How do adolescents develop?
I study how family, cultural, and social contexts shape adolescents' adaptive and maladaptive developmental pathways — including prosocial behavior, mental health, and behavioral adjustment. My work draws on strengths-based and resilience perspectives and uses longitudinal and dyadic models to understand development across diverse cultural contexts.
Utah State University
How do young people grow into caring, resilient adults?
Two themes organize the work: how prosocial development unfolds, and which family and cultural strengths support resilience across diverse cultural contexts.
Prosocial development
What makes young people kind? How empathy, prosocial behavior, and moral capacities develop — and what supports them.
Family, culture, and resilience
What helps adolescents thrive against the odds? How family and cultural strengths buffer adversity and support positive development.
Methods
What changes, and for whom.
Most developmental research traces how problems transmit. My work traces both directions: how strengths in one domain produce strengths in another, and how risk processes can be interrupted.
- Connect individual differences with the environments around adolescents.
- Separate within-person change from stable between-person differences.
- Identify strengths that buffer adversity in understudied communities.
What changes across adolescence?
Which strengths shape the path?
How can research inform programs?
Methods and development, taught through practice.
19 courses across three institutions and two countries. Undergraduate cohorts of 75 to 150; graduate cohorts of 15 to 35.
Interested in the research, teaching, or a possible collaboration?
alexia.carrizales@usu.edu
Email Alexia ↗