About

Overarching goals of research program

I am a Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. I am also active with the Biostatistics program in the School of Medicine at CWRU, where I lead the Social Sciences track in the MS graduate program. My work is grounded in an ecological perspective on child development, which highlights the importance of integrating multiple levels of influence on child functioning, ranging from cultural to neurobiological factors. My research is centered on family functioning, as transactions within families as crucial to both the etiology of emotional and behavioral problems in youth, and provide important targets for intervention.

My research program integrates both basic and applied topics, with lines of work focused on refining family-focused prevention and intervention practices, as well as on the etiology of emotional and behavioral disorders across childhood and adolescence. My work has been funded by NIH and the Institute for Education Sciences, in addition to internal and foundation-grants. Elements of my research program are detailed in the following sections.

Prevention and Intervention Research

Much of my work has focused on family-focused prevention to reduce risks for the development of emotional and behavior problems across childhood and adolescence. Within this sphere, ongoing lines of research are aimed at enhancing efficacy and accessibility of family-focused preventive interventions including through the development and dissemination of technology-driven interventions, and on the examination of “cross-over” impacts of early prevention on the mitigation of suicide-risk across development.

For instance, one ongoing line of my research has centered on efforts to adapt the Family Check-Up (FCU) prevention program to a mobile-health framework, incorporating mobile technology to enhance to reach and impact of family-focused prevention. The FCU is a brief assessment-driven intervention designed to motivate parenting change when needed, that was originally developed to prevent the development of conduct problems and substance use in youth. The development of an effective mobile-health version of the FCU is a critical goal, offering the promise of enhancing the reach of prevention programs to underserved populations that may otherwise have limited access to effective family-focused prevention services. In particular, I served as PI on a recently completed R01grant supplement from NIMH which supported the development and preliminary testing of an app-based version of the FCU, the Family Check-Up Online (FCU-O), designed to support adaptive parent and youth functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project involved substantial work refining both English and Spanish-language versions of the Family Check-Up Online (FCU-O), an app-based version of the FCU that can be delivered remotely, coupled with remote parent-coaching sessions to support intervention engagement and personalization. Following app-development, we conducted a small randomized trial with 161 families with middle-school aged youth, in which parents were screened for elevated pandemic-related parenting stress and/or symptoms of anxiety and depression. This trial supported several recent publications demonstrating the benefits of the FCU-O for reducing parental stress and depression, and improving adaptive parenting skills across 6-month follow-up.

Following the success of this initial trial, my colleagues and I were awarded a subsequent IES grant (for which I serve as Co-PI) to conduct a larger randomized trial with longer-term follow-up to examine the effects of the FCU-O on youth academic functioning, as well as factors associated with school-based dissemination and implementation. For this follow-up trial, we recruited 281 families of middle-school aged youth from across Oregon. The trial will ultimately follow families across 2 years. Preliminary analysis of the recently completed 1-year follow-up assessment indicates that we are seeing similar benefits for improving parenting skills, which in turn have benefits for reducing youth conduct problems over time. Crucially, these trials support the short-
and longer-term impact of this relatively brief intervention that combines both app-based intervention materials and remote coaching on parent and family adaptation, underscoring the need for future dissemination efforts to enhance intervention access for families.

Data Harmonization Research

A second ongoing line of prevention-centered research has examined “cross-over” effects of early preventive interventions, particularly for reducing risk for depression and suicidality across development. My early work in this area centered on cross-over effects of the Family Check-Up prevention program, which was originally developed to target risk for antisocial behavior development in youth by supporting effective parenting practices and enhancing family communication and problem-solving skills. Work examining cross-over effects of the FCU is critical, because while depression and suicide are highly prevalent in youth, effect sizes observed in depression-focused prevention and intervention trials are generally modest, and relapse rates are high, underscoring the need for refinement of prevention and intervention efforts. Moreover, parent and family functioning have not been well-integrated into current intervention models for depression or suicide-risk, and so one long-term goal of this work is to identify novel opportunities to adapt the FCU for these highly critical outcomes.

Following preliminary trial-level work in this area, I was awarded a recently completed R01 grant from NIMH, focused on employing integrative data analytic (IDA) techniques to examine long-term effects of the FCU on depression and suicide-risk across several randomized trials. IDA techniques permit the harmonization of individual-level data across multiple trials, that may have employed different measures across differing timeframes, facilitating novel and powerful analyses of prevention effects across trials. IDA techniques are particularly important for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), which are lower-base rate outcomes that may be challenging to examine in an individual trial not specifically for STB prevention. By synthesizing data across trials, we are able to conduct more powerful analyses of FCU effects across long developmental timeframes, to provide an overarching view of the durability of FCU effects. Results from this project documented significant impacts of the FCU on reducing both depression and suicide-risk across trials, while also showing that the benefits of the FCU waned over time, highlighting the need for further work to enhance the durability of the FCU effects on these outcomes. The success of this R01 led to the cultivation of a larger collaborative research network to examine crossover effects on suicide-related outcomes across a much larger body of prevention programs. We were recently awarded a large collaborative U01 award from NIMH, for which I serve as one of 5 MPIs, tasked with aggregating data across approximately 30 prevention trials with data on more than 42,000 families, in order to examine prevention impacts on Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors as well as suicide mortality. This is an exciting and innovative collaboration that has the promise to inform suicide prevention efforts in the decades to come.

Integrating family and affective science approaches

In addition to prevention-focused research, I also conduct etiologically focused research on emotional and behavior problems, centered on employing a multi-method approach to examining emotional processing and emotion regulation in parents and youth. This work incorporates self-report, observational methods, and measures of neurobiological functioning. My current lab supports the simultaneous integration of observed interaction dynamics, as well as indices of autonomic nervous system functioning in parents and children (e.g. heart rate/heart-rate variability, respiration, skin conductance). We also examine neurocognitive processes related to affective responding, including EEG and startle-response data, which provide objective and non-invasive indices of the emotional arousal and emotion regulation skills. Of note, my lab serves as a teaching lab, helping undergraduate and graduate students learn to conduct innovative lab-based research that is consistent with NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach, which emphasizes the identification of basic biological and cognitive processes associated with the development of psychopathology, which may offer novel insights guiding the refinement of prevention and intervention strategies. We have conducted several lines of research in this area, including several studies examining the integration of family interaction dynamics and affective processes associated with familial-risk for depression, as well as lab-based work focused on neurocognitive processes underlying the co-occurrence of depression and alcohol abuse. Such work facilitates the examination of mechanisms of family-risk that operate in the moment across multiple levels of functioning, potentially providing novel risk-markers that may be targeted in future intervention trials.

Relevant citations within the last 5-years

Family Check-Up Online

Connell, A. M., Stormshak, E. A., Mauricio, A. M., Hails, K. A., Ramirez-Miranda, J., & Inyangson, J. I. (2024). A Digital Health Model for School-Based Implementation to Improve Parent and Child Outcomes: Comparison of Active Versus Light-Touch Coaching Effects. Journal of Prevention, 1-19.

Stormshak, E. A., Connell, A.M., Mauricio, A. M., McLaughlin, M., & Caruthers, A. (2024). Digital health delivery of parenting skills to improve conduct problems in middle school youth across two distinct randomized trials. Prevention Science.

Mauricio, A. M., Hails, K. A., Caruthers, A. S., Connell, A. M., & Stormshak, E. A. (2024). Family Check-Up Online: Effects of a Virtual Randomized Trial on Parent Stress, Parenting, and Child Outcomes in Early Adolescence. Prevention Science, 1-12.

Connell, A., & Stormshak, E. (2023). Evaluating the efficacy of the Family Check-Up Online to improve parent mental health and family functioning in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Journal of Prevention.

Cross-over effects, Integrative Data Analysis, and Family-intervention

Seidman, S., Danzo, S., Connell, A., & Stormshak, E. (2025). The Family Check‐Up and Youth Suicide: Assessing Indirect Effects of Improving Self‐Regulation and Reducing Depression in Promoting Long‐Term Resilience. Suicide and Life‐Threatening Behavior, 55(3), 1 – 7.

McClaine, R., Connell, A., Ha, T., Stormshak, E., Westling, E., Wilson, M., & Shaw, D. (2024). Adolescent developmental pathways among depression, conduct problems, and rejection: Integrative data analysis across three samples. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, in press.

Danzo, S., Connell, A. M., Worley, D., & Milner, R. (2023). Feasibility and acceptability of implementing an intimate partner violence and parenting group intervention in a community agency serving a high-risk community sample: A pilot study. Children and Youth Services Review, 152, 107093.

Seidman, S., Connell, A., Stormshak, E., Westling, E., Ha, T., & Shaw, D. (2022). Disrupting Maternal Transmission of Depression: Using Integrative Data Analysis (IDA) to Examine Indirect Effects of the Family Check-Up (FCU) Across Three Randomized Trials. Prevention Science, 1-12.

Magee, K. E., Connell, A., Hipwell, A. E., Shaw, D., Westling, E., Keenan, K., … & Stepp, S. (2022). Developmental Models of Depression, Externalizing Problems, and Self-regulatory Processes: Integrated Data Analysis Across Four Longitudinal Studies of Youth. Prevention Science, 1-11.

Connell, A. M., Seidman, S., Ha, T., Stormshak, E., Westling, E., Wilson, M., & Shaw, D. (2022). Long-term effects of the family check-up on suicidality in childhood and adolescence: integrative data analysis of three randomized trials. Prevention science, 1-11.

Connell, A., Magee, K., Stormshak, E., Ha, T., Westling, E., Wilson, M., & Shaw, D. (2021). Long-term Cross-over Effects of the Family Check-Up Prevention Program on Child and Adolescent Depression: Integrative Data Analysis of three Randomized Trials. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 89(9), 773 – 782.

Etiological and Integrative lab-based research

Magee, K. E., McClaine, R., Laurianti, V., & Connell, A. M. (2023). Effects of binge drinking and depression on cognitive-control processes during an emotional Go/No-Go task in emerging adults. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 162, 161-169.
Elam, K. K., Mun, C. J., Connell, A., & Ha, T. (2023). Coping strategies as mediating mechanisms between adolescent polysubstance use classes and adult alcohol and substance use disorders. Addictive behaviors, 139, 107586.

Berg, K., Holmes, M., Evans, K., Powers, G., Moore, S., Steigerwald, S., Bender, A., Yaffe, A., & Connell, A. (2022). Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence and Children’s Physiological Functioning: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Journal of family violence, 37(8), 1321-1335.

Post, L. M., Youngstrom, E., Connell, A. M., Zoellner, L. A., & Feeny, N. C. (2021). Transdiagnostic emotion regulation processes explain how emotion-related factors affect co-occurring PTSD and MDD in relation to trauma. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 78.

Magee, K., & Connell, A. (2021). Depression and alcohol use across adolescence and early adulthood: Coping mechanisms and long-term outcomes. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.

Danzo, S., Connell, A., & Stormshak, E. (2020). Transdiagnostic pathways between alcohol use and internalizing symptoms across emerging adulthood: Examination of gender differences in interpersonal and intrapersonal processes. Emerging Adulthood, 9(4) 347-359.

Seidman, S., Danzo, S., Patton, E., & Connell, A. (2020). Here’s looking at you kid? Maternal depression and adolescent attention to self- or other-directed emotional faces. Journal of Affective Disorders, 272, 38-45.

Connell, A., Danzo, S., Magee, K., & Dawson, G. (2020). Rumination in Early Adolescent Girls: An EEG Study of Cognitive Control and Emotional Responding in an Emotional Go/NoGo Task. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20(1), 181-194.

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