Navigating Autonomy: A Mid-Career Reflection on Life in Academia
Enhancing engagement in evidence-based tobacco cessation treatment for smokers with mental illness: A pilot randomized t...
OBJECTIVE:To evaluate the efficacy of a brief telephone-delivered Motivational Interviewing (MI)-based intervention to facilitate engagement in evidence-based cessation treatment for Veterans with mental illness referred to smoking cessation treatment. METHODS:86 military Veteran smokers with mental illness were recruited from a tobacco cessation c...
Experimental manipulation of extraverted and introverted behavior and its effects on well-being.
Research in personality psychology has remained predominantly correlational. For example, 3 decades of research demonstrate a robust cross-sectional relationship between extraversion and positive affect. A handful of studies, however, have examined this link experimentally, showing that extraversion boosts positive affect over short durations. If t...
Early life stress sensitizes individuals to the psychological correlates of mild fluctuations in inflammation.
BACKGROUND:Early life stress (ELS) has been linked to health disparities across the human lifespan, particularly increased risk for depression and its recurrence. In this study we explore two plausible and competing pathways through which ELS may lead to depression via inflammation. METHODS:Participants (ages 18-22; n = 41) completed the Early Trau...
Psychological functioning in children suspected for mitochondrial disease: the need for care
Published in Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases
BackgroundMitochondrial diseases (MD) are generally serious and progressive, inherited metabolic diseases. There is a high comorbidity of anxiety and depression and limitations in daily functioning. The complexity and duration of the diagnostic process and lack of knowledge about prognosis leads to uncertainty. In this study, we investigated the ps...
Mischief-making bots attacked my scientific survey
Published in Nature
A barrage of fake responses to her online questionnaire prompted psychologist Melissa Simone to ferret out the culprits.
Ambiguous at the second sight: Mixed facial expressions trigger late electrophysiological responses linked to lower soci...
Social interactions require quick perception, interpretation, and categorization of faces, with facial features offering cues to emotions, intentions, and traits. Importantly, reactions to faces depend not only on their features but also on their processing fluency, with disfluent faces suffering social devaluation. The current research used electr...
Battling the Modern Behavioral Epidemic of Loneliness: Suggestions for Research and Interventions.
Social priming: time to ditch a dubious term?
Published in Nature
Dysfunction of cortical GABAergic neurons leads to sensory hyper-reactivity in a Shank3 mouse model of ASD.
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Hyper-reactivity to sensory input is a common and debilitating symptom in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but the neural basis underlying sensory abnormality is not completely understood. Here we examined the neural representations of sensory perception in the neocortex of a Shank3B-/- mouse model of ASD. Male and female Shank3B-/...
