Pam Alexander was a senior research scientist through September 2010 at the Wellesley Centers for Women, where she conducted research on gender-based violence. After getting her Bachelors from Wake Forest University, Dr. Alexander received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Emory University in 1980, was an assistant professor and director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Memphis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, and a senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Youth and Social Policy.
Dr. Alexander’s research focused on family violence generally, with a particular emphasis on intimate partner violence. She was interested in the role that childhood trauma played in increasing the risk for both the experience and perpetration of intimate partner violence as well as child maltreatment. Her work on the development and evaluation of intervention programs for intimate partner violence was informed by attachment theory with its attention to affect regulation and implicit views of attachment relationships, by motivational interviewing with its emphasis on values and choices, and by mindfulness approaches with their focus on learning to recognize, tolerate and regulate emotions. She believed that taking into account both the intergenerational context of violence as well as the current context of the relationship was essential in understanding, preventing and eradicating gender-based violence.
Dr. Alexander’s research career originally began with a concentration on the long-term effects of incest. In 1986, she received funding by the National Institute on Mental Health to conduct a psychotherapy outcome study on the effectiveness of group therapy for adult female incest survivors. Given the inevitable overlap between different types of violence perpetrated within the family, she began to focus more on the intergenerational transmission of violence, including abusive parenting and the perpetration of and vulnerability to intimate partner violence, with an emphasis on the attachment relationships between parents and children and between intimate partners. Her research was based on clinical samples of men and women (ranging from batterers to battered women and incest survivors seeking services to parents at risk for child abuse) and samples of women recruited from the community (such as adult female incest survivors and mothers with young children). She evaluated both the U.S. Army’s and the U.S. Marines’ New Parent Support Program, a home visitation child abuse prevention program.
Two federally funded projects completed by Dr. Alexander consisted of the following. First, a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control examined the determinants and consequences of readiness to change in a sample of more than 1,500 batterers court-ordered to treatment. Second, a project funded by the National Institute of Justice compared the effectiveness of a stages-of-change/motivational interviewing (SOCMI) model of group therapy with standard batterer treatment for batterers court-ordered to treatment.
Cathy has worked with language impaired children in elementary schools in Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts, as well as with adults in hospitals in Lynn, Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut. In her former career as a Speech and Language Therapist, her focus was on helping people develop strategies to compensate for weak language processing skills and to promote useful pragmatic social skills.
Her work in the field of pragmatic social skills led directly to developing a social competency curriculum for elementary school children. After many years working in the Wellesley Public Schools, Cathy joined the Open Circle Project in 1990, where she is currently its Consulting Director. In this role, she is a mentor and coach to the Open Circle consulting staff as well as the corps of dedicated teachers who make up the project’s Consulting Teacher groups. Cathy is also a member of the Open Circle training and consulting staff. Open Circle currently trains and consults to more than 500 teachers per year—that translates to touching the lives of thousands of students each year. Cathy is excited to be part of this wonderful project and to make a positive difference for children and the entire school community.
At the Centers, Rachel worked on a wide variety of research and evaluation projects. She worked with United Way of Massachusetts Bay as an evaluator on an initiative to build partnerships between afterschool programs and schools. In addition, she worked with the State of Maine researching and writing technical assistance papers on afterschool issues, specifically focusing on inclusion efforts for special needs students. Rachel also focused her time on building a professional development infrastructure for afterschool and youth workers in the Boston area. She worked with a variety of Boston-based organizations and higher education institutions to pilot the first credential for school-age and youth workers in Boston.
Prior to joining Wellesley Centers for Women, Rachel held a legislative research position in Alexandria, Virginia, tracking state health care bills and presenting legislative reports to pharmaceutical companies. She also held a post at the Boston Globe conducting marketing research and designing surveys.
Senior Research Scientist
Work, Families, & Children Research Group
Linda M. Hartling was the Associate Director of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute (JBMTI) at the Wellesley Centers for Women until 2009. The JBMTI is dedicated to exploring and advancing the practice of the Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT), a groundbreaking model of growth that puts relationships at the center of psychological development, recognizing that relationships are highly influenced by culture and the dynamics of power.
Dr. Hartling holds a doctoral degree in clinical/community psychology and has written papers on resilience, substance abuse prevention, shame and humiliation, appreciative inquiry, relational practice in the workplace, and developments in RCT. Building on the work of Jean Baker Miller and the scholars of the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, now a part of the Wellesley Centers for Women, Dr. Hartling explores the specific qualities of relating that encourage growth and examines the operations of power that prevent individuals from participating in these types of relationships. She is co-editor of The Complexity of Connection: Writings from the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Stone Center (2004), and she has supervised the publication of over 40 Stone Center Working Papers, project reports, training videos, and home study programs.
One of Dr. Hartling’s special areas of interest is the study of humiliation. In 2004, she joined the board of directors for Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS; humiliationstudies.org), a global network of scholars, researchers, and activists dedicated to ending cycles of humiliation that contribute to psychological problems as well as interpersonal and international conflict. She has co-convened and facilitated annual international meetings of HumanDHS in Paris at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, in Berlin at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in Costa Rica at the UN University for Peace, and in New York at Columbia University. She is on the academic board of the Journal of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, an e-journal that will be launched in March 2007. In addition, she is the developer of Humiliation Inventory, a scale to assess the internal experience of derision and degradation. In one of her most recent presentations, “Humiliation: Real Pain, a Pathway to Violence,” she described social and neurobiological pathways linking humiliation, social pain, and violence. Dr. Hartling strives to expand applications of RCT in the real world. For example, Dr. Hartling suggests, “It’s helpful to conceptualize human dignity as a co-created experience, rather than as an individual, internal phenomena. We encourage dignity in others whenever we build mutually respectful connections in which people feel known and valued, they feel that they matter. RCT encourages the construction of this relational experience for all people.”
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