Elaine Wethington

Professor Emeritus, Human Development and Sociology Link

Faculty Affiliate, Center for Aging and Policy Studies

CAPS Biography:

My research directly relates to the signature health and well-being theme and the cross-cutting policy theme of the Center. I am a scholar in the areas of stress, social support, and mental health disparities, as evidenced by my recent editorship of Society and Mental Health, the journal of the Sociology of Mental Health section of the American Sociological Association.  

Through my leadership role on the Cornell Roybal Center, I have more than 25 years of experience mentoring investigators from varied disciplines (e.g. Medicine, Neuroscience, Information Sciences, Public Health, Psychology, Sociology) who aim to translate science to community settings, practice, and policy. My specialty in the Cornell Roybal Center has been to help investigators translate the behavioral science of stress, social relationships, social isolation, and health to interventions in clinical, other practice, and community settings. I lead a multidisciplinary team of geriatricians, sociologists, psychologists, and statisticians in an intervention development program that has supervised over 50 investigators to date, with products that have included quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, policy, and clinical trial studies. A major focus of my Roybal work has been co-development of tools and methods for the translation of basic scientific findings into policy and practice. I was recently part of multi-disciplinary team for an NIH-funded intervention study to prevent obesity and promote weight loss in African American and Latino/a adult populations using innovative behavior change science and applying a mixed methods developmental strategy (SCALE: Small Changes and Lasting Effects PI: M. Charlson), as well as a collaborator on the multi-disciplinary LARKSPUR trial (Lessons in Affect Regulation to Keep Stress and Pain UndeR control) which examined the role of increasing positive affect in promoting behavioral change. These interventions applied measures of stressor exposure, social network interaction, and every day positive and negative affect to understand barriers to weight loss in minority communities and effective pain management among older adults, respectively.