I am currently a third year graduate student at Suffolk.  I grew up on Long Island and came up to New England to attend the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.  During high school and college, I worked as a camp counselor for three- to six-year-olds at a summer camp on Long Island.  I was amazed by both the difficult situations that some of the kids there had already faced at such a young age and by their resiliency.  My experiences there led me to gradually change my career goals from medicine to psychology.  My hope is that I will be able to learn how to help kids have the best childhood that they can, in spite of whatever obstacles they may face. 

After graduating from Holy Cross, I moved to Boston and worked as a research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital.  I am currently living in Plymouth, MA with my husband, Justin.  My favorite activities are going to the beach, running, and skiing.

Abstract of Current Research

Recent work has linked experiential avoidance with parents’ negative emotional experiences and ineffective parenting.  Specifically, parental experiential avoidance has been linked with poor monitoring, low parental involvement and inconsistent discipline among parents of adolescents (Berlin et al., 2006) and with stress and adjustment difficulties in mothers of preterm infants (Greco et al., 2005).  In addition, more mindful mothers were found to be more sensitive towards their young children (Coyne et al., 2006).  Moreover, preliminary data have shown that mindfulness techniques reduced parent distress and depression (Blackledge & Hayes, 2006) and reduced child behavior problems (Singh et al., 2006) in parents of autistic children.

Taken together, these findings suggest that experiential avoidance plays a role in parenting difficulties, and as such, mindfulness-based approaches may be potentially useful augmenting behavioral parent training interventions.  The goals of our study were: (1) to investigate whether experiential avoidance is related to behaviorally observed parenting behaviors during a parent-child interaction task, (2) to explore the relationship between parental risk status and experiential avoidance and (3) to compare parenting behaviors of mothers who have participated in a brief mindfulness exercise to those in an attentional control condition. 

Participants included 30 mothers and their children aged 3 to 6 recruited from Head Start centers or other early childhood educational programs serving urban families as part of a larger ongoing study.  Mothers completed self-report questionnaires assessing depression, anxiety, experiential avoidance, parenting stress, and child behavior problems. Demographic characteristics such as socioeconomic and marital status were also obtained.  Mothers were randomly assigned to watch videotapes of either a brief mindfulness exercise or an attentional control.  Each mother-child pair then participated in a 20 minute videotaped parent-child interaction task (Eyberg & Matarazzo, 1980) adapted to be increasingly frustrating.  Videotapes were coded by graduate- and undergraduate-level raters blind to the experimental condition, and adequate interrater reliability was obtained on all codes.

We expected that mothers who had higher levels of risk would also have higher levels of experiential avoidance.  We also predicted that there would be a positive relationship between mothers’ experiential avoidance and ineffective parenting strategies.  Finally, we predicted that mothers in the mindfulness group will respond to their children more appropriately during the parent-child interaction task than those in the attentional control group.   

Presentations and Publications

Silvia, K.A., Ozanne, E.M., & Sepucha, K.R. (in press). Implementing breast cancer decision aids in  community sites: barriers and resources. Health Expectations.

Strand P., Coyne L. W., & Silvia K. (in press). Behavioral conceptualization. In M. Hersen & D. Reitman (Eds.) Handbook of Assessment, Conceptualization & Treatment, Vol. II, Children and Adolescents. New York: Wiley & Sons.

Silvia, K.A., Coyne, L.W., Conti, K., Sommerville, S., (November 2007) “Mindfulness in parenting: preliminary data from an experimental study,” Poster accepted for presentation at the 2007 Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Philadelphia, PA. 

Silvia, K.A., Conti, K., Sommerville, S., Coyne, L.W., (November 2007) “The role of experiential avoidance in perceived parenting stress & child externalizing behavior problems: a preliminary study,” Poster accepted for presentation at the 2007 Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Philadelphia, PA. 

Silvia, K.A., Coyne, L.W., Conti, K., (March 2007) “Does mindfulness influence parenting  behaviors? Preliminary data from an experimental study,” Suffolk University Academic  Conference, Boston, MA.

Sepucha, K., Ozanne, E., Silvia, K., Partridge, A., & Mulley, A.G. Jr. (2007).  An approach to  measuring the quality of breast cancer decisions.  Patient Education and Education, 65,  261-269. 

Silvia, K.A. & Sepucha, K.R. (2006). Decision aids in routine practice: lessons from the Breast  Cancer Initiative.  Health Expectations, 9, 255-264.

Sepucha, K.R., Ozanne, E.M., Hughes, K.S., Farrelly, K.A., Partridge, A.H., Mulley, A.G.,
(October 2005) “New instruments to measure decision quality for breast cancer,” 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, San Francisco, CA.

Farrelly, K.A., Hughes, K.S., Mulley, A.G., Partridge, A.H., Sepucha, K.R., (June 2005)
“Shared decision making and posttraumatic growth in early-stage breast cancer survivors,” Presented at the 3rd International Shared Decision Making Conference, Ottawa, Canada.

Sepucha, K.R., Farrelly, K.A., Hughes, K.S., Partridge, A.H., Mulley, A.G., (June 2005)  “Measuring decision quality:  lessons from pilot testing,” 3rd International Shared  Decision Making Conference, Ottawa, Canada.