Name: Dr. Ronald P. Rohner
Alma mater: Stanford University
Hometown: Storrs, Connecticut
Current position at UConn: Professor Emeritus and Director, Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection, HDFS
Research: I’ve devoted the past 6 decades to understanding the long-term developmental effects of interpersonal relationships, especially parent-child relationships.
1) conduct and promote basic and applied research worldwide on issues surrounding interpersonal acceptance-rejection, with special emphasis on the form of parent-child relationship called parental acceptance-rejection
2) formulate and implement practical intervention, prevention, educational, and other such applications pertinent to these issues, and
3) foster and encourage knowledge-sharing by establishing the Rohner Center as the world’s pre-eminent information resource center regarding interpersonal acceptance and rejection
Research Summary: TED talk Research history: IPARTheory conception to maturity
Current projects:
- Child and adult mental health
- Conduct problems, behavior disorders, and delinquency
- School violence and teacher acceptance and rejection
- Child welfare, including custody, parent education, foster care, and adoption
- Healthy child development
- Parental Alienation
Global reach: Our work on the issues of interpersonal acceptance and rejection has a global reach. For example, the readership distribution report from ScholarWorks shows more than 16,333 downloads of a single article from 1,157 institutions in 147 countries.
Leisure time: I work mostly 7 days a week just to keep-up with research and the needs of researchers and practitioners around the globe. But I always tell my colleagues and students “Work Well, Love well, and Play Well–and keep them in BALANCE”. So, to balance my day, I try to swim and walk when I can. And I love playing my harmonica.
Favorite movie: Charlotte’s web. Reason: It links well with my research and with the mission of the Rohner Center. The movie centers around the life-changing friendship between a pig named “Wilbur” and a spider named “Charlotte”. It makes us realize how important it is to feel cared about (accepted) by the people most important in our lives.
