At the undergraduate level, Dr. Grych teaches Introduction to Psychology, Childhood Psychopathology, and Psychology of Marriage and Family. At the graduate level, he teaches Principles of Child Psychopathology and Intervention and Marriage and Family Therapy.
Dr. Grych's research interests center on family processes linked to the development of child psychopathology, with a particular emphasis on the links between marriage, parent-child relationships, and child development. Much of his work has focused on understanding the effects of marital conflict and divorce on children. He developed a conceptual framework in which cognitive and affective factors are proposed to mediate the impact of conflict on children (Grych and Fincham, 1990). This framework argues that the effect of conflict depends upon children's appraisal, or evaluation, of the meaning of the conflict for their well-being, which in turn is influenced by specific characteristics of the conflict and contextual factors such as the nature of parent-child relationships. Children's appraisals of conflict are proposed to guide their behavior when conflict occurs and to have implications for the development of adjustment problems.
