Research Publications

Relationships between dispositional mindfulness and the personality metatraits, stability and plasticity, remain unexplored despite continued efforts to more accurately characterize associations between dispositional mindfulness and personality. The metatraits are theorized to constitute basic requirements for biological survival and their expression is believed to be a strong determinant of well-being.

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition that causes functional impairment and emotional suffering. To allay pain-induced suffering, opioids are often prescribed for chronic pain management.

A subset of chronic pain patients misuse prescription opioids as a means of regulating negative emotions. However, opioid misuse may result in deficits in emotion regulation strategies like reappraisal by virtue of the deleterious effects of chronic opioid exposure.

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.

This exploratory study examined the three domains of self-extension proposed by William James' Constituents of Self—the psychological, social, and material domains. A novel analytic method, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS-T), was used to represent the structure of James' self-extension domains in geometric space for a large sample of American adults (N = 1181).