural discrimination in the form of between school sorting—the concentration of students of color in punitive schools—and interpersonal bias—the harsher sanctioning of Black students than White students for comparable, routine misbehavior—offer possible explanations. Using a combination of large scale survey data analysis with a national sample of U.S. children and an original video experiment, Owens helps disentangle these potential explanations, with important implications for the appropriate targeting of future policy efforts.

Come and join us for an information session on the Urban Semester Program, an intensive internship experience in Hartford.

The Urban Semester Program offers students a tremendous opportunity for service learning and public service. Students intern in a variety of agencies in Hartford. Students have full choice in choosing their internship with the help of the Internship Coordinator. Please join us to learn more.

We hope to see you there.

Lehigh University, Psychology and Africana Studies.

Elissa Perry, Ph.D., Social-Organizational Psychology, Columbia University.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” Maslow (1966).

Sexual harassment training is the hammer often used to address sexual harassment, despite the lack of consistent evidence that it does so effectively (Roehling & Huang, 2018). A training based approach to sexual harassment is limited in several respects. I discuss these limitations and present a conceptual model that may help us think about sexual harassment interventions more broadly. I suggest that a focus on a broader climate for inclusion, and the role that leaders play in creating it, may provide a richer understanding of the conditions under which sexual harassment, as well as other forms of mistreatment, occur. Even the most well-developed and evidence-based training will have limited impact if the training is embedded in an organizational context that does not support the training, or worse, tolerates incivility and other exclusionary behaviors. I suggest how this model may help identify strategies (e.g., leadership development programs) for combating sexual harassment that complement the sexual harassment training programs that are more traditionally implemented.

Assistant Professor. UConn, Developmental Psychology.

Graduate Student Advisory Committee

Visiting Assistant Professor. Hope College, Psychology.

Jana Iverson, PhD., from University of Pittsburgh will be discussing her work on Infant Communication.

Title: Early Motor and Communicative Development in Infants with an Older Sibling with Autism Spectrum Disorder