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Maurice Elias

Maurice Elias

Title: Professor I
Areas: Clinical Psychology/Intradisciplinary Health
Phone: 732-445-2444/2056
Email: RUTGERSMJE@aol.com
Campus: Livingston
Building: Tillett Hall 431/402/404
Website: www.rci.rutgers.edu/~melias/


The unifying themes in my action-research, clinical work, and policy/advocacy are the development of positive, constructive life paths for children and youth and the organization of opportunities to allow this to happen in equitable ways. This has brought me into areas such as social-emotional learning (SEL), emotional intelligence, social competence promotion, character education, primary prevention, school-based, evidence-based intervention, and socialization of identity. It has also brought my work increasingly into the areas of implementation and sustainability of interventions, and cutting edge issues such as the link of SEL and academics and the distinguishing features of sustainable, versus well-implemented, empirically supported innovations.

I have worked to establish the field of prevention, school-based preventive intervention, and social competence promotion as a credible, important, and rigorous area of research, practice, and public policy. To accomplish the latter, collaborative models are necessary, as are programs of longitudinal, synergistic action-research with an explicit eye to practice and policy. Thus, I have organized my work within the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab. The Lab is dedicated to conducting action-research in public, private, and religious school settings for the purpose of building children’s skills for facing the tests of life, and not a life of tests. It focuses on understanding the relationship of academic achievement, social-emotion competencies, and the development of character and a core set of life principles, and the development of school-based interventions to strengthen social-emotion skills , character, and one’s Laws of Life, and prevent bullying, violence and victimization, substance abuse, and related problem behaviors.

Projects of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab focus on students and their school, family, and community environments. We employ a project-based, constructivist and inquiry-oriented social-learning approach to pedagogy and a development ecological-community psychology approach to understanding settings and designing, delivering, and evaluating interventions. In addition, we carry out applied research related to bullying/youth violence, victimization, character development and identity, spirituality, purpose, and forgiveness, social-emotional and social decision making skills, social support, classroom organization, management, and discipline, test anxiety and motivation, menschlekheit development in schools and families, Jewish education, emotional intelligence, and the design, implementation, and sustainability of preventive interventions.

Current projects include:

  • Developing Safe and Civil Schools Initiative
  • Laws of Life and Social-Emotional Learning in the Schools: A Longitudinal Action-Research Project
  • Implementation and Sustainability of School-Based Interventions
  • Social Decision Making/Social Problem Solving Curriculum and Computer Lab in Highland Park, NJ
  • Jewish Adolescent Identity Project
  • Talking with TJ Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum for Urban Youth
  • Emotionally Intelligent Parenting.