After receiving her Ph.D., Frances Aboud began her research in developmental psychology, focusing intially on the development of racism in children. Working with her colleague Morton Mendelson, Professor Aboud developed the McGill Friendship Questionnaire. The questionnaire offered insight into how children develop friendships and classify others. Using the questionnaire, her research showed that children often keep an emotional distance from children of other races, but that this distance can be reduced by exposing racist children to children with lower levels of prejudice. These and other findings led her to publish her first book, "Children and Prejudice," in 1988. More recently, she has been studying how both cross-ethnic friendship and cross-ethnic bullying (esp name-calling) influence positive integration in multi-ethnic schools. She and her students study the conditions under which children who witness name-calling can be encouraged to take an anti-biased stand to stop bullying.

Another branch of Professor Aboud's research focuses on health psychology. After examining health behaviors in developing countries, she published her second book in 1998, entitled "Health Psychology in Global Perspective." Following the publication of this book, she took a two-year sabbatical in Bangladesh to further study health psychology in a cross-cultural context. She returns for several months each year to continue this research. In particular, she helps local NGOs to improve their early childhood programs in education and nutrition by evaluating existing programs, suggesting improvements and then evaluating the benefits.

Professor Aboud is currently the health psychology editor for the scholarly international journal "Social Science and Medicine." She received the Canadian Psychological Association's Award in 2005 for Distinguished Contributions to Public and Community Service for her work in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Canada. To learn more about Professor Aboud and her pioneering research, please see her profile in "Great Canadian Psychology Researchers" at:

http://www.greatcanadianpsych.ca/Researchers.html