Leslie Leve
American psychologist
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Through Adoption
Career
Leslie Leve received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1990. She earned a master's degree in psychology in 1991 and a PhD in developmental psychology in 1995 from the University of Oregon. She started working at the University of Oregon in 2013 as a professor in the College of Education. Prior to that, she was a senior scientist at Oregon Social Learning Center. In 2018 Leve received a grant of $12.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the collaborative research on the effects of environment on children's health and development.
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Academic interests
Her primary focus is in adoption, foster care, child abuse, intervention, and outcomes for youth in the juvenile justice system, child development, and teen girls. She also co-leads the Early Growth and Development Study, and directed a randomized intervention trial with an aim to limit the appearance of problematic behaviors of girls from foster care who are going to enter middle school.
Research
As of 2018, Leve is working on a study about the influences of genes and environment on child development, which is conducted by studying adopted children and their biological and adoptive families. Leve and other researchers' findings suggest that children may have different health issues than their biological and adoptive siblings. In a study with Luke Hyde, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, they found that children with aggressive behaviors ("callous-unemotional traits") may inherit these traits from their biological parents, but these behaviors can still be mitigated by positive interactions with adoptive parents, preventing them from developing long-term antisocial behaviors.
In past research, Leve also found that parents' harsh responses can be affected by children's behaviors as well as the parents' characteristics and marriage issues. She and her colleagues have found that mothers with depressive symptoms are more likely to respond to their children's difficult behaviors with anger or irritability, which increases the likelihood the children will develop further behavioral problems. However, if parents (both mothers and fathers) with depressive symptoms have a partner with strong social support, the association between parental depression and child behaviors was weaker. For early child development, Leve believed that a stable connection with the primary caregiver is essential for the children's development. Her research with the Society for Prevention Research showed that prevention programs for drug use proved to be more effective and economical than programs for treating it.
In the middle school girls version of the KEEP SAFE program that she led, she has conducted a study with Hyoun Kim to evaluate the efficiency of the program and the results show a rating of "promising" for the program. The program has shown "a significant decline in tobacco, marijuana, and overall substance use as well as delinquent behavior."