Lance Swenson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology
B.S. University of Georgia, Athens, M.A., Ph.D. (Developmental & Clinical Child), University of Missouri-Columbia; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Brown University School of Medicine, Center for Alcohol & Addiction Studies

Contact Information

Suffolk University
Department of Psychology
41 Temple Street
Boston, MA 02114
Donahue 636D
617-994-6874 (office)
617-367-2924 (Fax)
lswenson@suffolk.edu  

 

Courses Taught

233 Child Development PSYCH 236 Psychology of the Family PSYCH 336 Developmental Psychopathology PSYCH 748 Developmental Psychopathology  

 

Specialty Areas

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. (in press). 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