Happy Holidays 2021

After another difficult year of COVID restrictions and limitations, the board of MRI continues to be impressed with all the researchers’ creativity, ingenuity, and determination in pursuing their research projects. This past year we have continued to fund high quality research into interactional aspects of human behavior.

Here is a list of just a few of the issues and problems our grantees are working on:

·       Finding solutions to bullying in middle and high schools.

·       Understanding how couples help each other to deal with stress, anxiety and loneliness engendered by restrictions during the COVID pandemic.

·       Assessing a program for relationship education for pregnant and postpartum women.

·       Assessing the effectiveness of an online intervention designed to improve youth social relationships, social well-being, and mental health in high school.

·       Understanding how siblings help each other to manage stress in adolescence.

·       Understanding how parent-child similarity varies over time and how it influences psychological health.

·       Improving the quality of psychotherapy supervision by assessing whether Deliberate Practice, that is, the specific identification of skills to be developed with a prescribed iterative practice regimen, is more effective than supervision traditional supervision.

With the assistance of our major donors (Shibata Family Fund, The Eileen Bobrow Fund and the Ben Hammett Family Foundation) we have been able to work with our research partners to address many important and timely issues.  The ongoing support allows us, at the Mental Research Institute, to continue its mission of supporting researchers who are striving to understand complex aspects of human behavior and finding innovative and practical approaches to people’s problems.

As this year is ending, we would like to thank you for being part of the MRI community. It is our privilege to be able to count you among our friends, supporters, and grantees.

We look forward to another year of meeting researchers and issuing new research grants.

We hope that you have a great holiday season and wish you a great new year.

Sophie Suberville

Executive Director

Mary Ann Norfleet, PhD

Chair, MRI Board of Directors