Roselinde Kaiser, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, is being recognized for her research on the science and treatment of adolescent depression

Roselinde Kaiser, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, has been named a winner, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their independent careers.

“PECASE embodies the high priority placed by the government on maintaining the leadership position of the United States in science by producing outstanding scientists and engineers and nurturing their continued development,” according to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which was commissioned in 1996 to create PECASE.

“The awards identify a cadre of outstanding scientists and engineers who will broadly advance science and the missions important to the participating agencies.

In honoring scientists and engineers who are early in their research careers, the PECASE Awards recognize “exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century. The awards foster innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, increase awareness of careers in science and engineering, give recognition to the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhance connections between fundamental research and national goals, and highlight the importance of science and technology for the nation's future,” according to the NSTC.

Kaiser is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who studies the science and treatment of adolescent depression. With her research group, the Research on Affective Disorders and Development Lab (RADD Lab), she conducts research that asks questions such as: How can brain functioning and behavior help us to understand the experience of depression in adolescence and over the course of human development? Can we use brain or behavioral markers to better predict depression—or to predict resilience? How can we enhance brain and behavioral functioning to promote emotional health and wellness throughout the lifespan?

The mission of the RADD Lab is to gain insight into the brain and behavioral processes that reflect or underlie depression and other mood experiences, with the goal of leveraging research discoveries to foster emotional health. This year, in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, educators and young people, Kaiser and her team are launching an initiative to scale and translate scientific discovery into high-impact programs aimed at promoting mental health.

“I am delighted and honored to receive the PECASE, which truly reflects the dedicated efforts of our research team and the commitment to innovation at the University of Colorado,” Kaiser says.

“Youth depression is an urgent public health priority; in our research, we are advancing new paths to promote healthy mood through interdisciplinary discovery achieved with and for young people. The PECASE recognizes the promise and innovation of this work and is a launchpad for research that will develop and scale programs for personalized health insight and wellness promotion. We are enthusiastic to begin the next chapter in research discovery and real-world impact.”

Also recognized with a PECASE award was , JILA fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist and CU Boulder physics professor.

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In a recent study, CU Boulder’s Robert Moulder and colleagues find that individuals with trait neuroticism rarely modify how they respond to negative emotions 

Emotions, like temperatures, go up and down. Yet everyone copes with these ups and downs in his or her own way. Some use the same emotion-regulation strategies over and over—read a book, take a walk, watch a movie—while others change which strategy they use depending on the situation.

Research scientist Robert Moulder of the University of Colorado Boulder Institute of Cognitive Science, along with , ,  and , wanted to know why: Why do some people frequently modify their regulation strategies? Why do others reuse the same strategies? And are there benefits to both approaches?

Difficult questions, these, not least because they seek to identify patterns in what seem like random human behaviors. Which is why Moulder was particularly well-suited to the job of answering them. With a background in both mathematics and psychology, he uses chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics to understand human systems. “The way I like to describe it, I am like  from Jurassic Park, but for people instead of dinosaurs,” he jokes. “I do the ‘mathy math’ behind how psych works.”

Thanks to Moulder’s “mathy math,” he and his fellow researchers  a key distinction between those who rarely change up their emotion-regulation strategies and those who do so often: trait neuroticism.

Trait vs. state

Neuroticism, Moulder says, refers to “someone's overall tendency to engage in and ruminate on negative emotions like getting angry, getting upset, being distrustful. You can think about it as the propensity of an individual to experience and act upon negative emotions.”

There are two categories of neuroticism: state neuroticism and trait neuroticism, the differences between which Moulder illustrates with an analogy to extroversion.

“A state personality would be, say, how extroverted you are right now, or how extroverted you are in two or three days,” he says. “Have you ever gone to a party and felt really engaged but afterwards felt dead? During that party your extroversion was higher than it normally would be, and afterwards, it was probably a little lower.” 

Trait extroversion, on the other hand, takes the average of those individual moments over time. “It's kind of like your stable equilibrium,” says Moulder. “If you were going to describe to someone how extroverted you are, you'd be talking about your trait extroversion.”

The same thing goes for neuroticism. One person may have a high degree of neuroticism at any given moment but a low degree overall—high state, low trait—whereas another person may be exactly the opposite.

What Moulder and his colleagues found was that subjects with high levels of trait neuroticism tend not to experiment with their regulation strategies. “That means someone who is very high in neuroticism will consistently use the same tools over and over again, whether they’re working or not.”

A new mathematical model

Moulder and his colleagues arrived at these findings with the help of transition matrices, an analytical tool Moulder and Daniel developed in a . 

“Why people do the things they do after a negative event has thousands of components,” Moulder says. “There was not a good method for measuring that. So, we made one.”

Transition matrices are rectangular grids of rows and columns that enable study subjects to keep track of which emotion-regulation strategies they use and when they use them.

A subject who got into an argument with her boss at noon and then took a walk, for example, would put a “1” in the box in her matrix associated with taking a walk. If she received an angry email from her boss an hour later and chose this time to call a friend, she would put a “1” in the box associated with that regulation strategy.

“If someone used the exact same strategy all the time, you would just see one number in the matrix, and all the rest of the matrix would be ‘0,’” Moulder says, whereas someone who constantly switched from one regulation strategy to the next would have numbers all over his or her matrix.

These transition matrices provide two key metrics, Moulder explains: stability and spread. Higher stability means fewer regulation strategies; higher spread, more strategies. Subjects with high levels of trait neuroticism are therefore likely to have high stability. 

Just-in-time interventions

With this information about their own emotion-regulation behaviors, subjects can see which strategies they use and reuse; they get a snapshot of their own stability and spread. If they find they’re putting the same strategies on repeat, they can decide to change things up—play pickleball instead of binge-eating pickles, for instance.

“There are some times when it makes sense to choose the same strategy,” Moulder says, “but we know from prior research that there are some times when it makes sense to become more adaptive—to increase, to spread, to try other things.”

Moulder adds that the knowledge gleaned from transition matrices can also be turned toward potentially more effective approaches to emotion regulation. He and Daniel call one idea “just-in-time interventions.” 

“If we are, let’s say, giving individuals telehealth, which is a really big space right now for therapy, we want to do something called just-in-time interventions,” he says. By understanding a person’s regulation practices, “we can say to that person, ‘Hey, you keep going to drink almost every time something negative happens. Maybe this time go read a book or a call a friend.’ We can offer alternatives that research shows will lead to better outcomes.”

The power of such interventions lies in their precision. They’re based not purely on statistics, Moulder says, but on “person-specific analysis, which we can use to give people personalized messaging that would ideally best help them in the long run.”

There’s no guarantee that switching strategies will bring the desired outcome, Moulder admits, but experimentation is part of the process. “We’re never going to know what works until we try.” 

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In his research on the brain, Daniel Gustavson looks for clues about when cognitive decline begins

According to Daniel Gustavson, assistant research professor in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, much of the research on cognitive decline starts late. 

“A lot of studies of older adults—too many, in my opinion—focus on when some cognitive decline has already happened,” he says. “It's clear that a lot of the disease, or even just normal aging, has already taken place by the time somebody comes into a clinic and says, ‘I'm worried about my brain.’”

Gustavson wants to dig deeper into the timeline and see if cognitive decline can be spotted before its telltale signs arise.  he coauthored and recently published in Neurobiology of Aging makes headway toward accomplishing that goal. 

CU Boulder researcher Daniel Gustavson notes that a lot of cognitive decline, or even just normal aging, has already taken place by the time "somebody comes into a clinic and says, ‘I'm worried about my brain.’”

The cognitive gas tank

Gustavson’s study—which used twin research, genetic analysis and magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), among other methodologies—examines the relationship between brain reserve in middle age and executive function later in life.

“Brain reserve,” says Gustavson, “is a bit like a gas tank. You have a certain amount of gas built up when you’re a young adult, when your brain is at its healthiest, and as you age, you start to lose some of that fuel.”

Executive function, he adds, refers to complex goal management or attentional control. “It captures higher-level cognitive processes, where you have to be controlling other sub-processes.”

An example of executive function in action is asking someone to memorize and reorder a string of letters and numbers.

“You might have people listen to a list like X, six, B, Y, seven, J, and then they’d have to remember that list in their head and repeat the numbers back in numerical order and the letters in alphabetical order,” Gustavson says. “It’s a little more complicated than just repeating what someone said.”

Using data from the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (), which includes more than 1,600 subjects who have undergone various cognitive assessments at regular intervals over the past 20 years, Gustavson and his coauthors concluded that higher brain reserve at the age of 56 was associated with better executive function at the age of 68. 

Looks can be revealing

Brain reserve, says Gustavson, is a proxy for brain thickness, and brain thickness is determined through MRIs.

To analyze the hundreds of MRIs of VETSA subjects, Gustavson and his coauthors used a  developed by , professor of neuroimage computing at the , which was trained in much the same way Google trains its search algorithms.

“You can train it over and over again,” Gustavson says. “The more data you have”—that is, MRIs—“and the more times you tell it, ‘You were wrong this time. You were right this time,’ the better it gets at classifying this brain as one age versus that brain as another age.”

The algorithm assesses plump, padded brains as younger and atrophied, motheaten brains as older, regardless of the chronological age of the people in whose heads those brains reside. That means, for example, that a 56-year-old can have a brain that appears 60 and a 60-year-old can have a brain that appears 56.

And this matters, Gustavson says, because how a brain looks in an MRI predicts its executive function years later.

“Controlling for their actual age, people with younger-looking brains had much shallower decline in executive function over the subsequent 12 years, and people whose brains appeared older than average had steeper drops in executive function.”

Yet the cause of this discrepancy—genetics? environment? trauma?—is something the algorithm alone can’t explain. That’s where twin research comes in.

Same genes, different story

One of the benefits of twin studies like VETSA, Gustavson says, is their ability to separate environmental influences on a person’s health—things like diet, exercise and place of residence—from genetic influences.

“Brain reserve is a bit like a gas tank. You have a certain amount of gas built up when you’re a young adult, when your brain is at its healthiest, and as you age, you start to lose some of that fuel,” says Daniel Gustavson. (Illustration: iStock)

“Those two things aren't fully separable, but basic twin studies give us some idea of how inherited different constructs are—not only cognitive abilities, like memory or speed, but also changes in those abilities. Twin studies help us quantify how much those changes are due to genetics and how much are due to environment.”

If one twin experiences cognitive decline faster than the other, in other words, researchers can confidently point to environment as the reason, since twins share the same genes.

But twin studies can go only so far, Gustavson says, as they tend to paint with a broad brush. “You often can't pinpoint specific genes or specific environments that matter, because it's all statistical.”

That’s why Gustavson and his team incorporated genetic analyses in their study. They wanted a higher-resolution snapshot of the genetic influences on cognitive decline, specifically by seeing if the APOE genotype, which is strongly associated with Alzheimer’s, predicted a drop in executive function.

What they found is that, although APOE alone did not fully explain changes in subjects’ executive function over time, those subjects’ genes taken as a whole did.

“Most of the association between people's brain health and their future cognitive decline, about two-thirds, was explained by genetics,” Gustavson says.

But that’s not to dismiss the other third as inconsequential.

“Things like healthy lifestyle, diet, smoking and alcohol use, social engagement—those things don't seem like they relate to cognitive changes, but they might impact your brain health in the first half of your life, and then your brain health in midlife will impact your cognition later,” says Gustavson.

The fourth wave

Gustavson and his fellow researchers just completed the fourth wave of data collection, when the VETSA subjects were 74 years old, and are therefore currently working to build upon their findings. 

“We would like to expand our models to capture the cognitive changes even further out,” he says.

Gustavson would also like to deepen his understanding of what exactly the brain-age algorithm is detecting. “Is it capturing something new to midlife, or is it capturing something from young adulthood, the consequences of which are only becoming apparent in midlife?”

He suspects it’s the latter, but he’s not yet sure. “I really want to look at that in more detail.” 

Jeremy A. Elman, Chandra A. Reynolds, Lisa T. Eyler, Christine Fennema-Notestine, Olivia K. Puckett, Matthew S. Panizzon, Nathan A. Gillespie, Michael C. Neale, Michael J. Lyons, Carol E. Franz and William S. Kremen contributed to this research.

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It’s surprisingly common for children to have both conditions, CU Boulder researcher Erik Willcutt argues in a recently published paper

According to a coauthored by Erik Willcutt, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder and faculty fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, many children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) also have reading disability, and vice versa.

“A lot of kids tend to have both learning and attentional difficulties,” says Willcutt, a clinical child psychologist by training. “Similarly, many children with reading disability also experience broader learning difficulties in areas such as math and writing.”

This research marks a shift in the clinical understanding of learning disabilities.

In recently published research, Erik Willcutt, a CU Boulder professor of psychology and neuroscience, finds that many children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder also have reading disability, and vice versa.

“Twenty-five years ago, we all went into an assessment with a child thinking we had to figure out what the diagnosis is.”

“The” diagnosis—singular.

“Back then, it was always kind of surprising if a child met criteria for more than one diagnosis. We’d think, ‘Maybe we’re just wrong, and we’ve got to figure out which diagnosis is correct.’”

Yet, as research has progressed, this either-or thinking has transformed into something more like both-and thinking.

“We’ve realized over time, there are a lot of kids that really do seem to have more than one diagnosis, and that in many cases both diagnoses would benefit from treatment.”

When one diagnosis complicates another

The phenomenon of multiple diagnoses for one person is called comorbidity, a term “that came out of classic medical literature where people could have more than one illness at the same time,” says Willcutt. “For example, heart disease frequently co-occurs with other physical conditions such as diabetes, and this may mean that treatment of the heart disease is complicated by the diabetes or another co-occurring illness.”

It’s the same idea with reading disability and ADHD. “That comorbidity suggests that a child's difficulties extend beyond what they would be if that child had just reading disability.”

Reading disability, Willcutt points out, doesn’t simply mean difficulty reading. It means unexpected difficulty reading, with the expectations being based on a child’s education.

So, a child who struggles to read but hasn’t had an adequate reading education may not have reading disability. Perhaps that student struggles because he or she hasn’t grown up around books, or hasn’t been read to, or hasn’t been given adequate reading instruction. For a student such as this, difficulty reading may not be a disability so much as the natural consequence of a less-enriched reading environment.

It's the children who have had an adequate education and still underachieve in reading who may have reading disability. And if those kids also happen to have ADHD, their reading disability will likely be harder to manage, just as heart disease becomes more challenging for someone who also has diabetes.

“Individuals with more than one disorder often differ in important ways from individuals with a disorder in isolation, with the comorbid group frequently experiencing greater symptom severity, more extensive and severe functional and neurocognitive impairment, and poorer long-term outcomes,” Willcutt and co-author state in their paper.

Externalizing and internalizing behaviors

Researcher Erik Willcutt notes that reading disability doesn’t simply mean difficulty reading. It means unexpected difficulty reading, with the expectations being based on a child’s education.

There is a range of behaviors associated with reading disability and ADHD, Willcutt explains, some of which are “externalizing” and some of which are “internalizing.”

Externalizing behaviors are those that children express outwardly—“things like aggression, delinquency or conduct problems,” says Willcutt—whereas internalizing behaviors “are more internally focused—so if you feel anxious or you feel depressed or withdrawn.”

Willcutt says that reading disability and ADHD frequently co-occur with both internalizing and externalizing behaviors, but the specific profile varies among children. One student with comorbid ADHD and reading disability may continually show up late to school and disrupt class, whereas another student with the same diagnoses may be quiet and anxious.

“And there are some different behavior clusters that seem to really matter,” Willcutt adds. “The kids who have reading disability and ADHD along with early aggressive or delinquent behaviors tend to be a subgroup that is at higher risk for more severe antisocial behaviors during adolescence. On the other hand, students who have ADHD and reading disability along with internalizing symptoms often show pronounced difficulties in the classroom because they are really anxious about their academic performance.”

Assessment and treatment

Willcutt says that one key takeaway from his and Petrill’s study is that comorbidity matters and is much more common than previously thought. “At least 25% of kids who have ADHD have a learning disability, which is much higher than we would expect by random chance.”

Willcutt therefore hopes those who read his and Petrill’s study, particularly clinicians, adjust their assessment practices in a way that addresses the potential for comorbid diagnoses.

 

We’re at the point of saying when a child has ADHD and reading disability, both conditions really warrant interventions. Rather than trying to decide which is more important, we should really target both of them by providing the optimal intervention for reading disability and the optimal intervention for ADHD.”

 

“If you’re assessing learning disabilities, it’s really important to also assess whether a child has attention problems, anxiety or conduct difficulties along with that. For clinicians who specialize in the assessment of ADHD, it's critical to include a screening measure to determine whether the child may also have learning problems. Our results suggest that it may matter quite a bit if they have a comorbid diagnosis.”

For the field more broadly, Willcutt hopes that his and Petrill’s work prompts other researchers to study treatments for comorbid learning disabilities and attentional difficulties.

“We’re at the point of saying when a child has ADHD and reading disability, both conditions really warrant interventions. Rather than trying to decide which is more important, we should really target both of them by providing the optimal intervention for reading disability and the optimal intervention for ADHD.”

In other words, if a child has both reading disability and ADHD, treating only one will likely have little to no effect on the other.

“Reading intervention might really help with the reading, but it may not address some of the other concerns that are also getting in the way for that child.”

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In her honors thesis, recent graduate Amber Duffy describes how loneliness influences a person’s ability to respond to stress

Amber Duffy, who graduated last semester magna cum laude, didn’t always plan to write an honor’s thesis.

She came to the University of Colorado Boulder on a pre-med track, studying neuroscience, but an introductory psychology class knocked her off that path and inspired her to change her major.  

“I really liked the behavioral aspect of psychology,” she says.

She liked psychology so much, in fact, that she wasn’t content simply to study it. She wanted to contribute to it. “If I’m not going to do medical school anymore,” she remembers thinking, “I should delve into research.”

Recent psychology and neuroscience graduate Amber Duffy won the the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, recognizing her research on loneliness.

She contacted Erik Knight, a CU Boulder assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, with whom she’d taken a class her sophomore year, and he invited her to join his lab. She ended up working there for two years, during which time she decided to write an honor’s thesis.

The topic? Loneliness and its effect on young adults’ stress responses.

Why loneliness?  

Duffy’s interest in loneliness isn’t purely academic. Many of her friends and family have struggled with it for years, even before the pandemic, she says. And she herself, the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and a Pennsylvanian father, has often felt its sting.  

“Growing up in a multicultural family in my predominantly white town”—Castle Rock, Colorado—“it was hard for me to connect with people sometimes,” she says. “I would learn about my mom’s culture at home and then go to school or talk with friends, and they just didn’t understand how I lived.”

Her concerns over loneliness only increased when she learned of Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s that the United States is suffering from a loneliness epidemic.

“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” Murthy states.  

Hearing this spurred Duffy to action. She wanted to contribute to the fight against loneliness and its potentially negative consequences.

“If we expand our knowledge of loneliness,” she says, “maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

More gas, less brakes

For her honors experiment, Duffy gathered 51 CU Boulder undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 34 and divided them randomly into a control condition and an experimental condition. Those in the former provided a low-stress comparison to those in the latter, who were put through the wringer.

First, the subjects in the experimental condition had to interview for a high-stakes job Duffy and Knight had concocted specifically for the study.

“We told them, in the moment, ‘You have five minutes to prepare a five-minute speech on why you’re the perfect applicant,’” says Duffy.

Immediately following that, subjects had to solve subtraction problems for five minutes, out loud, perfectly, starting at 6,233 and going down from there in increments of 13. “If they made a mistake,” says Duffy, “they had to start over.”

While the subjects ran these gauntlets, Duffy monitored their heart-rate variability (HRV), or the change in interval between heartbeats, and their pre-ejection period (PEP), or the time it takes for a heart to prepare to push blood to the rest of the body. Both serve as indicators of how a person’s stress-response system is functioning, Duffy explains. 

Finally, when the stress tests were done, the subjects completed the questionnaire, which research has found to be a reliable means of measuring loneliness.

Duffy had hypothesized that lonelier subjects would have more pronounced stress responses than less lonely subjects, and indeed that’s what her data revealed.

Lonelier subjects had higher heartrates, stronger responses from their sympathetic nervous systems (SNS) and weaker responses from their parasympathetic nervous systems (PNS). Duffy likens the SNS, which controls the fight-or-flight response, to a car’s gas pedal and the PNS, which counterbalances the SNS, to a car’s brakes.

When met with stressful situations, then, lonelier individuals had more gas and less brakes, which Duffy says could have long-term health implications.

Yet she is also quick to point out that more research needs to be done, preferably with more subjects.

 

If we expand our knowledge of loneliness, maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

 

“We only had 51 people. An increase in sample size would help with more reliable data,” she says. “It’s also important to look at more clinical and diverse populations because there are other factors that could affect loneliness levels.” 

Posters, prizes and professorships

Duffy submitted an abstract of her research to The Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, where she hoped to present a poster, thinking this would be a nice, low-key way of getting some conference experience under her belt.

Her abstract was accepted. But then a conference organizer asked her if, in addition to presenting a poster, she could also give a fifteen-minute talk. She would be the only undergraduate at the conference to do so.

Duffy balked. The thought of speaking to a roomful of PhDs intimidated her. “Most of my life I’ve heard how cutthroat academia is,” she says. But she ultimately agreed, and she was glad she did.

Her talk and poster presentation went so well that not only did she receive interest and encouragement from several doctoral programs, but she also won an award that she didn’t even know existed: the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award.

“In the middle of my poster presentation, a woman came up to me—I didn’t know who she was—and said, ‘I have a check here for you for $500.’ I didn’t know that was supposed to happen, but it was great!”

Now graduated, Duffy isn’t 100% sure what her next steps will be, but she’s leaning toward one day pursuing a PhD. 

“When you get a PhD, you get to do research and also work with students,” she says. “I think it would be fun to be a professor and give back in that way.”

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CU Boulder researchers find that body-scanning and ‘urge surfing’ appear to help people cut down how much alcohol they drink

Mindfulness is having a moment, but is it worth all the hype? Researchers at CU’s Center for Health and Neuroscience, Genes, and Environment (CUChange) say the answer is yes—particularly when it comes to drinking behavior.

A team including Carillon Skrzynski, a faculty research associate at CUChange, building on the growing body of evidence suggesting mindfulness plays a significant role in influencing alcohol use.

Their research found that mindfulness techniques including intentional awareness of what’s happening and non-judgmental acceptance of whatever that may be helped reduce cravings for alcohol.

Carillon Skrzynski, a faculty research associate at CUChange, is part of a research team that found evidence suggesting mindfulness plays a significant role in influencing alcohol use.

Alcohol: a growing problem

For many, alcohol is a normal part of life. At the same time, the number of deaths in which alcohol is a significant contributing factor has risen sharply in recent years. Between 2020 and 2021, the number of alcohol-related deaths in the United States increased by 29%, as compared to data from 2016-17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data also show that one in six Americans binge drinks, with a quarter doing so every week.

If alcohol is so bad for our health, why is it so hard to stop drinking to excess, and what can we do to make it easier to cut down or stop? Skrzynski has been fascinated by these questions since her undergraduate days as a psychology major at the University of Michigan.

While studying substance abuse in her introduction to psychology class, Skrzynski was struck by both the prevalence of substance abuse disorders and their far-reaching negative effects. “I remember being extremely curious about why people are engaging in substance abuse when it’s obviously disrupting their lives in really deleterious ways,” she says.

“When I found out psychology researchers were exploring this question in systematic ways to try to help people with addiction issues, I remember thinking, ‘That’s really cool. I want to be part of that process.’”

After graduating from the University of Michigan, she earned her PhD in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University before arriving at CU Boulder to continue her quest to pinpoint the variables that contribute to the development and maintenance of addictive behavior.

The power of mindfulness

Skrzynski’s team’s recent research suggests mindfulness may be a simple but powerful way to cultivate a healthier relationship with alcohol. Led by , one of the founding directors of CUChange and professor of psychiatry at CU Anschutz, the researchers designed a study to compare the effectiveness of mindfulness-based relapse prevention versus standard relapse prevention, in which they randomly assigned nearly 200 participants to one of the two groups.

The results, which were published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, suggest that mindfulness helped participants decrease their drinking. While participants in both groups experienced an initial reduction in the number of days they engaged in heavy drinking, at the 20-week and 32-week follow ups, the improvements remained stable for the mindfulness group but diminished for the standard treatment group.

Their research also suggested even slight increases in mindfulness had the potential to reduce alcohol cravings, findings that were published in Psychology of Addictive Behavior.

“The takeaway here is that mindfulness can be a really useful tool in reducing drinking, or maybe even quitting entirely,” says CU Boulder researcher Carillon Skrzynski.

“The takeaway here is that mindfulness can be a really useful tool in reducing drinking, or maybe even quitting entirely,” says Skrzynski. And while this idea isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, it’s nonetheless important.

“Most researchers would agree that mindfulness does have great utility in this endeavor,” she says. “But the more supporting evidence you have, the stronger the case.”

How to be more mindful

Mindfulness consists of two essential components, says Skrzynski. “One, being intentionally aware of what’s happening, and, two, non-judgmental acceptance of whatever that may be.” To bring more mindfulness into your day, you can try a couple of the techniques the researchers taught the mindfulness group.

The first is body scanning, which, as the name implies, involves slowly and sequentially checking in with each part of your body, from your head to your toes and noticing how it feels.

The second, urge surfing, means noticing when you have a craving (in this case, for alcohol), and instead of having a drink, allowing yourself to experience the craving, knowing that at some point the strength of the urge will peak, at which point it will begin to decline.

“Both techniques involve awareness and acceptance of whatever is happening that you’re not trying to push it away,” says Skrzynski, adding that it’s a powerful tool no matter what you’re dealing with. “Although my research focuses on addiction, the truth is, mindfulness can be transformative in so many life domains.” 

Angela Bryan, a CU Boulder professor of psychology and neuroscience, also contributed to the research.

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College’s outstanding undergraduate of spring 2024 focused his honors thesis on sex-based differences in sleep

As an undergraduate researcher, Grant Mannino has helped advance scientific understanding of sleep, perhaps to the detriment of his own volume of sleep.

Mannino is graduating this week with a double major in psychology and neuroscience, summa cum laude. He has been designated as the spring 2024 outstanding undergraduate of the College of Arts and Sciences.

While pursuing his degree, he has contributed more than 1,500 hours of undergraduate research, co-authored two peer-reviewed manuscripts, is first author of a manuscript under review, and has contributed to four other manuscripts and a book chapter.

Mannino, who went to high school in the Denver metro area, recently answered five questions from this magazine. Those queries and his responses appear below:

Question: If you were to briefly summarize the results of your honors thesis to a lay audience, what would you say?

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Glen Krutz (left) talks with Grant Mannino, the college's spring 2024 outstanding graduate, about his research and future plans. (Photo: Kylie Clarke)

Mannino: Essentially, sleep is being increasingly recognized as an important mediator of disease and has thus gained more attention as an outcome measure in studies of various subdisciplines of biomedical research (e.g., neuroscience). In my thesis, I found significant biological sex differences in the sleep of male and female mice (267 total) commonly used in research.

Specifically, female mice slept less than their male counterparts. Historically, however, female animals are underrepresented in biomedical research and underlying sex differences—as previously described—are rarely taken into account in data analyses.

In accordance with the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) initiative to improve rigor and reproducibility in biomedical research, I used these data to demonstrate that investigators should account for underlying sex differences when interpreting sleep in the context of disease models.

Question: When did you realize that you wanted to pursue a career in science?

Mannino: I’ve always had some natural interest in medicine but didn’t realize that I wanted to pursue a career in science until I joined a laboratory here at CU. Biomedical research provides this unique intersection between medicine and preclinical research that I really enjoy.

Simply spending as much time as I have in my lab has just solidified my desire to pursue a career in science.

Question: I understand that you mentor other undergraduate students; what motivates you to do this, and how do you find the time?

Mannino: I’ve had the opportunity to work in a big lab that often hosts students from summer programs and internships from various institutions/backgrounds. Once I had established proficiency in certain research techniques, I sought to serve as a peer mentor for newer/rotating students with the goal of helping them with their projects while building relationships and enriching their experience in the lab.

Question: You are hoping to pursue an MD/PhD; what is your hope for your career beyond that?

Mannino: Up to this point, I’ve largely been on the discovery side of research, where I’ve been interpreting results and disseminating findings. Whether I end up going the MD/PhD route or just doing a PhD, I’d definitely love to end up more on the implementation side of research. This way, I could potentially see some of the novel interventions/strategies that I’m familiar with actually improve the life of patients.

Question: Is there anything about your time at CU Boulder that was especially meaningful to you?

Mannino: The relationships I’ve been able to develop at CU have been (by far) the most meaningful to me. I feel extremely lucky to have spent the past few years working for two professors (Dr. Rachel Rowe and Dr. Mark Opp) who are both amazing people, mentors and scientists.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to build relationships across different areas of the same community with my friends, classmates, research colleagues and professors. I think that the culmination of all these relationships has shaped my undergraduate experience in the most meaningful way.

Top image: College of Arts and Sciences Dean Glen Krutz and Grant Mannino (Photo: Kylie Clarke)

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60 years after its legalization, people are still attracted to the lottery because of the strong emotions associated with imagining the future, CU Boulder psychologist says

Sixty years ago last week, New Hampshire became the first U.S. state to allow a government-run lottery following a nationwide ban of lotteries in 1895. Why did Americans grow to disfavor the lottery then? Moreover, considering how unlikely it is to win, why do they play it now?

Leaf Van Boven, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of psychology, sheds light on people’s motivation for playing the lottery, supported with Eduardo Andrade of the University of California Berkeley on the relationship between decision making and counterfactual thoughts.

The history of U.S. lotteries

While the first modern lottery conducted by the government in a U.S. state was in New Hampshire in 1964, lotteries were commonplace until the middle of the 19th century. Historian shows that at least 392 lotteries were held in colonial America. Legislators also authorized the use of lotteries to fund public works after the United States won independence.

Leaf Van Boven, chair of the CU Boulder Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, has researched the relationship between decision making and counterfactual thoughts in playing the lottery.

The acceptance of lotteries began to change in the 1830s because of the . While the evangelicals opposed lotteries for moral reasons, the general public began to dislike them at around the same time because of a number of scandals involving lotteries. The , a U.S. financial crisis that preceded a six-year economic depression, undermined people’s confidence in infrastructure funded by state borrowing and other methods of public financing, which would have made lotteries even more unpopular, according to Ann-Marie Szymanski’s book Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes.

By 1860, most states had banned lotteries. Similar to how Prohibition would lead to a massive black market for alcohol when it was introduced in 1920, the ban on lotteries led to the operation of illegal ones. One major example was the Louisiana State Lottery, which . Corruption of this sort led to the complete federal ban of lotteries in 1895.

The first government-run U.S. lottery to appear after this ban was in Puerto Rico in 1934, but New Hampshire was the first state to relegalize the lottery. Lotteries now operate in 45 states; the five states that still do not allow them are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. Now, there also are multi-state lotteries like Powerball and Mega Millions, which are designed to create massive jackpots worth hundreds of millions of dollars; for example, the Mega Millions jackpot is close to $1 billion this week.

Government lotteries are a significant source of income for states, and in 2021 state and local governments collected In fiscal year 2022-23, the Colorado Lottery saw

Why do people play the lottery?

However, the odds of winning the lottery are very low. While different lotteries have different odds, the major multi-state lotteries are similarly unlikely to be won with a given ticket. The overall jackpot odds for a given Powerball drawing, for example, are one in 292,201,338. , the lifetime odds of being struck by lightning are about one in 15,300. That means players are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning at some point than to win the lottery, even if they buy multiple tickets.

“The odds are really small, and people are pretty bad at thinking about small probability events,” Van Boven says, “so they almost always overestimate the likelihood.”

People will also treat small probabilities as if they were larger than they are, Van Boven explains: "If something has a 1% likelihood of happening, people will often treat that as though it is actually a 5% likelihood.” This phenomenon is known as the behavioral response or decision weight. These factors combine to make people not only overestimate the odds of winning the lottery, but also overweight those low odds.

Some lotteries have secondary prizes, or prizes other than the jackpot, and players are more likely to win these. However, the chance is still low, and the payouts are much smaller. Van Boven notes that lotteries “are fascinating because it never makes good economic sense to play them. It’s a bad deal.”

There are still psychological motivations at play, though. Counterfactual scenarios are major examples. After making a choice, people often imagine what would have happened if they had done things differently. In the case of the lottery, people may imagine that they would have won if they had played and feel regret as a result.

“Sometimes, people will make decisions to minimize that anticipated regret. They worry that they’re going to miss out on something, so they’ll decide to go ahead and play even though they realize it’s maybe not a great idea,” says CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven. (Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

“Sometimes, people will make decisions to minimize that anticipated regret,” Van Boven explains. “They worry that they’re going to miss out on something, so they’ll decide to go ahead and play even though they realize it’s maybe not a great idea.”

A deeper look into the psychology

“Nobody expects to win the lottery, but what you’re buying is the enjoyment of thinking about what would happen if you won,” Van Boven says. “It’s more about the enjoyment that people experience when they imagine things that are going to happen in the future, which is a really powerful emotion.”

The inordinate strength of this sort of emotion has been demonstrated by studies showing that people imagine feeling more strongly about future events than they actually will. The positive emotions that people feel when imagining winning the lottery are the main reason that they play, Van Boven notes, but it is also worth considering what motivates people to continue playing even after they have lost several times. One contributing factor is that people tend to minimize their personal responsibility for negative outcomes by attributing it to something outside their control, like bad luck.

“Part of the implication of that,” Van Boven explains, “is it makes it difficult to learn over time,” since it stops people from taking responsibility and making the necessary changes to their behavior.

Another factor is that, while people usually overestimate how strongly they will feel about something that happens in the future, they underestimate their reactions to counterfactuals about something that did not happen. Van Boven says that “if you consider and then decide not to play a gamble, and then you find out that you would have won, you feel more distressed than you would have expected.” This was evidenced in the research he conducted with Andrade.

“What we were looking at in that paper is how, when you choose not to play a gamble, you think you’re going to opt out of making those comparisons, but you don’t really,” Van Boven explains. “So, you decide, ‘I’m not going to play the gamble,’ but then you find out that you would have won if you had played, and that makes you feel bad, even though you chose not to play for good reason.”

While there is typically no way to know whether you would have won the lottery if you chose not to play, counterfactual thoughts about the possibility of having won will tend to evoke stronger emotions than expected, according to Van Boven’s research. This may make the choice not to gamble unpleasant for gamblers, though the effect does not apply to non-gamblers, Van Boven says, given that it only happens in “those instances where you consider doing something and then you decide not to.”

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CU Boulder research associate Charleen Gust demonstrates that the physical and psychological benefits of yoga last longer with consistent practice

While even one yoga class may yield short-term benefits for participants, those who hope for benefits lasting longer than a week should aim for regular and consistent yoga practice.

These are the findings from a newly released of how yoga produces the benefits to mind and body that previous research has demonstrated, including improved mobility, reduced risk for chronic disease and decreased stress.

, a research associate in the University of Colorado Boulder who in August earned PhDs in social psychology and neuroscience, led the research with a goal of exploring how yoga benefits those who practice it.

CU Boulder research associate Charleen Gust studies how yoga produces benefits to mind and body.

Her research compared a typical yoga class (one that offers postures, breathing exercises, mindfulness and meditation) with a postures-only class (one that offers guided stretching). Gust says comparing the two classes let her probe how factors other than physical and psychological health change in response to yoga–factors that might also explain yoga’s health-promoting effects.

“This is what is meant by ‘potential self-regulatory and neurophysiological mechanisms’–factors related to self-regulation [or the ability to manage thoughts, emotions and behavior in a given situation] and neurophysiology [nervous system functioning] that help us understand how yoga works to improve health,” says Gust, who examined emotion regulation, self-control, distress tolerance and mindfulness, among other factors, before and after research participants completed a yoga class.

Limited differences

In general, Gust found that those examined factors improved after a yoga class, but the improvements only lasted about a week. And the changes in those factors didn’t differ much between those in a yoga class versus those in a postures-only class–a result Gust says she didn’t expect.

“It was surprising because the four major components of yoga–ethics, breath regulation, postures and meditation–informed our decision about which factors to assess,” she says. “For example, mindfulness was the factor we selected for meditation, since past studies have shown that meditation cultivates mindfulness. Because the postures-only class didn’t have a meditative component, we expected smaller changes in mindfulness for those in that class. But our findings didn’t support that. Those in the postures-only class showed similar improvements in mindfulness like those in yoga.”

She adds that because the two types of classes produced comparable changes in most of the factors she and her research colleagues studied, this suggests that there may be additional “mechanisms of action” underlying yoga’s health-promoting effects that researchers failed to consider.

“We need more research in this area to determine what these factors or mechanisms might be,” she says. “I will say that a major implication of our findings is that while people may notice small benefits after just one yoga class, regular continued practice is necessary to see more lasting changes since the improvements participants reported after taking part in yoga weren’t maintained one week later.”

Experience informing research

Gust speaks from experience. She first became interested in yoga more than a decade ago and now practices three to five times a week.

 

That’s the beauty of yoga; it’s not at all about social comparison. It’s about showing up, being present, doing your best and letting go of expectations.”

 

“For me personally, yoga is particularly helpful in maintaining a sense of overall well-being,” she says. “The time I set aside for practice is often the only time I can truly disconnect from the distractions and stress that leave me feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Yoga has also helped me cultivate a sense of compassion, both for myself and for others.”

Her advice to yoga newcomers?

“It’s normal to feel out of place. Even as a former gymnast of 13-plus years, I felt extremely self-conscious at my first few yoga classes. I couldn’t help but compare myself to others who I perceived as able to do the poses much better than me. But that’s the beauty of yoga; it’s not at all about social comparison. It’s about showing up, being present, doing your best and letting go of expectations.”

Gust says she believes the biggest misconception about yoga relates to accessibility.

“Many believe that you have to go to a yoga studio to do yoga, which simply isn’t true. Gyms and fitness centers, even companies, recognize the value of yoga and offer classes. And it’s perfectly fine to do yoga in your own living room. That’s what I do.” 

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CU Boulder researcher June Gruber kicks off a new season of “The Ampersand” podcast in a conversation about all the feelings, not just the positive ones

When June Gruber was tackled by two grown men on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, her fear and shock stood in stark relief to her gratitude as strangers stepped forward to offer help and to catch the assailants.

As overwhelming and scary as the experience was, it offered Gruber, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, opportunities to be curious.

Gruber studies and looks for the best in humanity, even in its darkest parts, and brings to light the complexity of the human brain and all the stories it has to offer. Her research has shown that a range of emotion, from bittersweet melancholy to nostalgic joy, is better for the human body than a “toxic positivity” insistence on a singular feeling of happiness.

She host Erika Randall, associate dean for student success in the CU College of Arts and Sciences, to kick off a new season of the College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall—who also is a dancer, professor, mother, filmmaker and writer—joins guests in exploring stories about “�����پ��Բ�” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

Erika Randall (left) and June Gruber how the human body benefits from a range of emotions while recording "The Ampersand" podcast in Boulder.

In a broad-ranging discussion, excerpted below, Gruber and Randall talked about the full palette of emotions and how there’s connection to be found even in the worst moments. Click the link above to hear the entire conversation.

Gruber: A lot of the way we hear about happiness and positivity, especially in more westernized or individualistic context, is very self-centered. It's, "How can I feel better, and in particular, how can I feel these kind of exuberant emotions–joy, excitement, enthusiasm?"

Although those are certainly important feelings to have in part of the human experience, sometimes we push them too far or experience them in ways that put other feelings to the wayside. And so, when I think about that sweet spot of happiness, I think about a few different pieces. One is balancing the kinds of emotions you have so that you balance both the emotions that bring you pleasure, but also, you're experiencing those kinds of feelings that really orient you outwards towards other people.

So, we think of these as other-oriented feelings. This could be love, this could be compassion. We've even found … that a sense of awe and wonder, the science is telling us that gets us out of ourselves, that gets us into the great beyond and actually makes us really connect with others in the greater world. So, I think it's about also experiencing those emotions that engage us with the world and engage us with other people.

I also have found that happiness isn't about just feeling positive. And in fact, we've done some work looking at the diverse … menu of feelings you can have as a human being. We're built with all kinds of feelings, including sadness and frustration, at times embarrassment.

Randall: Melancholy is my favorite.

Gruber: Melancholy, yeah.

Randall: It's my fave, and my kid at 2 years old: “Mama, my favorite word is melancholy.”

Gruber: Such a good word.

Randall: Yeah, I'm like, okay, I'm done parenting. I've arrived. But yeah, these other feelings that connect us to a sense of ourselves and outward.

Gruber: And the world as it is. So, that means if experiencing what we call emotional diversity. There are times when it's completely appropriate to feel angry at social injustice, at the world, you know, not going the way it could or optimally ought to be. And anger can motivate us to sort of push towards social change or, you know, behavioral change. There's times when embarrassment, we find that it actually can be completely all right. Although it can feel painful. When you feel embarrassed, other people like you more, they trust you more. They laugh.

CU Boulder researcher June Gruber the complexity of human emotions.

Randall: Yeah, they see your humility, humanity.

Gruber: So, happiness is about experiencing all the different … The palette of emotions we find.

Randall: What brought you to this work? I think, for myself, I spend so much time as an artist and as a writer being with, and I wonder what it's like to be with on a neurological level, on a scientific level. What brought you to be with happiness so deeply?

Gruber: Part of it's … I always wanted to be a writer when I was in high school. I loved English literature. I loved reading about human experience. And all of them, you know, whether I was reading, you know, 1984 or Lord of the Flies, or you know, it was just learning about the human mind. And I knew that I wanted to try to study it more deeply in a way that I could also bring in math and I could also bring in running experiments, like to do all the things to be able to understand happiness.

But what got me interested in this in particular, actually, was not a class, but I actually was an undergraduate and I was shadowing a psychiatrist through an inpatient unit in the psychiatry unit. And I was following her around as she went on her rounds from patient to patient. And I remember one patient that we stopped and visited, and it was a woman in sort of the acute throes of mania. And I had never seen anything like that before.

Randall: And it was probably terrifying.

Gruber: It was terrifying, and it was also absorbing because here she was in this very fragile part of her life, and at the same time she was laughing, she was exuberant. And I wanted to understand what that was about, because all I knew at that time from my classes was in the positive psychology movement where we were trying to foster happiness, we were trying to think positive thoughts. And this didn't fit with that, and I wondered what could it tell us?

Randall: You said a sentence earlier on ... about what really is. How do we be with what is and still find pleasure, wonder and not just happiness at that edge?

Gruber: As a mom with two little boys, I think all the time about like, we have this opportunity, we can teach children and teach them these things young so it becomes part of the foundation of who they are and what they think about their own feelings. I think about that, especially as a mom of two young boys, where we need to foster greater awareness of feelings and all of them in a world that hasn't always supported men experiencing all their feelings.

Randall: So, I want to get back to the story about the bystander experience.

June: What's so interesting about it is it's one of these things you learn early on, and that when we're in a group and something happens, especially someone, you know, maybe they're being robbed on the street, that people, if they don't have to be involved, they just turn an eye and walk away. And that's what we're told to understand and believe humans are about. And it always made me sad. It always made me feel sort of cynical about humanity. And I think this experience showed me that that doesn't have to be the case. Like, there's hope for humanity, especially in these times when it can feel so challenging … There’s still like, inherent human goodness.

Randall: Yes, especially when you feel danger in your body. So, you were traveling?

Gruber: I was traveling. I was in Sao Paulo (Brazil) with my friend Sabrina. We were teaching a course to students there on creativity and happiness. So, like where art and psychology meet. It was a dream.

And one night, we were leaving dinner, just she and I, and we were walking up the street. And out of just ... literally, it was the blink of an eye. I couldn't have even described having an opportunity to react right away because it happened so fast. Two men just pushed my friend to the side and pushed me to the ground.

Two men, out of nowhere, you know, middle aged, like solid. Solid people. They had pushed me to the ground. So, I was on the ground and I had been holding my phone. I shouldn't have been holding it out. And as I was just gripped to it. I don't even think in that moment I quite knew it was happening. But yeah, they were sort of both ... One was like pushing, pinning me down to the ground, and the other was just like striking me with his arms. And I was just in the moment, in a blur like, what is happening? How much worse is this going to get? I believed it was going to be a lot worse. And when is this going to end? That's all I could think.

And my friend Sabrina, who is a very kind, very gentle, not physically aggressive person at all. She was standing back and watching these two men over me. I'm on the ground. And just, just in a moment, I don't think she even thought twice. She went and just like whacked him. She kicked him hard. She does play soccer, so we think that helped. But she whacked him with a foot.

Randall: Wow, she put herself in.

Erika Randall hosts "The Ampersand" podcast, now in its second season.

Gruber: She did.

Randall: Into the mix.

Gruber: She put her own safety at risk. And I asked her about this: “Why did you do that? Thank you, but why did you do that?” And she said, “What else could I have done? You were in a dire situation and no one else was reacting. No one else was there in that moment.”

And she said, “I honestly didn't think twice.” And the man she kicked kind of lost his balance and stumbled back. And then they both just took off. I think they didn't want to mess with my friend or us anymore.

Randall: I don't want to mess with her either. I love it.

Gruber: Yeah. We were floored what happened after that because we thought that was sort of the end of the situation … We then, like, were standing there and suddenly a man down the street yelled, "They've got him, they've got him!" And we walked down the street and one of the men was there, and suddenly there was a whole barrage of police there.

Someone else came up to us asking how we were doing. Another guy drives by on a motorcycle, “I'm going to catch the second guy.”

Randall: Whoa, just the world sprang into action.

Gruber: We were sort of in a little bit of shock, but, you know, everyone kept coming up to check with us. Another person called our friend Paolo, who had been our host for this workshop. And he asked if he could come get us. Everyone in that moment checked in on how we were doing.

They ended up catching both of them… and then they tended to us. We went to the police station, and they took care of us. They checked in on us and they took us back to our hotel later that night at 2 in the morning.

Randall: And I bet every single human who was in that situation with you, and for you, didn't leave feeling happy, but they left feeling something.

Gruber: And that's exactly it. No one felt happy in that moment. To feel happy in that moment, I would think would have been toxic positivity, right? Like, it wouldn't have made sense in that moment. It would've meant someone was really out of touch or insensitive, in fact. No one felt happy but I think everyone felt connected and got a sense of what we talk about as purposeful.

Randall: I love that so much. A sense of connected and purposeful.

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