This colloquium explores social and developmental contexts differentially shaping mental health among cisgender and gender-diverse LGBQ+ adolescents.

This presentation provides practical strategies to de-escalate tension, mitigate conflict, and turn difficult conversations into opportunities for collaboration to support student needs.

What happens when adults trade maturity for adolescent drama and teens buy into nonreality? This presentation will explore research on youth and adult social drama and its effects on all of us explicitly through our obsession with screens and social media.

Many anti-bullying programs encourage bystanders to defend their victimized peers, in the hope that this ceases the bullying and improves victims’ psychological functioning. But does peer defending truly have these intended effects? And what about the defenders themselves—how risky or rewarding is it to step in?

Friendships are crucial relationships during adolescence, affording youth many socioemotional benefits, including mitigating risk for the development of mental health challenges. Ironically, however, youth in distress who may benefit most from supportive friendships tend to experience the erosion of these social supports over time. This talk will review the protective benefits of adolescent friendships, as well as the risks associated with certain types of friendships.

Dr. San Miguel Torres will address the underestimated and significant problem of bullying as it is being addressed internationally in terms of the gap in research and application of effective training and intervention within the education system in Puerto Rico.

This presentation will describe an ongoing program of research that uses large and diverse population-based samples of adolescents and recommended statistical approaches to explore these health disparities and the distinct contribution of bias-based bullying.