Mindy Kibbey is the winner of the 3rd annual G. Terence Wilson Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award!

Mindy is currently a doctoral candidate and psychology resident at Brown University, working under the supervision of Dr. Samantha Farris. Her project was titled "A Systematic Review of Safety Behavior Assessment in Psychiatric and Medical Conditions". False safety behaviors are assessed across a diverse range of psychiatric and medical conditions in which they provide short term relief from anxious distress by seemingly preventing feared catastrophes. Safety behaviors sustain anxiety in the long-term by maintaining maladaptive threat beliefs and interfere with corrective learning. Mindy’s systematic review was designed to (1) identify and describe all extant validated measures of safety behaviors and briefly summarize the state of related psychometric validation literature; and (2) synthesize information from included studies to characterize how assessment reflects the conceptualization of safety behaviors within distinct conditions and trandiagnostically. Upon completion, the review included 173 studies of 62 distinct measures of safety behaviors across 11 DSM-5 psychiatric diagnostic categories and six medical conditions. Of the 62 assessment tools, 55% (n = 34) were tested in development studies only, with no follow-up psychometric studies. Only 37% of development studies (23/62) explicitly labeled items as safety behaviors. Nearly half (28/62) neither labeled the items as safety behaviors nor described their functional role in reducing acute distress while maintaining long-term pathology. Mindy then presented a novel transdiagnostic functional model to inform future assessment by providing a framework for robust construct identification and thorough item development that samples all aspects of the construct.