Welcome to the Roisman Relationships Research Lab!
Under the direction of Glenn I. Roisman, Ph.D., the Relationships Research Laboratory studies the legacy of early interpersonal experiences as an organizing force in social, cognitive, and biological development across the lifespan. Our research focuses on the childhood antecedents of adaptation within the developmentally salient contexts of adolescence and adulthood. This work is multi-method and multi-informant, employing web-based questionnaire, interview, observational, and psychophysiological methods with individuals, families, and couples. In spanning multiple levels of a developmental analysis of individual and dyadic trajectories, our goal is to provide insight into the childhood experiences and resources that scaffold healthy adjustment in the years of maturity.
More recently, our lab has focused on studying to what extent, through what mechanisms, and for whom anthropometric indicators and biomarkers of adult physical health have their roots in childhood and adult interpersonal experiences.
This program of research leverages data:
(a) recently acquired from the large, normative-risk NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development cohort in their late 20s and early 30s with support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (PI: Bleil, R01HL130103; MPIs: Roisman and Bleil, R01HD091132)
(b) archived and to be collected from the higher-risk Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation through midlife (PI: Simpson, R01AG039453, recently completed with funding from the National Institute on Aging; NIA)
(c) being collected from the large Minnesota Twin Registry and the Carolina African American Twin Study of Aging samples in late life with support from the NIA (MPIs: Roisman and Krueger, R01AG053217) as well as the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (a longitudinal study of adoptive children and their parents studied from when the children were in adolescence into midlife; MPIs: Roisman and Krueger; R01AG077742)
(d) Professor Roisman is also continuing to pursue with his colleagues the largest and most comprehensive studies ever undertaken on the developmental origins of adult attachment styles and states of mind, including secondary coding and analysis of data from the Collaboration on Attachment Transmissions Synthesis (CATS) Individual Participant Data (IPD) corpus, with support from the NICHD (PI: Roisman; R01HD102035).
Taken together, this work will provide important prospective, longitudinal data from birth to adulthood on social, cognitive, and biological development and, via the Minnesota Twin Registry, Carolina African American Twin Study of Aging, and Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study, significantly improve causal inferences in the study of the developmental foundations of adult physical health, cognition, and well-being.