Lab News

April 25, 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Williamson, who has received a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. She will spend the 2023/2024 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Universidad de Granada, where she will be hosted by Dr. Inmaculada Valor-Segura, Professor of Psychology. Dr. Williamson’s Fulbright project focuses on diversifying and globalizing the scientific study of close relationships. An important step toward studying the family relationships of people who have been historically underrepresented in research is to ensure that the field has the necessary tools to do. Dr. Williamson will work to validate Spanish-language versions of multiple commonly used self-report instruments to ensure that they are valid and reliable for use with Spanish-speakers in the U.S. and abroad. She will also conduct a novel study of the buffering effect of close relationships on the link between socioeconomic status and well-being in the United States and Spain, two countries with high levels of income inequality.

April 21, 2023

Undergraduate Katie Hale completed her honors thesis in the Williamson Lab this year, working with data from the Future First project, which is an evaluation of a youth sexual and relationship education program delivered in public high schools in Texas. She focused on sexual and gender minority youth participating in the program, finding that 25% of the students who participated in the program identified as a sexual or gender minority. These students had higher levels of knowledge about STDs after finishing the program than non-SMY youth, but report feeling less interested in the program than non-SMY youth.

March 10, 2023

In a new paper, authored by Dr. Williamson and former graduate student Megan Schouweiler, we examined whether a lack of quality time together could be one problem facing low-income couples. Using time diaries from a sample of nearly 15,000 married couples, we find that lower income couples spend less time together than higher income couples, and also report feeling more stressed during their time together than higher income couples. There were some important moderators, including whether the couple has children, whether it was a weekday or a weekend, and the number of hours worked by the couple. Overall, these results indicate that quality and quantity of time may be important factors in understanding differences in relationship outcomes between lower and higher income couples.

March 6, 2023

The Williamson Lab is excited to welcome visiting scholar Bariş Sevi. Dr. Sevi is an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at MEF University (Turkey) and he will be with us at UT for the remainder of 2023.

March 1, 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Williamson for earning tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, effective in September.

February 26, 2023

Graudate student Nick Chen presented his research examining cross-cultural differences in the transformation of motivation process in romantic relationships at SPSP this weekend.

February 18, 2023

This new paper by Dr. Williamson and collaborators provides information about the recruitment and retention of couples with low incomes into a study of relationship education with integrated economic services. Results indicate that it is possible to recruit a large, linguistically, and racially diverse sample of couples living with low income to participate in an integrated intervention, but the uptake of relationship-focused services was higher than the uptake of economic-focused services.

February 6, 2023

Dr. Williamson, graduate student Nick Chen, and our regular collaborator Dr. Justin Lavner have a new paper published in the most recent issue of Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. This study uses a randomized controlled trial of low-income married couples with children and finds that fathers’ parenting can be enhanced by improving couple functioning, suggesting that strengthening the quality of parents’ romantic relationship may be a viable path to enhancing fathers’ engagement with their children.

January 30, 2023

The Williamson Lab is excited to have Dr. Betul Urganci joining us a post-doctoral fellow. Dr. Urganci received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University.

November 21, 2022

This weekend graduate student Nick Chen presented a new study examining the indirect effects of couple relationship education on fathers’ parenting at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy (ABCT) annual convention in New York Cty. This work was conducted with Dr. Williamson and our collaborator Dr. Justin Lavner.