Research Publications

Preclinical studies have shown effects of chronic exposure to addictive drugs on glutamatergic‐mediated neuroplasticity in frontostriatal circuitry. These initial findings have been paralleled by human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research demonstrating weaker frontostriatal resting‐state functional connectivity (rsFC) among individuals with psychostimulant use disorders. We hypothesized that prescription opioid users with chronic pain, as compared with healthy control subjects, would evidence weaker frontostriatal rsFC coupled with less frontostriatal gray matter volume (GMV).

It is difficult to estimate the impact of a scholar. Conventional metrics such as citation counts, h-indexes, publications in top-tier journals, and federal grants all provide some objective indication of scholarly impact, but these indices fail to capture the holistic and historical context of a scholar’s influence on the development and emergence of entire fields of inquiry. As his student and colleague, I believe that Matthew Owen Howard, PhD, exerted a singular influence on social work research, and his scholarly efforts helped give rise to a new and critically important field of scientific investigation: the study of mindfulness as a treatment for addiction.

Although prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) has been linked with greater externalizing behavior, no studies have investigated heterogeneity of developmental trajectories in children with PCE to date. The present study aimed to: (1) identify developmental trajectories of externalizing problems in childhood by using a person-oriented analytic approach; (2) examine whether trajectories differ by PCE and other environmental and biological correlates; and (3) investigate how trajectories were associated with adolescent substance use and sexual behavior.

In this study, the authors utilized a novel psychophysiological probe of pain-opioid conditioned associations, the cue-primed reactivity (CPR) task, to assess associative learning and second-order conditioning effects among chronic pain patients taking long-term opioid analgesics.

Contemporary advances in addiction neuroscience have paralleled increasing interest in the ancient mental training practice of mindfulness meditation as a potential therapy for addiction. In the past decade, mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been studied as a treatment for an array of...