Beth Russell has spent 20 years studying psychological distress and how people manage it. Her studies examine how individuals and families respond to stress across a range of typical life events (like the transition to parenthood) and atypical experiences (caregiving in the context of chronic health conditions). Her most recent work examines the multi-level influences that shape people’s responses to stress, spanning individual, social, and place-based factors over time. She is currently on several teams funded by both internal and external awards to develop and test interventions that target the regulation of distress to improve psychosocial outcomes.
Families are a primary source of support during times of stress. Much of the modeling close loved ones provide about how to manage challenges is shaped by attitudes about stress and the coping behaviors that might (or might not) be useful in a given situation. The range of supports to cope with stress extend far beyond family influences to include informal supports like friends/peers, and formal supports including help-seeking through treatment providers. Beth’s work across different stressful situations demonstrates that there are subgroup patterns in help-seeking which ultimately impact coping strategies. For example, young men tend to be strikingly absent from clinical trials and community-based service provision, indicating meaningful gaps in our understanding of help-seeking in times of stress. Describing the unique distress and resilience trajectories among subgroups at heightened risk for mental health struggles is an important step in tailoring accessible and equitable interventions for those with the greatest needs. Beth and her HDFS colleague Kari Adamsons won the National Council on Family Relations 2024 Men in Families Focus Group Best Research Paper Award for their coauthored work “Longitudinal transmission of risk behaviors between mothers, fathers, and adolescents” published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
Beth became the Director of the Center for Applied Research in Human Development (CARHD) in 2018, where she has over a decade of experience directing evaluations of human service programs that provide supports to disadvantaged communities, helping programs identify what works best for whom within their client populations. Beth also holds two editorial board member seats for the journals New Directions for Evaluation and Child Psychiatry and Human Development.
Outside of work, Beth spends time with her family, in her gardens and art studio, and connecting with friends over good food. Three generations of her family love coming together from around the country to travel to the best beaches, jungles, waterfalls, and caves every summer – next up in 2025: SCUBA diving a Pacific Island volcano crater!