Emotion Regulation Predicts Recovery Capital Beyond Mindfulness and Demographic Variation in Recovery Dharma.

Recovery Dharma is a Buddhist-inspired mutual-aid recovery program for those with substance use disorders and behavioral addictions. The program combines meditation, emotion regulation techniques, literature, and Buddhist practices during meetings to help people achieve emotional balance and improve their well-being. Despite the growing popularity of Recovery Dharma, how the practices in this program predict recovery resources remain largely unknown.

Predictors of participant compliance with ecological momentary assessment among individuals with chronic pain who are using cannabis and opioids.

Background: Cannabis may be an alternative or adjunct to opioid therapy for chronic pain. However, there are limited data on patterns of opioid medication and medical cannabis use. The current study investigated the feasibility of using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) to assess patterns of prescription opioids and medical cannabis among individuals experiencing chronic pain.

Self-administered mindfulness interventions reduce stress in a large, randomized controlled multi-site study.

Mindfulness witnessed a substantial popularity surge in the past decade, especially as digitally self-administered interventions became available at relatively low costs. Yet, it is uncertain whether they effectively help reduce stress. In a preregistered (OSF https://doi.

When Public Will Meets Legislative Resistance: Five Lessons from Ohio's Issue 2 Cannabis Legalization Controversy.

In this paper, I explore the challenges of legalizing cannabis in Ohio, focusing on the passing of the Issue 2 Bill, legislative resistance, and public response. I propose five strategies for effective policy change: persistent advocacy post policy change success, establishing strong coalitions, empowering grassroots movements, promoting rigorous data-driven research, and launching public education campaigns. I offer a detailed analysis of the interaction between public opinion and legislative action in cannabis legalization and its implications for substance-related policy change.

Effects of nicotine patches on early and late attentional bias to smoking cues: We may know less than we think.

In contrast to overnight deprivation versus satiety studies, a small number of placebo-controlled studies have failed to find that nicotine administration reduces attentional bias (AB) to smoking cues. To assess the reliability of this failure and to address the duration and salience of AB in smokers versus never-smokers, we used a longer-than-typical (i.e.

Development of the Enthusiastic Substance Use Attitudes Scale: Preliminary Evidence of a Novel Maintenance Factor.

Expectancies, motives, and attitudes toward substances are cognitive factors that partially account for substance use; however, existing measures tend to have monotonous phrasing, diverging from the enthusiastic attitude toward the perceived benefits of substance use exhibited by those who use substances regularly in informal settings. I aimed to characterize a new cognitive maintenance factor that precedes substance use by creating a brief, multidimensional measure to capture this tone nuance, which I called the Enthusiastic Substance Use Attitudes Scale (ESUAS). Undergraduate students ( = 198) between ages 18 and 62 ( = 19.

Is it time for a cannabis harm reduction approach? Commentary on Sherman et al. (2022) and Borodovsky et al. (2022).

Objective: Recent research suggests potential therapeutic benefits of cannabis-derived products, a lower risk profile than other illicit substances, and significant functional improvement from reduced use. Likewise, low abstinence rates and low motivation to achieve abstinence among those with cannabis use disorder (CUD) are the norm. As such, the harm reduction model has gained traction among substance use scientists and health care professionals as a viable alternative approach.

Emotional fear of COVID-19, but not physiological expressions of fear, explains variability in COVID-19's impact on individuals' lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound and robust impact on individuals' lives and has particularly negatively affected individuals' experiences with fear of catching COVID-19. To measure this fear, researchers created the unidimensional Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S). However, some exploratory factor analysis studies suggested the presence of two factors, which are 1) emotional fear and 2) physiological expressions of fear.

The War on Drugs has Unduly Biased Substance Use Research.

After working in the substance use field for several years and conducting research on substance use, it has come to my attention how deeply ingrained the War on Drugs propaganda is in substance use research. The lines of research demonstrating the potential benefits of substance use (including illicit substances), delineation of harm from stigma, and the societal impact of the War on Drugs is rather weak and lacking, despite numerous recent studies showing the benefits of certain substances and reports of individuals in therapy and online suggesing that illicit substances help them in some respects. There are numerous critical implications of this bias in substance use research.

The Pathogenesis of Borderline Personality Disorder: Evolution of Evidence and Treatment Implications for Two Prominent Models.

Since Stern first started his work in 1938, the field has recognized several empirically supported models of the etiology of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Two such models are the Tripartite Model of the Development of BPD and the Biosocial Development Model of BPD. The Tripartite Model of the Development of BPD suggests that it is a combination of a hyperbolic temperament, traumatic childhood experiences, and an event or series of events that trigger the onset of BPD.

The explanatory ability of COVID-19 life changes on quality of life: A comparison of those who have had and not had COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly negatively affected individuals' quality of life through multiple means such as social isolation, exacerbated mental health conditions, and financial instability. Multiple studies have demonstrated that one of the negative correlates of quality of life is the perceived danger of COVID-19 (i.e.

Researcher degrees of freedom in statistical software contribute to unreliable results: A comparison of nonparametric analyses conducted in SPSS, SAS, Stata, and R.

Researcher degrees of freedom can affect the results of hypothesis tests and consequently, the conclusions drawn from the data. Previous research has documented variability in accuracy, speed, and documentation of output across various statistical software packages. In the current investigation, we conducted Pearson's chi-square test of independence, Spearman's rank-ordered correlation, Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance, Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney U rank-sum tests, and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, along with estimates of skewness and kurtosis, on large, medium, and small samples of real and simulated data in SPSS, SAS, Stata, and R and compared the results with those obtained through hand calculation using the raw computational formulas.

Anhedonia in Nicotine Dependence.

Prior findings indicate that trait anhedonia enhances the likelihood of becoming a tobacco smoker, and preliminary evidence suggests that smoking abstinence leads to anhedonic states in some individuals and situations, and nicotine administration reduces anhedonic states. Nevertheless, many vital questions exist concerning relationships between anhedonia and nicotine dependence, including situational and individual difference factors that may moderate the strength of these associations. This chapter provides a critical review of the literature assessing relationships of anhedonia to nicotine dependence and the effects of acute nicotine through the lenses of the Research Domain Criteria's (RDoC) Positive Valence Systems (NIMH, RDoC changes to the matrix (CMAT) workgroup update: proposed positive valence domain revisions.

The Ethical Use of Fit Indices in Structural Equation Modeling: Recommendations for Psychologists.

Fit indices provide helpful information for researchers to assess the fit of their structural equation models to their data. However, like many statistics and methods, researchers can misuse fit indices, which suggest the potential for questionable research practices that might arise during the analytic and interpretative processes. In the current paper, the author highlights two critical ethical dilemmas regarding the use of fit indices, which are (1) the selective reporting of fit indices and (2) using fit indices to justify poorly-fitting models.