Despite the overall decline in the prevalence of cigarette use in the United States, the prevalence of menthol cigarette use is rising. Menthol cigarette use has been associated with greater difficulty in quitting smoking and increased dependence, which can be due to the cognitive enhancing and rewarding effects of nicotine....
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, progressive disease associated with physical, financial, and psychological burdens. Depression and anxiety, common comorbidities, are associated with poor outcomes including worse disease course, higher disability, decreased health related quality of life and reduced medication adherence. Prevention of psychological comorbidities and promotion of well-being...
Current prediction instruments for violent recidivism lack accuracy as recidivism rates for violent offenses remain high (Fazel & Wolf, 2015). Part of the issue may be the conceptualization of violent offenders as a homogenous group as opposed to heterogeneous subgroups. Additionally, various studies suggest that cognitive abilities in violent offenders...
Esophageal hypervigilance, or the increased awareness and amplification of esophageal symptoms, is a psychological process known to drive symptom experience in individuals with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). However, current understanding lacks a conceptual framework with known biomarkers and relationships to other psychophysiological variables. The aim of the current study is...
Cognitive impairment is a significant public health concern as the United States (US) population continues to age at unprecedented rates. It is well established that older adults are more likely to have higher rates of morbidity and mortality, in addition to greater healthcare utilization and costs. A parallel concern is...
The presence of subjective cognitive decline (SCD) among cognitively normal-for-age older adults is increasingly hypothesized to represent a preclinical stage in the development of Alzheimer’s dementia (Jessen et al., 2014). This project aimed to characterize this construct with regard to its cognitive, motor, emotional, and functional features. The first study...
Though cognitive behavioral techniques are generally effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders, some people fail to benefit from exposure therapy or experience a return of fear after terminating exposure therapy. The burgeoning field of non-invasive brain stimulation provides a potential method of augmenting exposure therapy so that it is...
Problems in interpersonal functioning are a major concern. In adults, interpersonal dysfunction is often investigated as it relates to personality disorders (PDs). In fact, researchers have argued that a core of interpersonal dysfunction is what defines personality disorders (Hopwood, Wright, Ansell, & Pincus, 2013). This is perhaps most evident for...
Recent studies have begun to examine white matter connectivity aberrations in psychiatric populations, such as major depressive disorder. Several studies have found reduced white matter integrity (WMI) in depressed samples, though the location of this reduction is not clear. Incorporating symptom measures of depression severity and rumination may allow for...
Sexual orientation is conventionally understood as relative attraction to men versus women. It has recently been argued that male sexual orientation in particular can be extended to include other dimensions of sexual attraction besides gender, such as sexual maturity and location. With respect to the dimension of location, most men...