Loreen Olson

Loreen Olson received her B.A. at St. Cloud State University. She then went on to receive her master's degree at the University of California, and later received her PH.D. at the University of Nebraska. Olson was previously an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, an Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Nebraska, and a Project Coordinator at UNL. Her main focus of research is on Interpersonal Communication and Organizational Communication. Her other scholarly interests includes, the dark side of family and close relationships, intimate partner violence, and the luring communication of child sex predators.

One of Loreen Olson's most noteworthy research publications is the book, The Dark Side of Family Communication. This book combines research and theories that look into the dark side of family communication, which involves the verbal and nonverbal messages that are deemed harmful, morally suspect, and/or socially unacceptable. Olson points out that every family experiences some type of darkness in various degrees, which she refers to as "shades of darkness". The dark side of communication include dark topics such as family incest, sibling violence, and intimate partner violence. Other topics that are deemed as less dark are also looked into such as parent child conflict and the impact of narcissism on a family members communicative behaviors. The text uses scholarship that shows how dark interactions between family members may co-exist with positive ones or they might function in ways that are both positive and negative. Olson also examines the darkness at a dynamic level including the role of religion, traditional family values, the media, and morality of family life.

Loreen Olson also published an important scholarly journal article titled, Conflict and control: Examining the association between exposure to television portraying interpersonal conflict and the use of controlling behaviors in romantic relationships. The journal article presented a study that investigated the link between exposure to television that is high in interpersonal conflict and viewers' use of relational control in their romantic relationships. The results showed a relationship between the exposure to interpersonal conflict television and relational control. The results also showed that the main relationship was moderated by what the viewers' perceived as realism on television.

Olson also published the book chapter, Violence, aggression, and abuse, in the International encyclopedia of interpersonal communication. The text looked into interpersonal aggression which includes acts of violence, emotional/psychological abuse, verbal aggression, rape, battering, bullying, incest, neglect, stalking, coercion, entrapment, and harassment. Interpersonal aggression is considered different examples of the dark side of interpersonal communication. Many times the terms abuse, aggression, and violence are used interchangeably. Due to this, Olson examined the different ways in which scholars understand and form ideas about aggression, violence, and abuse.

• Gold Chalk Award MU 2010
• Honorary Member of Lambda Pi Eta MU 2010
• Advisor of the Year MU 2009
• Outstanding Article Award MU 2005
• Top Paper Award MU 2004
• Top 5 Article of The Year CSU 2002
• Steve Duck New Scholars Award CSU July 2002
• Top 4 Paper Award UMM 2001
• Top 4 Paper Award UMM 2001
• Top Paper Award UNL 2000