The winners of the American Psychological Foundation’s 2014 Visionary Grants: (left to right) Ryan Hill, Dara Babinski, PhD, Naama de la Fontaine, PhD, Arpana "Annie" Gupta, PhD and Anne Krendl, PhD. Not pictured: Scott Ross, PhD, Laura Taylor, PhD and Casey LaDuke.
Ryan Hill, a doctoral student at Florida International University, is developing a suicide-prevention program that aims to reach teens and young adults early, to get them into treatment before they move from the "mild-risk" into the "high-risk" category for suicide. To do so, he's designed a screening tool to identify people who feel like they are a burden on others — an early suicide risk sign — and teach them to address and overcome those thoughts.
Hill wanted to test his treatment module, but until last year, he thought that he would only be able to afford to run a very small trial, one that might not catch a small but meaningful positive effect size. Then, in July, he found out that he had won a 2014 Visionary Grant from the American Psychological Foundation (APF). The grant allowed him to double his sample size to 80 teens and improve participant retention by offering participants a small payment.
"That's why the Visionary money is so important," Hill says. "I'm expecting a small effect size, and without the Visionary money I wouldn't have been able to find it."
Hill was one of eight recipients of the 2014 grant program. The program, which grants up to $20,000 to each winner, funds innovative research and intervention projects that use psychology to solve social problems. Focus areas include exploring the connection between behavior and physical health, reducing stigma and prejudice, understanding and preventing violence, and addressing people's psychological needs in the aftermath of disaster.
Along with Hill, four of the other winners are also aiming to help children and teens. Dara Babinski, PhD, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, is developing an intervention to help adolescent girls with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) improve their social skills. Because ADHD is more common among boys than girls, most treatment models are based on research with male samples, Babinski says.
"It's not clear these models are appropriate for girls," she says, especially when new research suggests that girls with ADHD suffer more social problems — such as peer rejection — than boys with ADHD do. Babinski will test a group treatment model that includes social skills training and addresses such issues as body image and depression. She's using the Visionary funds to run a pilot study with six teens and then plans to expand to a larger, 20-person study.
Across the country, Scott Ross, PhD, an assistant professor at Utah State University, is testing a school-based program to prevent bullying in high schools. The program is based on the idea that peer attention reinforces bullying. So Ross's program attempts to remove that reinforcement by teaching all of the students in a school simple ways to respond to bullying without encouraging it. The program also involves organizing a student leadership team to run a Web-based peer-recognition program in which students can nominate peers who have responded appropriately to bullying to receive an award.
"It's that simple," Ross says. "And from the small amount of data we've collected before, we're getting good results."
Ross and his colleagues have previously tested a similar program in elementary schools. Now, the Visionary funds are allowing them to adapt it to high school students.
Bullying can affect all students. But the particular stressors faced by immigrant and refugee youth are the focus of research by Laura Taylor, PhD. Now a lecturer (assistant professor) at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Taylor had been at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In her Visionary Grant-funded study, she is working with teens at three Greensboro community centers that offer services for newcomers to the U.S., including after-school tutoring, language instruction and citizenship classes. Sixty teens will keep daily diaries of both their negative, stressful daily interactions and the positive, constructive ones. Taylor is interested in how these daily interactions affect the teens' development and relations across different immigrant and refugee groups.
"APF enabled me to do this research," she says. "As an early career researcher in a tough state budget crisis, this study would not have been possible without APF's support."
Meanwhile, at Yale University, postdoctoral associate Naama de la Fontaine, PhD, is hoping to help young victims of violence by evaluating a new training method for police officers on how to respond to violent situations that involve children. She will be assessing the current state of practice at six police departments across the country, and then conducting a post-training evaluation to see how the training changed officers' knowledge, attitudes and behavior.
"The police are often the first to respond to violence," de la Fontaine says. "This programs aims to capitalize on the opportunity for police officers to identify and intervene early with children and families exposed to violence."
Visionary award grantee Casey LaDuke is also studying violence, but from a very different angle. LaDuke, a doctoral student in clinical neuropsychology and forensic psychology at Drexel University, is interested in using neuropsychological measures to help legal decision makers such as judges, correctional administrators, parole and probation officers, and others determine violence risk — in other words, to figure out which prison inmates are likely to become violent in prison or after their release. For his study, he will recruit 100 participants at a New Jersey correctional facility. LaDuke will administer a series of neuropsychological tests — such as tests of executive function, verbal fluency and impulsivity — to each inmate when they arrive, and then will follow up to assess violent and antisocial behavior upon their release, six months later and one year later.
"There are a few studies that have looked at this retrospectively," he says. "I'm carrying that torch forward and doing it prospectively."
Finally, this year's other two Visionary grantees, Arpana "Annie" Gupta, PhD, and Anne Krendl, PhD, are both using brain imaging — one to study mental health stigma and one to study obesity.
Gupta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, is working with a team of gastroenterologists, psychologists and biostatisticians there to explore the seemingly unlikely connections among gut bacteria, the brain and obesity, and how sex and race differences affect those connections. Previous research has shown that differences in people's gut bacteria may affect their propensity to obesity, Gupta says, and that the effect may be moderated by the gut bacteria's effects on brain structure. In her study, Gupta will compare gut microbiota from stool samples, and structural and diffusion tensor imaging brain signatures from obese and normal weight African-American and non-Hispanic white American, and male and female participants, to investigate sex and race differences in the interaction between the gut microbiome and the brain.
"The goal is to come up with a comprehensive brain-gut model that provides a reliable biomarker related to food addiction behavior in obesity," Gupta says. "That could eventually lead to more personalized and individualized treatment for this subset of obese individuals."
Krendl, an assistant professor at Indiana University, is using a neuroscience approach to tease out how stigmas about mental illness affect attitudes toward mental health treatment and how those stigmas can be reduced. In her brain-imaging study, she's looking at how participants' brains respond to the stigma associated with depression. She's particularly interested in how the participants' regulatory and affective systems interact and how that response correlates with their attitudes toward mental health treatment.
"My goal is to ultimately be able to come up with some way of easily identifying what the main drivers are for stigma for an individual, and come up with interventions targeted to them," she says.
For more information on the Visionary grants, go to APFopens in new window funding or contact APF Program Officer Samantha Edington or (202) 336-5984.
