Michael Sladek

How do sociocultural contexts shape adolescent stress, health, and identity?
How do family, school, and community assets buffer youth from the adverse effects of stress and promote health and positive identity development?
How can we learn from and partner with youth, families, and community leaders to inform interventions that disrupt the status quo of societal inequities in education and health?

To answer these questions, I draw from cultural-ecological models that situate development in context and emphasize strengths-based, identity-affirming approaches to support youth growing up in a world profoundly shaped by systemic ethnic-racial inequities. Through my work collaborating with a team of scientists and scholars in psychology and education, our research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences. I am a consulting editor for Child Development, the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology and a member of the Society for Research on Adolescence, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the American Psychological Association. Prior to joining the Department of Psychology at The University of Oklahoma, I completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, MA, received my Ph.D. and M.A. in psychology from Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, and received my B.A. with honors in psychology from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Read more about our research in the Contexts of Health, Adolescent Resilience, and Measuring Stress (CHARMS) Lab. Research assistants in the CHARMS Lab join a warm, collaborative, and diverse group of scholars interested in learning more about youth health and development research and gaining experience for graduate school and careers in psychology, health, and education.

Student collaborators are underlined.

Sladek, M. R., Gusman, M., & Doane, L. D. (2023). Ethnic-Racial identity developmental trajectories across the transition to college. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 52, 61-75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-022-01724-z

Sladek, M. R., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Hardesty, J. L., Aguilar, G., Bates, D., Bayless, S. D., Gomez, E., Hur, C. K., Ison, A., Jones, S., Luo, H., Satterthwaite-Freiman, M., & Vázquez, M. A. (2022). “So, like, it’s all a mix of one”: Intersecting contexts of adolescents’ ethnic-racial socialization. Child Development, 93(5), 1284-1303. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13756

Sladek, M. R., Castro, S. C., & Doane, L. D. (2021). Ethnic-Racial discrimination experiences predict Latinx adolescents’ physiological stress processes across college transition. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 128, 105212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2021.105212

Sladek, M. R., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Wantchekon, K. A., McDermott, E. R., & Updegraff, K. A. (2021). Contextual moderators of a school-based ethnic-racial identity intervention: The roles of family ethnic socialization and ethnic-racial background. Prevention Science, 22(3), 378-385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-020-01166-8

Sladek, M. R., Doane, L. D., Luecken, L. J., Gonzales, N. A., & Grimm, K. J. (2020). Reducing cultural mismatch: Latino students’ neuroendocrine and affective stress responses following cultural diversity and inclusion reminder. Hormones and Behavior, 120, 104681. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104681

Sladek, M. R., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., McDermott, E. R., Rivas-Drake, D., & Martinez-Fuentes, S. (2020). Testing invariance of ethnic-racial discrimination and identity measures for adolescents across ethnic-racial groups and contexts. Psychological Assessment, 32(6), 509-526. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000805

Sladek, M. R., Doane, L. D., & Park, H. (2020). Latino adolescents’ daily bicultural stress and sleep: Gender and school context moderation. Health Psychology, 39(3), 179-189. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000824

Sladek, M. R., Salk, R. H., & Engeln, R. (2018). Negative body talk measures for Asian, Latina(o), and White women and men: Measurement equivalence and associations with ethnic-racial identity. Body Image, 25, 66- 77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2018.02.005