Our Research

Influence of synthetic sex hormones on alcohol effects in women?

In these projects, we use human laboratory procedures to study how natural and synthetic sex hormones influence alcohol subjective and behavioral effects in women.

Brain-Behavior Markers of Reward and Cannabis Abuse Risk In Young Adults

K23DA048132

To date, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the rewarding, reinforcing properties of cannabis and how these may contribute to individual differences in subjective reward response to cannabis, a marker of drug abuse liability. The proposed study aims to characterize individual differences in subjective reward response and neural reward processing to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, among healthy young adults who may be at-risk for problematic cannabis use.
 

Context, Subjective and Cognitive Experiences with Patterns of Tobacco and Cannabis Co-Use in Young Adults

R01DA051157 

The objective of this study is to examine, in real time, the proximal antecedents and consequences of tobacco and cannabis co-use in young adults using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA).

Workplace Harassment, Macro-Level Stressors, Substance Use and Health Outcomes: A Long-Term Follow Up

This project is a 25-year follow-up of participants from a prior study, to investigate the long term health effects of exposure to chronic workplace harassment, including psychopathology and substance abuse.
 

Chronic Stressors and Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Middle-aged Adults

This national mixed methods study addresses the most salient psychosocial causes of increased substance use and increased midlife mortality of US adults, comparing differences by race/ethnicity.

How do drug conditioned cues influence mood and behavior?

In these projects, we use a human laboratory paradigm to study the formation of conditioned drug associations and to examine their influence on mood, behavior and drug taking.

Gender, Harassment and Drinking among College Students

This web-based longitudinal cohort study followed nearly 3000 college students from Illinois colleges and universities at 6 points across 4 years of college. It extends past research on college student drinking by a) examining how patterns of harassment at school (SH) and work (WH), in the context of other school and life stressors, differentially contribute to drinking trajectories and problem drinking for women versus men college students, and b) applying a stressor-vulnerability model to examine how a variety of gender-linked risk and protective factors influence the relationships between WH and SH and other work, school, and life stressors and trajectories of problematic alcohol use (i.e., trajectories of increasing or chronically heavy use) over time. 

Work-family Conflict and Drinking in Caregivers

This study used a combination of random digit dial (RDD) telephone recruiting and self-report mail survey methodology to conduct a 3-wave panel study of employed men and women with unpaid caregiving responsibilities, in the Chicago metropolitan area.  This study extended previous research on work-family conflict (WFC) by: 1) using a comprehensive measure of WFC to further specify relationships between WFC and drinking outcomes; 2) longitudinally studying WFC in a broader context of other job and life experiences to examine the relative importance of various stressors in predicting drinking outcomes over time; 3) examining workplace harassment and discrimination as potential risk factors for WFC; and 4) testing potential reverse-causal relationships among WFC, distress, and drinking behavior over time.