Faculty Bibliography

In signaled active avoidance (SigAA), rats learn to suppress Pavlovian freezing and emit actions to remove threats and prevent footshocks. SigAA is critical for understanding aversively motivated instrumental behavior and anxiety-related active coping. However, with standard protocols ∼25% of rats exhibit high freezing and poor avoidance. This has dampened enthusiasm for the paradigm and stalled progress. We demonstrate that reducing shock imminence with long-duration warning signals leads to greater freezing suppression and perfect avoidance in all subjects. This suggests that instrumental SigAA mechanisms evolved to cope with distant harm and protocols that promote inflexible Pavlovian reactions are poorly designed to study avoidance.

The worldwide corona virus (COVID-19) has had profound effects on all aspects of life: physical health, the ability to travel locally or to more distant destinations, material and financial resources, and psychosocial wellbeing. Couples, families, and communities and individual persons in those relationships have struggled to cope with emerging depression, anxiety, and trauma, and the rise of relational conflict. In this article, we suggest that the existential nature of the pandemic's challenges require more than just the usual psychosocial interventions. We propose a taxonomy of responses to foster coping and resilience - "Reaching Up, Down, In, and Around". "Reaching Up" includes accessing spiritual, religious, and ethical values. "Reaching Down" includes ideas and practices that foster a revised relationship with the Earth and its resources, and that engage families to participate in activities that aid the Earth's recovery from decades of human-caused damage. "Reaching In" represents a turn towards experiences available in the mind and in shared minds in relationships that provide pleasure, excitement, joy, and peace, given that external sources of these emotions are of limited availability due to quarantine. "Reaching Around" involves reframing the mandate for "social distancing" as fostering social connection and support while maintaining physical distancing. The challenges for family therapists, whose practices are confined largely to online therapy, and who are struggling with the same fears and constraints as those persons they are attempting to help, are also discussed.

Recent anecdotal and scientific reports have provided evidence of a link between COVID-19 and chemosensory impairments such as anosmia. However, these reports have downplayed or failed to distinguish potential effects on taste, ignored chemesthesis, and generally lacked quantitative measurements. Here, we report the development, implementation and initial results of a multi-lingual, international questionnaire to assess self-reported quantity and quality of perception in three distinct chemosensory modalities (smell, taste, and chemesthesis) before and during COVID-19. In the first 11 days after questionnaire launch, 4039 participants (2913 women, 1118 men, 8 other, ages 19-79) reported a COVID-19 diagnosis either via laboratory tests or clinical assessment. Importantly, smell, taste and chemesthetic function were each significantly reduced compared to their status before the disease. Difference scores (maximum possible change ±100) revealed a mean reduction of smell (-79.7 ± 28.7, mean ± SD), taste (-69.0 ± 32.6), and chemesthetic (-37.3 ± 36.2) function during COVID-19. Qualitative changes in olfactory ability (parosmia and phantosmia) were relatively rare and correlated with smell loss. Importantly, perceived nasal obstruction did not account for smell loss. Furthermore, chemosensory impairments were similar between participants in the laboratory test and clinical assessment groups. These results show that COVID-19-associated chemosensory impairment is not limited to smell, but also affects taste and chemesthesis. The multimodal impact of COVID-19 and lack of perceived nasal obstruction suggest that SARS-CoV-2 infection may disrupt sensory-neural mechanisms.

Background Anosmia is a recognized symptom of COVID-19, but the relationship of SARS-CoV-2 exposure with olfactory dysfunction remains enigmatic. This report adds unique data from healthy students tested as the virus emerged locally. Methods Psychometrically validated measures assessed odor detection, identification and hedonics in healthy university students. Data from asymptomatic students (N=22), tested as SARS-CoV-2 unknowingly emerged locally, were compared to students tested just prior to local virus transmission (N=25), and our normative sample (N=272) tested over the previous 4 years. Results The exposed cohort demonstrated significantly reduced odor detection sensitivity compared to the students in the prior group (P=.01; d=0.77; CI 0.17, 1.36), with a distribution skewed towards less detection sensitivity (P=.03). Categorically, the exposed group was significantly more likely to have hyposmia (OR=7.7; CI, 3.1, 19.4), particularly the subset assessed in the final week before campus closure (OR=13.6; CI, 3.4, 35.7). The exposed group also rated odors as less unpleasant (P<.001, CLES=0.77, CI, 0.51, 1.56) and showed a similarly skewed distribution (P=.005). The groups had similar odor identification performance. Conclusion Psychometric measures of odor detection sensitivity and hedonics may detect early SARS-CoV-2 exposure in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic persons with normal odor identification. Viral detection by nasal associated lymphoid tissue is known to trigger systemic immune effects, but its activation may also reduce smell sensitivity and shift perception of the environment towards unpleasant, increasing the social isolation that may mitigate viral infection or transmission. Regular testing of odor detection and hedonics may have value for identifying regional viral exposure.

The United States is in the midst of a children's mental health crisis, with rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide increasing precipitously. Evidence produced by children's mental health services research can help address this crisis by informing public policy decisions about service delivery, system design, and investments in the social determinants of mental health. Unfortunately, the policy impact of children's mental health services research is limited because evidence often fails to reach policy makers, be responsive to their needs, resonate with their worldview, or reflect the contexts in which they make decisions. Dissemination strategies-defined as the development and targeted distribution of messages and materials about research evidence pertaining to a specific issue or intervention-can help address these challenges. Yet, limited integrated guidance exists to inform the design of such strategies. This article addresses this need by synthesizing the results of empirical studies to provide guidance about how to enhance the dissemination of children's mental health services research to policy makers. The article provides four recommendations about the content of policy maker-focused dissemination materials, discusses how strategic framing and message tailoring can increase the chances that evidence is persuasive to policy makers, and highlights strategies to ensure that evidence reaches policy makers.

LAY ABSTRACT/UNASSIGNED:Although mental health problems are common in autism, relatively little is known about their stability and the factors that influence their persistence or change over the life-course. To address this, we use data from the Special Needs and Autism Project (SNAP) cohort studied at three time-points from 12 to 23 years. Using the parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) domains of conduct, emotional, and ADHD symptoms, we evaluated the role of child, family, and contextual characteristics on these three trajectories. Symptoms decreased significantly over time for all three domains, but many participants still scored above the published disorder cutoffs. Individuals showed high levels of persistence. Higher initial adaptive function and language levels predicted a greater decline in conduct and ADHD symptoms. In contrast, higher language functioning was associated with higher levels of emotional symptoms, as was lower levels of autism symptom severity and higher parental education. Those with higher neighborhood deprivation had higher initial conduct problems but a steeper decline over time. Our findings highlight that it may be possible to accurately predict mental health trajectories over this time period, which could help parents and carers in planning and help professionals target resources more efficiently.