Dr. Gabriela Livas Stein received UNCG’s 2021 Junior Research Excellence Award for her scholarship on the impacts of Latinx cultural values, cultural stressors, and access to mental health care.
Recognized as a leader in the Latinx child development field, the professor of psychology has published over 70 peer reviewed articles in top journals such as Developmental Psychology and the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. She has received $5.5 million in funding and currently co-leads an NIH R01 grant.
Community Resilience
“I was drawn to identify community resilience factors in Latinx and other minoritized communities because much of the existing work on these communities focused on deficits. There was not a lot of work on what I as a Mexican-American woman experienced in my day-to-day life – processes in these communities that promote positive outcomes in kids and families.
“My work has highlighted the protective role of Latinx familism values – loyalty, obligation, respect, and support among family members, and identification through one's family network. Familism supports family-based coping and a sense of meaning in life. We found these values predict greater academic achievement and motivation, fewer depressive symptoms, and greater self-esteem.”
Cultural stressors
“Discrimination is a stressor that impacts depressive symptomology, self-efficacy, self-esteem, academic motivation, and college-going. We’ve found it has a long shadow. Discrimination kids experience in fifth grade – personal mistreatment and observing others endorsing negative stereotypes about your group – predict depressive and anxiety symptoms all the way to the end of 12th grade.
“I’ve also studied acculturation gap conflict, where kids and parents acculturate to American values at different speeds. That can lead to family conflict, but it’s a unique stressor in that families can also perceive conflict as caused by the gap when it may not be. Parent-child conflict is part of being a kid and a parent, but we see a difference in attributions. If a parent tells their child, ‘Hey, clean your room,’ and the child doesn't, in the acculturation gap scenario, they might say, ‘My kid is becoming disrespectful,’ or the kid might think, ‘My parents ride me because they're too Latinx – I wish they were like these other parents.’
“The gap exacerbates the effects of family conflict. We’ve found that it predicts depressive symptoms among kids and moms – it impacts the whole family. For kids, it also impacts self-esteem and racial ethnic group pride, reducing the protective effects familism might otherwise provide.”