Lance Swenson, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology

Phone: 617.994.6874
Fax: 617.367.2924
Email: lswenson@suffolk.edu
Office: Donahue Building, Rm. 636D 

Education

• PhD, University of Missouri, Columbia
• MA, University of Missouri, Columbia

• BS, University of Georgia, Athens

Internship: Brown University Clinical Psychology Training Consortium; Postdoctoral Fellowship: Brown University School of Medicine, Center for Alcohol & Addiction Studies.

Specialty Areas

Friendships and peer relationships, parenting, socioemotional development, suicidality and self-harming behaviors, developmental psychopathology

My research interests involve understanding children and adolescents’ social relationships and the complex processes by which they influence youth emotional and behavioral functioning. As a clinical and developmental psychologist, I am particularly fascinated by the roles that youths’ relationships with their friends, peers and romantic partners, and with parents play in promoting positive adjustment. An additional focus of my research is to understand how normative developmental processes, such as friendship formation and maintenance, can lead to maladaptation. For example, one line of research examines close friends’ knowledge of youth internalizing and externalizing symptomatology. Related research has investigated concurrent and prospective relations among overt and relational aggression, social status with peers (i.e., perceived popularity), and social/emotional adjustment.   Some of my more recent research collaborations have involved clinically-oriented research with more severely impaired populations of children and adolescents (e.g., psychiatric inpatients). These collaborations encompass a wide range of topics, including nonsuicidal self-injury, comorbid substance use and suicidality, and psychiatric sequelae associated with childhood-onset bipolar disorder.

Selected Publications

Swenson, L. P., & Rose, A. J. (2009). Friend’s knowledge of youth internalizing and externalizing adjustment: Accuracy, bias, and the influence of gender, grade, positive friendship quality, and self-disclosure. Journal for Abnormal Child Psychology. 

Hunt, J., Birmaher, B., Leonard, H., Strober, M., Axelson, D., Ryan, N., Yang, M., MaryKay, G., Dyl, J., Esposito-Smythers, C., Swenson, L.P., Goldstein, B., Goldstein, T., & Keller, M. (in press). Irritability vs. elation as distinguishing symptoms of mania in bipolar youth. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Rose, A.J., Swenson, L.P., & Robert, C.A. (2009). Boys' and girls' motivations for refraining from prompting friends to talk about problems. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 33, 178-184.

Swenson, L. P., Spirito, A., Dyl, J., Kittler, J., & Hunt, J. I. (2008). Psychiatric correlates of nonsuicidal cutting behaviors in an adolescent inpatient sample. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 39, 427-438   
 
Swenson, L. P., Esposito-Smythers, C., Hunt, J. I., Hollander, B., Dyl, J., Rizzo, C. J., Steinely, D. L., & Spirito, A. (2007). Validation of the Children’s Interview for Psychiatric Syndromes (ChIPS) with psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 46, 1482-1490  

Courses Taught

PSYCH 233 - Child Development
PSYCH 236 - Psychology of the Family
PSYCH 336 - Developmental Psychopathology
PSYCH 741 - Clinical Supervision and Consultation IIB
PSYCH 748 - Developmental Psychopathology