Department of Psychology |
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Research Interests |
| Dr. Smith’s research focuses on risk for the early onset of alcohol use and the early onset of eating disordered behavior. The current emphasis in his lab is on understanding the transactional process between high-risk personality traits and psychosocial learning in increasing risk. The long-term goal is to chart a pathway of risk from beginning gene polymorphisms through variability in neurotransmitter levels in key brain systems to the development of personality, and then from individual differences in personality through individual differences in psychosocial learning to moment-to-moment behavioral choices. His lab is currently conducting a longitudinal investigation of the onset of alcohol use and eating disordered behavior across the transition into adolescence. |
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| His second line of research is on validity theory, or the process by which psychological theories, and the measures used to test them, are developed and then empirically validated. One implication of this work is a re-thinking of psychological diagnosis: his theory and findings support a move away from the classic, syndromal diagnostic approach toward a more parsimonious system based on underlying dimensions of dysfunction. |
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Current Projects |
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Dr. Smith and his graduate students are conducting a longitudinal study of children, beginning in the spring of 5th grade (prior to entry into middle school) and continuing through the spring of 8th grade. The sample includes 1,843 children, and they are testing a series of hypotheses concerning the process by which high-risk personality traits influence psychosocial learning to increase risk. Their hypotheses focus on the roles of emotion-based impulsivity and learned expectancies as risk factors for early onset drinking, eating disordered behavior, and smoking, and how those risk factors operate across the transition into adolescence.
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Dr. Smith and his graduate students, led by Tamika Zapolski, have developed an intervention for use with high-risk early adolescents that focuses on the effective management of intense mood states as a way to help adolescents pursue their goals effectively. The intervention was designed to accelerate, for high-risk kids, the rate at which they learn not to act on intense emotion, when harm would likely result if they were to act.
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Dr. Smith and Tamika Zapolski are also developing a problem drinking risk model for African Americans, to help understand why some African Americans are at risk and others are not. Even though African Americans, as a group, are at lower risk than Caucasians, there is still a great deal of variability in risk among African Americans, and their model will offer an explanation of that phenomenon.
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Dr. Smith and his graduate student, Jessica Combs, are developing an alternative model for describing psychopathology that represents a departure from the classic, medical, syndromal approach that characterizes the DSM model from psychiatry. They focus on general dimensions of dysfunction that are shared across putatively distinct disorders.
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Dr. Smith and Regan Settles, another graduate student, are exploring the differences in risk for the development of externalizing disorders (such as problem drinking) and the development of internalizing disorders (such as depression) in children and adults. They are finding that high levels of certain types of negative affect increase risk for both types of disorders, but high levels of other types of negative affect, such as emotion-based impulsivity, increase risk only for the externalizing disorders.
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