Dr. Erika Lawrence is the Director of Translational Science at The Family Institute and a Research Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at UCLA and has held tenured professorships at the University of Iowa and the University of Arizona, prior to joining The Family Institute. Dr. Lawrence has more than 75 peer-reviewed publications and her research has been funded by DOJ, NIMH, NICHD, and CDC. In addition to being an APS and APA Fellow, she received the Distinguished Contribution to Family Psychology Award from APA’s Society for Couple and Family Psychology for her basic and applied research contributions to the study of aggression.
Ten years ago, Dr. Lawrence developed a multidisciplinary partnership among clinical research psychologists and court professionals to address aggressive behaviors and unmet mental health needs of adolescents in the juvenile justice system. Her team was effective in developing a sustainable multidisciplinary team, developing a six-session Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)-based group intervention, and implementing this intervention with adolescent boys and girls in juvenile detention and out on probation. Compared to adolescents receiving treatment-as-usual in detention, adolescents demonstrated significantly greater declines in the ACT targets of experiential avoidance and values obstruction, as well as significantly greater declines in anxiety and depressive symptoms.