Completed Research

This investigation is designed to examine the differential experiences of acute nicotine withdrawal between individuals who use electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDs) and conventional cigarettes. Participants will be community-recruited conventional smokers or ENDs users interested abstaining from smoking for 24 hours. Findings will be used to understand how nicotine delivery systems impact the subjective experience of nicotine withdrawal. This, in turn, will inform the relative merits of utilizing ENDs as a harm reduction strategy for conventional cigarette use.

As we are currently facing the COVID-19 pandemic, we seek to research, in real-time, the effects of this outbreak on students at Rutgers University and individuals with primary residence in New Jersey. The purpose of this study is to examine the possible effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on health behaviors and psychological stress of participants, as well as to attempt to pinpoint factors that may correlate with those effects (e.g. history of emotional distress). Specifically, we seek to investigate factors that may influence individual likelihood to have fear or concerns regarding this virus, how these concerns manifest into emotions or actions (including social isolation behaviors), and their impact on overall wellbeing.

Attentional Bias and Smoking

This single-session experimental study will examine the role of psychophysiology in attentional bias for cigarette cues as well as the effects of stress and cognitive-affective vulnerabilities on cigarette demand. This study is recruiting sixty adult daily cigarette smokers from the local New Brunswick community.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between marijuana use and mood. This is completed utilizing a smart phone application that allows us to ask participants questions about mood, daily routine, and marijuana use in real time.

This senior honors project examined the moderating effect of menstrual cycle phase on the relation between emotion dysregulation and menstrual symptoms and perceived control over anxiety-related events. We found that women high in emotion dysregulation experience greater symptom severity in the luteal phase and percieve themselves as having less control over their anxiety as compared to women that are low in emotion dysregulation or women in the follicular phase.

This NIDA funded project examined the interaction between PD status and nicotine withdrawal severity in affective and physiological response to, and recovery from, a carbon-dioxide challenge (four minutes of 10% CO2-enriched air). We found evidence that PD and nicotine withdrawal independently and interactively predict physiological panic responsivity, and recovery to a CO2 challenge, as indexed by tidal levels of expired CO2 (ETCO2). In addition, we found that smokers experiencing more nicotine withdrawal reported greater emotional distress in response to the challenge; however, during recovery from the challenge, those with PD, regardless of nicotine withdrawal severity, reported a faster reduction in anxiety.

The goal of this investigation is to empirically examine how differential appraisal of threat, and associated differences in physiological response profiles, differentially predict smoking cognitions and behaviors (e.g., smoking topography) in daily smokers.