{"id":95202,"date":"2024-08-29T13:46:13","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T17:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=95202"},"modified":"2025-05-05T13:18:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T17:18:16","slug":"teen-development-at-the-core-of-distinguished-professors-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2024\/08\/teen-development-at-the-core-of-distinguished-professors-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Teen development at the core of Distinguished Professor\u2019s research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brock University\u2019s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient\u2019s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year\u2019s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients\u00a0<\/em>on The Brock News<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Distinguished Professor of Psychology Teena Willoughby investigates the factors that influence the behaviour and well-being of adolescents, work that has helped countless parents, educators, health professionals and fellow researchers better understand the transition from childhood to adulthood.<\/p>\n

\u201cAdolescence is a particularly intriguing developmental age period, marked by significant physical, cognitive and social changes,\u201d she says. \u201cThis age period also comes with an increased risk for the onset of mental health problems and health-risk behaviours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the last three decades, Willoughby has drilled down on an array of issues connected to young people, from risk taking to self injury to technology use.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am deeply interested in exploring how developmental changes interact with the emergence of mental health issues and health-risk behaviours during adolescence,\u201d she says. \u201cUnderstanding this interplay can reveal how these factors might shape an individual\u2019s trajectory into adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n

She uses a wide variety of techniques that sometimes yield surprising results, such as her finding that risk-taking behaviour peaks in early adulthood rather than the teen years, as other researchers previously believed.<\/p>\n

As a result, her work is often talked about beyond academia. In addition to some 200 academic publications and research reports for community partners, her findings have been profiled in mainstream publications such as Forbes<\/em>, The Washington Post<\/em> and Parent Magazine<\/em>, as well as newspapers around the world.<\/p>\n

Willoughby, who has also served as the Director of Brock\u2019s Lifespan Development Research Institute since 2021, says her overarching goal is to \u201cgenerate insights that can inform programs designed to promote healthy development and support adolescents in navigating this critical transitional period.\u201d<\/p>\n

To that end, Willoughby leverages two key research strategies \u2014 longitudinal studies\u00a0 and community partnerships \u2014 to ensure that results are nuanced and that the impact of her findings can be widely accessed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that building strong community connections with school boards, youth-serving agencies, youth advisory committees and health organizations such as UNICEF Canada is important to inform research design and the interpretation of findings,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In Willoughby\u2019s Adolescent Development Lab<\/a>, she says she and her students study large groups of participants over extended periods of time using \u201ca combination of self-report surveys, open-ended questions, electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioural experiments to gain a more comprehensive understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n

This approach means Willoughby can identify subgroups of youth as well as predictors for future behaviour, something her research has shown is crucial when it comes to prevention and intervention. After annual longitudinal data collection for 18 years, she has amassed three large-scale longitudinal datasets:<\/p>\n