Emily B Ansell

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Biobehavioral Health

Objective The neurocognitive risk mechanisms predicting divergent outcomes likely differ between men and women who use cannabis recreationally. Increasingly, the use of descriptive distributions including the ex-Gaussian has been applied to draw stronger inferences about neurocognitive health in clinical populations. The current project examines wh...

Over 75% of young adults who use cannabis also report drinking alcohol, leading to increased risks that include impaired cognition, substance use disorders, and more heavy and frequent substance use. Studies suggest that subjective responses to either alcohol or cannabis can serve as a valuable indicator for identifying individuals at risk of prolo...

Neuroendocrine tolerance to alcohol, i.e., a blunted cortisol response to alcohol, has been linked to Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VmPFC) alcohol cue reactivity and relapse risk in severe Alcohol Use Disorders (AUDs), but its role in the development of AUDs is not clear. Recent work suggests that blunted cortisol responses to alcohol cues in ind...

The experience of childhood maltreatment is associated with greater psychological difficulties in survivors of maltreatment and their later children. While this intergenerational pattern is well-established, little is known about the mechanisms leading to negative outcomes in the children of maltreated parents. Moreover, many studies to date have f...

Background/purpose: Cannabis tolerance breaks, or T-breaks, are believed to benefit persons who use cannabis (PUCs) by decreasing tolerance levels to cannabis. However, no prior research, to our knowledge, has compared the effects of T-breaks and other use breaks on cannabis use patterns and outcomes. The current study examined whether the occurre...

Objective and design: Preclinical studies suggest learned immune system responses to alcohol cues and consumption may contribute to alcohol's pharmacodynamic properties and/or Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) pathogenesis. Mechanistically, these immune alterations may be associated with increased craving and alcohol consumption, both acutely and over ti...

The current study examines the associations between interpersonal complementarity and affective reactions during social interactions in daily life, as well as contextual moderators of these associations. This research aims to understand how satisfaction/frustration of interpersonal motives (operationalized as interpersonal complementarity) impacts...

Background Simultaneous or concurrent use (co‐use) of alcohol and cannabis is associated with greater use of both substances over time, academic difficulties, more severe substance use consequences, and adverse impacts on cognitive functioning than the use of a single substance or no substance use. This study examined potential neural mechanisms un...

Purpose of Review Given increases in the rates of alcohol and cannabis co-use among adolescents and young adults, this review aims to summarize literature on the effects of alcohol and cannabis co-use on neurocognitive functioning, brain structure, and brain function. Recent Findings The limited existing studies examining concurrent, recent, and l...

Background As diverse cannabis use patterns among recreational users continue to evolve, little is known about how modes of use may contribute to long-term risk. The current study examined the association between types and number of modes of cannabis used over a 21-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) period with hazardous cannabis use and con...

Few studies have examined how changes in sexual identity impact trajectories of depressive symptoms and emotion regulation difficulties. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by examining these associations over a three-year period in a community sample of adolescents (N = 177; Mage = 12.56; SD = 0.60; nmale = 95). Multilevel model...

Emotion-driven impulse control difficulties are associated with negative psychological outcomes. Extant research suggests that high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) may be indicative of emotion-driven impulse control difficulties and potentially moderated by negative emotion. In the current study, 248 eleven- to 14-year-olds and their pare...

Background: Individuals who engage in alcohol and cannabis co-occurring use are at heightened risk for negative outcomes than individuals who only use alcohol or only use cannabis, but far less is known about implications of alcohol and cannabis co-occurring use for prescription drug misuse (PDM). Objectives: This study aimed to (1) identify whethe...

Background Reward motivation has been cross‐sectionally correlated with adolescent alcohol use, but the temporal nature of this relationship remains unclear. This project sought to determine whether adolescent alcohol initiation longitudinally predicted changes in reward motivation and behavioral inhibition from early to middle adolescence, and exp...

Major depressive disorder begins to increase in early adolescence and is associated with significant impairment (e.g., suicidality). Difficulties in emotion regulation (ER) have been associated with depressive symptoms; however, little research has examined this relation over time beginning in early adolescence. Starting when they were 11-14 years...

Objective: One in 5 college students use substances such as cannabis and/or alcohol to help sleep. Despite this high prevalence of sleep aid use, there remains a lack of research on the potential day-to-day sleep- and substance-related consequences. The current study examined associations of cannabis and alcohol sleep aid use with subsequent sleep...

Objectives Breast cancer survivors report significant cognitive impairments post treatment, particularly following chemotherapy. Depression may also occur post treatment and may partially mediate the effects of cancer treatment on cognition. Additionally, physical activity has been shown to mitigate treatment effects on cognition and depression. Th...

The pack-years formula is a widely used estimate of lifetime tobacco smoking exposure, and greater pack-years have been associated with greater risk of chronic pain development and poorer pain-related outcomes among smokers with chronic pain. The pathophysiology underlying these associations is poorly understood. Regular tobacco smoking exposure ma...

Parenting is a critical factor in adolescent social‐emotional development, with maladaptive parenting leading to risk for the development of psychopathology. However, the emotion‐related brain mechanisms underlying the influence of parenting on psychopathology symptoms are unknown. The present study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging an...

Importance: Cannabinoid drugs are widely used as analgesics, but experimental pain studies have produced mixed findings. The analgesic properties of cannabinoids remain unclear. Objective: To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between cannabinoid drug administration and experimental pain outcomes in studies of healthy...

The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is a method in which trained observers continuously code the dominance and warmth of individuals who interact with one another in dyads. This method has significant promise for assessing dynamic interpersonal processes. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of individual sex,...

Examines impacts of familiarity, conflict, and sex on continuously assessed behavior in dyadic interactions using the Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics across several samples. Establishes norms and basic psychometrics for CAID while also informing factors that influence interpersonal behavior.

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that levels of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines are dysfunctional in alcohol dependence. Moreover, some initial findings demonstrate that these adaptations in peripheral inflammation may contribute to motivation for alcohol and problem drinking via possible direct effects or the indirect eff...

Background: Prior studies have found that social rejection is associated with increases in negative affect, distress, and hostility. Fewer studies, however, have examined the impact of social rejection on alcohol use, and no known studies have tested whether the impact of social rejection by close others differs from social rejection by acquaintan...

Individuals with a personality disorder (PD) tend to experience more negative life events (NLEs) than positive life events (PLEs). In community samples, the Five Factor Model of personality (FFM) predicts both positive and negative life events. The present research examined whether FFM normal personality traits were associated with positive and neg...

Recent theories of stress reactivity posit that, when stressed, individuals tend to seek out opportunities to affiliate with and nurture others to prevent or mitigate the negative effects of stress. However, few studies have tested empirically the role of prosocial behavior in reducing negative emotional responses to stress. The current analyses us...

High comorbidity between personality disorders and alcohol use disorders appears related to individual differences in underlying personality dimensions of behavioral undercontrol and affective dysregulation. However, very little is known about how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition; DSM-5) Section III trait model...

Objective: This report examines the relationship of DSM-IV borderline personality disorder (BPD) to anxiety disorders using data on the reciprocal effects of improvement or worsening of BPD and anxiety disorders over the course of 10 years. Method: We reliably and prospectively assessed borderline patients (n = 164) with DSM-IV-defined co-occurr...

Identifying personality disorder (PD) risk factors for suicide attempts is an important consideration for research and clinical care alike. However, most prior research has focused on single PDs or categorical PD diagnoses without considering unique influences of different PDs or of severity (sum) of PD criteria on the risk for suicide-related outc...

Marijuana use is increasingly prevalent among young adults. While research has found adverse effects associated with marijuana use within experimentally controlled laboratory settings, it is unclear how recreational marijuana use affects day-to-day experiences in users. The present study sought to examine the effects of marijuana use on within-pers...

The core symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) often lead to interpersonal difficulties. However, little research has explored interpersonal functioning in OCPD. This study examined interpersonal problems, interpersonal sensitivities, empathy, and systemizing, the drive to analyze and derive underlying rules for systems, in a...

Cumulative adversity (CA) increases stress sensitivity and risk of adverse health outcomes. However, neural mechanisms underlying these associations in humans remain unclear. To understand neural responses underlying the link between cumulative adversity and adverse health symptoms, the current study assessed brain activity during stress and neutra...

Researchers examining personality typologies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have consistently identified 3 groups: low pathology, internalizing, and externalizing. These groups have been found to predict functional severity and psychiatric comorbidity. In this study, we employed Latent Profile Analysis to compare this previously establishe...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that personality pathology is, at its core, fundamentally interpersonal. The authors review the proposed DSM-5 Section 3 redefinition of personality pathology involving self and interpersonal dysfunction, which they regard as a substantial improvement over the DSM-IV (and Section 2) definition. They not...

Objective: Research has demonstrated poor agreement between clinician-assigned personality disorder (PD) diagnoses and those generated by self-report questionnaires and semistructured diagnostic interviews. No research has compared prospectively the predictive validity of these methods. We investigated the convergence of these 3 diagnostic methods...

The impact of pathological narcissism on psychotherapy has seldom been investigated empirically, despite extensive clinical theory proposing that highly narcissistic individuals should be reluctant to engage in treatment and derive smaller benefits from therapy. In this study, we investigate the relationship between scores on the Pathological Narci...

This cross-sectional study examined the associations between neighborhood-level socioeconomic-status (NSES), and psychosocial functioning and personality pathology among 335 adults drawn from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study. Participants belonged to four personality disorder (PD) diagnostic groups: Avoidant, Borderline, S...

Objective: The aim of the present study was to explore associations between specific interpersonal constructs and the developmental progression of behaviors leading to binge eating disorder (BED). Method: Eighty-four consecutively evaluated, treatment-seeking obese (body mass index ≥30 kg/m(2)) men and women with BED were assessed with structure...

This study examines the history of childhood maltreatment and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) symptoms in mothers whose children were removed from the home by Child Protective Services (CPS) to identify potential targets for future intervention efforts. Forty-one mothers of children removed from the home due to abuse and/or neglect and 58 com...

The stress-vulnerability model of addiction predicts that environmental factors, such as cumulative stress, will result in individual adaptations that decrease self-control, increase impulsivity, and increase risk for addiction. Impulsivity and cumulative stress are risk factors for tobacco smoking that are rarely examined simultaneously in researc...

To examine prospectively the natural course of bulimia nervosa (BN) and eating disorder not-otherwise-specified (EDNOS) and test for the effects of stressful life events (SLE) on relapse after remission from these eating disorders. 117 female patients with BN (N = 35) or EDNOS (N = 82) were prospectively followed for 72 months using structured inte...

Whereas previous interpersonal research in depression has frequently used self-reports, patients' impact on others is rarely analyzed. We analyzed impacts of 180 depressed psychotherapy outpatients out of 832 diagnostically heterogeneous patients as rated by their significant others. Depressed patients were perceived as more submissive, hostile-sub...

Stress and impulsivity contribute to alcohol use, and stress may also act via impulsivity to increase drinking behavior. Impulsivity represents a multi-faceted construct and self-report and behavioral assessments may effectively capture distinct clinically relevant factors. The present research investigated whether aspects of impulsivity mediate th...

Cumulative adversity and stress are associated with risk of psychiatric disorders. While basic science studies show repeated and chronic stress effects on prefrontal and limbic neurons, human studies examining cumulative stress and effects on brain morphology are rare. Thus, we assessed whether cumulative adversity is associated with differences in...

This study examined the interpersonal model of binge eating (Wilfley et al., Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Group, New York: Basic Books, 2000; Wilfley et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry, 8, 713-721, 2002; Elliott et al., Behav Res Ther, 48, 424-428, 2010) which posits that interpersonal problems lead to negative affect which, in turn, triggers disordere...

Several conceptual models have been considered for the assessment of personality pathology in DSM-5. This study sought to extend our previous findings to compare the long-term predictive validity of three such models: the five-factor model (FFM), the schedule for nonadaptive and adaptive personality (SNAP), and DSM-IV personality disorders (PDs). A...

The identification of reliable predictors of course in major depressive disorder (MDD) has been difficult. Evidence suggests that the co-occurrence of personality pathology is associated with longer time to MDD remission. Interpersonal pathoplasticity, the mutually influencing nonetiological relationship between psychopathology and interpersonal tr...

We examined the predictive power of the self-harm subscale of the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP) to identify suicide attempters in the Collaborative Longitudinal Study of Personality Disorders (CLPS). The SNAP, a self-report personality inventory, was administered to 733 CLPS participants at baseline, of whom 701 (96%) had...

Personality traits may provide underlying risk factors for and/or sequelae to substance use disorders (SUDs). In this study Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP) traits were compared in a clinical sample (N=704, age 18-45) with current, past, or no historical alcohol or non-alcohol substance use disorders (AUD and NASUD) as asses...

Previous research on aversive interpersonal behavior has provided limited links between interpersonal sensitivities and comprehensive models of personality and social behavior. Study 1 (N = 1,336) of this article demonstrated that interpersonal sensitivities can be mapped onto the interpersonal circumplex and that people generally find others' beha...

Despite a general consensus that dimensional models are superior to the categorical representations of personality disorders in DSM-IV, proposals for how to depict personality pathology dimensions vary substantially. One important question involves how to separate clinical severity from the style of expression through which personality pathology ma...

This study prospectively examined the natural clinical course of six anxiety disorders over 7 years of follow-up in individuals with personality disorders (PDs) and/or major depressive disorder. Rates of remission, relapse, new episode onset and chronicity of anxiety disorders were examined for specific associations with PDs. Participants were 499...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is traditionally considered chronic and intractable. To compare the course of BPD's psychopathology and social function with that of other personality disorders and with major depressive disorder (MDD) over 10 years. A collaborative study of treatment-seeking, 18- to 45-year-old patients followed up with standa...

Findings from several large-scale, longitudinal studies over the last decade have challenged the long-held assumption that personality disorders (PDs) are stable and enduring. However, the findings, including those from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study (CLPS; Gunderson et al., 2000), rely primarily on results from semistru...

Childhood maltreatment is a risk factor for eating disorder and negative/depressive affect appears to mediate this relation. However, the specific elements of eating- and body-related psychopathology that are influenced by various forms of childhood maltreatment remain unclear, and investigations among adolescents and men/boys have been limited. Th...

Personality traits may provide underlying risk factors for and/or sequelae to substance use disorders (SUDs). In this study Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP) traits were compared in a clinical sample (N=704, age 18–45) with current, past, or no historical alcohol or non-alcohol substance use disorders (AUD and NASUD) as asses...

Two studies evaluated the validity of the interpersonal scales, Dominance (DOM) and Warmth (WRM), from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991, 2007) to measure the 2 dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex (IPC). In Study 1, 114 college freshmen completed the PAI and the Interpersonal Adjectives Scale (IAS; Wiggins, 1995). In Stu...

To examine prospectively the course of major depressive disorder (MDD) and to test for the moderating effects of personality disorder (PD) comorbidity on relapse after remission from an episode of MDD. Participants were 303 patients (196 women and 107 men) with current DSM-IV-diagnosed MDD at baseline enrollment in the Collaborative Longitudinal Pe...

This study examined evidence for personality variability in adolescents with eating disorder features in light of previous evidence that personality variability in adult women with eating disorder symptoms carries important clinical implications. Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory personality data from adolescent girls with disturbed eating who w...

revious research on aversive interpersonal behavior has provided limited links between interpersonal sensitivities and comprehensive models of personality and social behavior. Study 1 (N = 1,336) of this article demonstrated that interpersonal sensitivities can be mapped onto the interpersonal circumplex and that people generally find others' behav...

Many personality assessment inventories provide gender-specific norms to allow comparison of an individual's standing relative to others of the same gender. In some cases, this means that an identical raw score produces standardized scores that differ notably depending on whether the respondent is male or female. Thus, an important question is whet...

The study's aims are to explore ethnic differences in rates of adverse childhood experiences and lifetime traumatic events and in rates of psychiatric disorders for patients exposed to similar traumas. Rates of these events and rates of major depressive disorder, posttraumatic stress, substance use, and borderline personality disorders were compare...

This study sought to confirm a multi-factor model of Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) in a Hispanic outpatient sample and to explore associations of the OCPD factors with aggression, depression, and suicidal thoughts. One hundred and thirty monolingual, Spanish-speaking participants were recruited from a community mental health cent...

Although stability and pervasive inflexibility are general criteria for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) personality disorders (PDs), borderline PD (BPD) is characterized by instability in several domains, including interpersonal behavior, affect, and identity. The authors h...

The convergent and discriminant validity of Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits with concurrent and prospective social, work, and recreational dysfunction was assessed in a large, longitudinal clinical sample. Consistent with five factor theoretical expectations, neuroticism is broadly related to dysfunction across domains; extraversion is p...

The construct of narcissism is inconsistently defined across clinical theory, social-personality psychology, and psychiatric diagnosis. Two problems were identified that impede integration of research and clinical findings regarding narcissistic personality pathology: (a) ambiguity regarding the assessment of pathological narcissism vs. normal narc...

Although Passive Aggressive personality disorder (PAPD) plays an important role in many theories of personality pathology, it was consigned to the appendix of the fourth edition of the DSM. The scientific basis of this decision has been questioned, but several controversies persist regarding PAPD, including its structure, content validity, overlap...

Evaluation of the validity of personality disorder (PD) diagnostic constructs is important for the impending revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Prior factor analytic studies have tested these constructs in cross-sectional studies, and models have been replicated longitudinally, but no study has tested a constrain...

To examine 1-, 2-, and 3-factor model structures through confirmatory analytic procedures for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) criteria in patients with binge eating disorder (BED). Participants were consecutive outpatients (n = 263) with binge eating dis...

It is commonly believed that some features of borderline personality disorder (BPD) improve as individuals reach their late 30s and 40s. This study examined age-related change in borderline criteria and functional impairment, testing the hypothesis that older age would be associated with relatively more improvement than younger age. A total of 216...