Biography

Seth Pollak’s research focuses on the influences of social risk factors on children’s brain and behavioral development, with particular focus on emotions, learning, and children’s health. Dr. Pollak has been the recipient of the Boyd-McCandless Award for Distinguished Contributions to Child Development, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Early Career Award, the APS James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award, as well as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Pollak currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Association for Psychological Science and previously served on the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development. In 2020, Dr. Pollak was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Website: https://childemotion.waisman.wisc.edu/
Twitter: @childemotionlab

Renée Boynton-Jarrett, a pediatrician and social epidemiologist, is an associate professor at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine. She is the founding director of the Vital Village Networks. Vital Village uses a trauma-informed lens to improve community capacity to promote child wellbeing and advance equity through dedicated collaborative partnerships, research, data-sharing, and community leadership development in Boston and nationally through the NOW Forum. Her scholarship has focused on early-life adversities as life course social determinants of health. She has a specific concentration on psychosocial stress and neuroendocrine and reproductive health outcomes. She is nationally recognized for work on the intersection of community violence, intimate partner violence, and child abuse and neglect and neighborhood characteristics that influence these patterns. She has received numerous awards for teaching, clinical care, and public health including the Massachusetts Public Health Association Paul Revere Award for outstanding impact on public health.

Website: www.vitalvillage.org
Twitter: @rboyntonjarrett

Trauma Among Individuals, Families, and Communities: Situating Adversity in Context

Session Type: Invited Symposium

Abstract

Discovering the processes through which early adverse experiences affect children’s development, health, and behavior is critically important for developing effective interventions. These paired presentations will discuss ways in which extant research approaches might be expanded to better embrace the real complexity of human development. Child adversity is embedded in multiple levels of social contexts that are often excluded from mainstream research approaches. The presenters will consider ways in which scientists can take on more responsibility for telling the story of the broad ecology that creates adversity. For example, too narrow a focus on the caregiver as delivering the adversity or resilience factor misses the contextual factors that influence that caregiver. And too great a focus on measurement of events predetermined by researchers to be adverse or protective may be overly centered on populations and fail to address the circumstances and humanity of each individual. We will suggest alternative formulations that hold promise for advancing knowledge about the mechanisms through which adversity affects human development.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program

Individual Presentations

• New Approaches to Uncovering the Developmental Effects of Child Adversity - Presenting Author: Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Emancipating the Social Ecology of Early Childhood Development: Racism, Structural Adversity, and Transformational Communities - Presenting Author: Renee Danielle Boynton-Jarrett, Boston Medical Center

Moderator

• Brenda Jones-Hardin, University of Maryland

Introducer

• Robey B. Shah, Michigan State University