The Developmental Risk and Cultural Resilience Laboratory
Our Mission
The DRCR Laboratory studies how experiences and environments shape mental health. These include relationships and collective events, including emerging technologies that change how people seek connection and care. We recognize how seasons of life matter. Toward that end, our work covers the lifespan, from infancy and the perinatal period through adolescence and emerging adulthood, with an emphasis on populations that are often overlooked in research.
Research areas
Relationships, families, and culture
Emotional development, regulation, and identity take shape within family relationships, but much of what is known about those processes has been on majority populations — and findings established in one group cannot be assumed to hold in another.
Our work in this area spans parent–child interaction beginning in infancy, mental health during pregnancy and the postpartum period, in immigrant families nad those outside the US to determine the conditions under which developmental patterns replicate across settings and groups.
Discrimination and mental health disparities
Racial discrimination is frequently measured as a single construct, but being targeted directly, witnessing it happen to someone else, and absorbing it secondhand through news and social media are distinct exposures with distinct effects.
We work to separate these forms, identify the pathways by which each reaches emotional experiences, symptoms, sleep, and racial trauma, and identify the family and identity processes that buffer them.
Societal conditions and population mental health
Some determinants of mental health operate at the level of whole populations rather than individuals: public health crises, political upheaval, economic pressure, and shifts in the broader social climate. Our research focuses on differential vulnerability — why some people are far more affected than others — as well as the effects of duration, as experiences can persist well after the event itself has passed.
Answering them requires following the same people over time, which is why our research relies on longitudinal cohorts. Through this we've been able to study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the psychological effects of other U.S. based societal events among children, perinatal populations, and young adults.
Technology, AI, and how young people seek support
Young people and adults alike are using generative AI for information and everyday tasks, but also for companionship and emotional support. Even more, they may bring to AI questions they may not bring to anyone else. There is very little evidence about what AI use means for their development or health.
Our findings so far show that loneliness predicts using AI for companionship even after accounting for depression, anxiety, and suicidality; that people facing barriers to conventional care are more likely to trust AI than human providers; and that most parents are not yet discussing AI with their children, making this an emerging part of how families navigate technology together.
Help-seeking and access to care
Running through all four areas is the question of what happens when support is needed. Formal care reaches only some of the people who need it, and the reasons — stigma, cost, availability, mistrust, cultural mismatch — differ across populations. We study patterns of service use and the barriers that shape them, along with the informal alternatives people rely on when professional care is out of reach: family, community, and increasingly, technology.
Team Highlights
Dr. Cindy Liu won both the Harvard Medical School Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Mentor Award!
Watch Dr. Liu's NBC interview on her publication in JAMA Pediatrics!
Our undergraduate research assistant, Yutian Liu, got into the early guaranteed medical school program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai!
Our undergraduate research assistant, Felix Lou, received a scholarship to attend Behavioral Health Tech conference and was invited to the Aspen Ideas Meeting!
