Psychology Lecture Series: "Family Stress, Risk and Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic"

The Psychology Department welcomes Dr. Nickola Overall as the first speaker in its 2021-2022 virtual lecture series: The Psychology of COVID-19 and Public Health.

This talk will present a conceptual framework for understanding how the cumulative stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic affect family processes that harm adults’ and children’s health and wellbeing. Data tracking families prior to and during the pandemic will be used to demonstrate how facing pandemic-related stress increases the risk of harmful processes across the family system, such as inter-parental conflict, unresponsive parenting, and family chaos.

After identifying the key factors that need to be addressed in order to mitigate the potential adverse effects of the current crisis, the talk will end by considering resilience processes (e.g., cooperative co-parenting) that may protect family wellbeing in the face of the ongoing family stress arising from the pandemic.

Dr. Overall is a professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Dr. Overall’s research programs are guided by a principal goal to identify how emotional, attachment and relationship difficulties can be overcome to build healthy and happy families. Her research focuses on the relative success of different communication strategies used when families are confronted with stress, social challenges and relationship problems. Dr. Overall has published over 135 articles, books and book chapters. She has won several international awards for her contributions to relationship and family science, and is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Dr. Overall has been associate editor of Personal Relationships and Social Psychological and Personality Science, and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes.

This event may be used to satisfy the Lecture Reflection Requirement in PSYC206 and PSYC493/494.