Rena Repetti

Rena Repetti is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with primary expertise in Clinical Psychology and secondary specialization in Health Psychology. Her research focuses on observing families in everyday environments to understand how daily stressors and emotions shape family life and influence the health of parents and children.

Professor Repetti's research interests center on how family members regulate each other's behavior, emotion, and physiology in response to daily stressors. She examines how day-to-day fluctuations in stressors and family emotional dynamics impact the long-term mental and physical health of both children and adults. A key aspect of her work involves studying how daily stressors experienced outside the home affect family interactions and health outcomes.

Her publication record reveals consistent focus on naturalistic observation methods to study family processes, emotion socialization, and stress-coping mechanisms. Through longitudinal designs embedded with intensive repeated measures, she investigates how short-term family processes predict long-term health outcomes. Her work frequently employs the UCLA Sloan Center for the Everyday Lives of Families video archive to analyze hundreds of hours of continuous recordings of family life.

Professor Repetti's research program demonstrates expertise across multiple domains including family processes, emotion dynamics, naturalistic methodology, stress and coping in children and adults, child development, work-family interactions, and adult health in social contexts. Her methodological approach emphasizes real-time observation of spontaneous social, psychological, and biological processes in natural settings.