
Howard TennenUConn Health Center · Department of Psychiatry
Howard Tennen
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487
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (487)
Objective: Egocentric social network analyses show that drinking habits of college students’ friends predict personal alcohol consumption. To date, most of this research focused on between-person, cross-sectional, or long-term longitudinal designs to evaluate these effects. This study used intensive longitudinal methods to examine episode-specific...
Objective: This study tested a highly individualized cognitive-behavioral coping skills treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD). Recent studies have indicated that coping skills training programs are not always effective. A possible explanation is that the training provided in these programs may not address the specific needs of the patient. The I...
Friendship-related stress is an understudied factor that may explain variation in coping-motivated and socially-motivated drinking among emerging adults. This study examined chronic and episodic friendship stress as predictors of drinking levels and motivations among emerging adults transitioning to post-college life. College drinkers reported drin...
Background:
Prior studies indicate that neuroactive steroids mediate some of alcohol's effects. Dutasteride, widely used to treat benign prostatic hypertrophy, is an inhibitor of 5-alpha reductase enzymes, which play a central role in the production of 5α-reduced neuroactive steroids. The purpose of this study was to test dutasteride's tolerabilit...
Background: Recent evidence indicates that alcohol and other substance co-use, compared to alcohol-only use, might be more closely associated with negative reinforcement processes, and thus more likely during periods of increased stress. The present study examined this possibility by using data from an intensive longitudinal (daily) study of colleg...
b> Introduction: Cognitive dysfunction or deficits are common in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). The current study systematically reviews and meta-analyzes multiple domains of cognitive impairment in patients with MDD. Methods: PubMed/MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, Embase, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched from i...
The management of the daily rhythm of work and childrearing, two central responsibilities of working fathers, has received limited research attention. Drawing from an expanded self‐regulation perspective, this study seeks to understand the within‐person depletion and compensation mechanisms that explain how fathers' daily work experiences spillover...
Research on posttraumatic growth has been marred by the ubiquity of retrospective perceived growth assessments that lack construct validity. However, one justification for assessing perceived growth is that such perceptions may be a catalyst for subsequent change. We examined this question using a measurement-burst design in a representative midlif...
The present study examined the mediating and moderating effects of affect-regulation (i.e., coping and enhancement) drinking motives in the relationship between eating disorder (ED) pathology and drinking outcomes. The sample included 419 undergraduate college students (52.0% female) who completed self-report questionnaire measures of ED pathology,...
Women who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) are disproportionately likely to engage in sexual risk behavior, including sex with a secondary partner (i.e., sex partners outside their primary relationship). Social disconnection has been identified as a social determinant of health that may enhance understanding of sex with a secondary...
Background: To examine whether individual differences in intensive longitudinal data-derived affective dynamics (i.e. positive and negative affect variability and inertia and positive affect-negative affect bipolarity) - posited to be indicative of emotion dysregulation - are uniquely related to drinking level and affect-regulation drinking motives...
Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...
Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...
Objective:
Research links approval-contingent self-worth to college drinking but has not differentiated social and solitary consumption. High approval-contingent self-worth individuals might drink socially to derive approval.
Methods:
In a sample of 943 undergraduates, approval-contingent self-worth and drinking motives were measured in an initi...
Existing data demonstrate reduced delta power during sleep in patients with depression and chronic pain. However, there has been little examination of the relationship between delta power and pain-reports, or pain-catastrophizing. We recruited female participants (n=111) with insomnia and temporomandibular disorder, and measured nocturnal and dayti...
Objective: To better understand how sleep is associated with alcohol consumption among college students, the present study tested whether last night’s sleep duration and current day fatigue were associated with being around others who were drinking that night and, if so, with alcohol consumption. Method: College student drinkers (N = 540; mean age...
Stress has been linked to increased alcohol use but how stress may increase drinking in social drinkers is not well understood. Negative reinforcement processes may explain this link but the role of specific motivational processes, such as craving, and how these motivational processes are altered by drinking have not been studied. The current study...
Objective:
This study examined the dynamic, real-time associations between partner involvement in diabetes self-care and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) metrics in adults with type 2 diabetes.
Methods:
Over one week, 63 participants wore Dexcom G4 CGMs and provided momentary reports of partner involvement in diabetes self-care five times per da...
Objective: Drink offers are related to increased alcohol consumption, which is linked to sexual activity among college students. However, offers of alcohol may increase the odds of sexual activity that night independent of the amount of alcohol consumed. Participants: 540 undergraduate students were recruited for a longitudinal study of daily exper...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of stress that may have increased drinking level overall and, more specifically, drinking to cope motivation. The current study tests whether specific domains of pandemic-related experiences are related to drinking to cope motivation and drinking level and whether drinking to cope motivation modera...
Expectancies for pain and pain relief are central to experimental models of placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia, and are a promising target for clinical intervention in patients with chronic pain. Affective states may play an important role in modulating the degree to which expectancies influence pain, broadening the opportunities for interve...
People with social anxiety disorder (SAD) are at increased risk for alcohol-related problems. Most research exploring social anxiety and alcohol use has examined negative drinking consequences, with less consideration of positive consequences—namely positive social experiences—that may reinforce alcohol use. In this daily diary study, we examined h...
Objective:
Systemic inflammation is commonly observed in idiopathic chronic pain conditions, including temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD). Trait positive affect (PA) is associated with lower inflammation in healthy controls, but those effects may be threatened by poor sleep. The associations between PA with proinflammatory cytokine activity an...
Objective: Social networks can be powerful determinants of drinking. Network Support (NS) treatment was designed to help persons with alcohol use disorder alter their social network to be more supportive of abstinence and less supportive of drinking. The present study was intended to determine how NS treatment altered behavior on a daily basis. It...
The majority of individuals with temporomandibular disorders (TMD) experience sleep disturbance, which can maintain and exacerbate chronic pain. However, the factors underlying the sleep-pain link have not been fully elucidated, especially beyond the laboratory. Sleep deprivation can induce threat interpretation bias, as well as impairment in posit...
Objectives:
We examined daily associations between drinking intentions and drinking behaviour and tested past drinking behaviour and current social environment as potential moderators of the daily intention-behaviour association. We expected both more frequent past drinking and being in a high drinking environment to weaken the intention-behaviour...
Interpersonal stress is a commonly reported drinking-related problem and evidence indicates that it is associated with drinking to cope (DTC) motivation. The preponderance of evidence for DTC motivation as a risk factor for increased interpersonal stress, however, comes mainly from studies examining between-person associations. Findings suggest tha...
Most individuals with temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) report experiencing sleep disturbance, which can maintain and exacerbate pain severity. However, the factors underlying the sleep-pain link, especially at the within-person level, have not been fully elucidated. Previous studies suggest that sleep disruption can induce biased attentional...
Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) are idiopathic orofacial pain conditions. Inflammation—particularly elevated circulating levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6)—is associated with pain symptoms. Prior work in healthy samples has shown that trait positive affect (PA) is associated with lower IL-6, but that poor sleep attenuates PA and elevates IL-6. Althou...
Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) is an idiopathic chronic pain condition and often associated with sleep disturbance. Although racial pain and sleep disparities have been observed in other pain populations, less is known about such disparities in TMD. Given that pain is strongly associated with sleep, Black individuals may experience compound...
Emotion regulation and interpersonal psychotherapies that do not require trauma memory processing have been shown to be effective in treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study used a novel method to assess in vivo outcomes in a randomized clinical trial with women (N = 147; ages 18-54; 61% of color; 94% low income) with full (79%) or...
Much is known about the types of strategies people use to regulate emotions. Less is known about individual differences that influence emotion regulation strategy selection. In this study, we tested the moderating role of negative emotion differentiation (NED; i.e., the ability to label and describe subtle differences among negative emotions) on th...
Background
Depression is thought to generate stressful life events. However, other internalizing symptoms such as anxiety or post-traumatic stress and individual difference variables such as personality traits and alcohol use may contribute to stressful life events. Whether stress generation is specific to depression or generalized to these other v...
Objective:
The current study examined the unique influences of romantic relationship status and episodic and chronic stress associated with relationships in predicting changes in alcohol consumption and drinking motivations from college to post-college life.
Method:
Moderate to heavy college student drinkers reported their drinking level and dri...
Objective:
This study was designed to test the hypothesis that an Individualized Assessment and Treatment Program (IATP) for cannabis use disorder (CUD) that utilized experience sampling (ES) data to individualize treatment would be more effective at eliciting adaptive coping responses in high-risk situations than a more conventional cognitive-beh...
In view of the importance of the need to belong in motivating behavior, we examined whether interpersonal and academic stress differentially influence social and solitary alcohol consumption and whether social and solitary alcohol consumption differentially predict next-day interpersonal and academic stress. Based on research suggesting that drinki...
This study examined whether daily stressors and continuously monitored glucose levels and glucose variability predict daily diabetes symptoms. Fifty Latinos with type 2 diabetes were randomized to either diabetes education (DE-only; N = 23) or DE plus stress management and relaxation training (DE + SMR; N = 32). After treatment, for 7 days they wor...
Objective:
Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we...
Previous research suggests that, even in college, parents influence the alcohol consumption of their children directly and indirectly through peers. However, research has not tested whether face-to-face interactions with parents buffer students against social influences on drinking. In the current study, 1168 undergraduate students selected 5 peopl...
Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we propose tha...
Although many college students view drinking as a means of gaining a community and being social, research has not established whether alcohol consumption influences students’ enjoyment and perceptions of how others view them or how this may differ based on the social or solitary nature of that consumption. The current study used online daily diary...
Evidence suggests that drinking cope (DTC) motivation becomes a greater risk factor for drinking-related problems as individuals progress through young adulthood. To test this, we examined how the effect of DTC motivation on a variety of drinking-related problems, controlling for drinking level, changed as individuals made the transition from colle...
Background
Spouses often attempt to influence patients' diabetes self-care. Spousal influence has been linked to beneficial health outcomes in some studies, but to negative outcomes in others.
Purpose
We aimed to clarify the conditions under which spousal influence impedes glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes. Spousal influence was hy...
Findings regarding the moderating influence of drinking motives on the association between affect and alcohol consumption have been inconsistent. The current study extended previous work on this topic by examining episode-specific coping, enhancement, conformity, and social drinking motives as moderators of the association between daytime experienc...
Despite the wealth of research on the effects of drinking norms on college students' alcohol consumption, researchers have not yet examined changes in drinking norms and their association with drinking level after students leave the college environment. The current study filled this gap by following students into postcollege life, measuring drinkin...
Daily levels of drinking to cope (DTC) have been found to be related to negative outcomes such as increased negative affect, and these effects vary across person. We examined whether daily-level effects of DTC motivation were related to two genetic polymorphisms (rs1360780 in the FKBP5 gene and 5-HTTLPR in SLC6A4) thought to be associated with mala...
The structure and psychometrics of daily self-report measures have only rarely been empirically tested. We developed the Daily Self-Report of Trauma-Related Sequelae (DSR-TRS), comprised of items assessing, in the past day: (1) posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms: (2) symptoms of affective-, behavioral-, relational-, somatic-, dissociativ...
Non-restorative sleep is a key diagnostic feature of the musculoskeletal pain disorder fibromyalgia, and is robustly associated with poor physical functioning, including activity interference. However, the mechanisms through which non-restorative sleep elicits activity interference among individuals with fibromyalgia at the within-person level rema...
Background:
Stress has been known to increase craving in individuals with Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD) and predict future alcohol relapse risk, but whether stress on a particular day affects craving on that day to impact prospective alcohol intake in the real world, particularly during early treatment and recovery, has not been studied thus far.
M...
Introduction:
Avoidant coping plays an important role in the maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, existing investigations have been limited in their assessment of coping as a static process - despite evidence that the coping strategies individuals use to manage stressors vary across time and contexts. Further, research ha...
This study tested a new approach to the treatment of cannabis use disorder (CUD). CUD is difficult to treat, and achieving abstinence is particularly difficult. The individualized assessment and treatment program (IATP) was intended to address this problem by providing a highly individualized approach to the training of coping skills most relevant...
Background: One-third of women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) are identified as having alcohol use problems. Yet, little research has examined factors that may increase the risk of alcohol use among this high-risk population. Objectives: This study overcomes limitations of previous research by using micro-longitudinal methods to exa...
Pain is a dynamic experience subject to substantial individual differences. Intensive longitudinal designs best capture the dynamical ebb and flow of the pain experience across time and settings. Thanks to the development of innovative and efficient data collection technologies, conducting an intensive longitudinal pain study has become increasingl...
The daily emotional experiences of adolescents are dynamic, vary significantly across individuals, and are crucial to their psychological adjustment, warranting a need to identify factors that promote adaptive affective responses to stressors and attenuated affective instability. The objective of this study, therefore, was to examine protective fac...
When pain repeatedly interferes with individuals’ daily activities, their psychosocial well-being is at risk. However, the mechanisms through which pain elicits pain interference in chronic pain patients’ daily lives remain unclear. Identifying a targetable mediating and moderating variable in the pain intensity-pain interference link is important...
Purpose/objective:
Previous studies have demonstrated important associations between personal resources and pain interference. Using latent profile analysis, the present study (a) identified subgroups of individuals with chronic pain who have different personal resource profiles; (b) explored sociodemographic differences among subgroups; and (c) e...
Emerging adults, particularly university students, who are physically active, drink more than their less physically active peers. We extended this between-person relationship to the within-person level of analysis, by examining whether students are more likely to drink on days when they exercise, and whether this within-person association remains a...
To further understand the role of drinking to cope (DTC) motivation in the development of drinking-related problems during young adulthood, we tested whether the association between episode-specific levels of nighttime DTC motivation and next-day negative affect and self-control depletion symptoms (SCDS) changed from college years to postcollege ye...
Objective: Stress management and relaxation (SMR) interventions can reduce symptoms of chronic disease and associated distress. However, there is little evidence that such interventions disrupt associations between symptoms and affect. This study examined whether SMR dampened the link between symptoms of hyperglycemia and proximal levels of affect....
Marijuana (MJ) is widely used among college students, with peak use between ages 18–22. Research suggests memory dysfunction in adolescent and young adult MJ users, but the neural correlates are unclear. We examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) response during a memory task among college students with varying degrees of MJ involveme...
Aims
To determine whether mechanisms of drinking behavior‐change that are targeted by specific treatments mediate the effects of Packaged Cognitive‐Behavior Therapy (PCBT) and Network Support (NS) on abstinence rates over 27 months.
Design
Secondary analysis of data from two Network Support Project randomized clinical trials (1, 2), in which parti...
Background
The hazardous effects of alcohol consumption on both hippocampus and memory have been well established. However, the longitudinal effects of ethanol on the developing brain and related consequences on memory are not well explored. Given the above, we investigated the longitudinal effects of college drinking on hippocampal volume in emerg...
This pilot randomized clinical trial tested an emotion regulation enhancement to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) with 29 college student problem drinkers with histories of complex trauma and current clinically significant traumatic stress symptoms. Participants received eight face-to-face sessions of manualized Internet-supported CBT for problem d...
Trauma exposure is linked to heavy drinking and drug use among college students. Extant research reveals positive associations between negative affect lability and both trauma exposure and alcohol use. This study aimed to extend past research by using daily diary methods to test whether (a) individuals with (versus without) trauma exposure experien...
Background: Heavy and/or harmful alcohol use while in college is a perennial and significant public health issue. Despite the plethora of cross-sectional research suggesting deleterious effects of alcohol on the brain, there is a lack of literature investigating the longitudinal effects of alcohol consumption on the adolescent brain. We aim to prob...
An essential component of achieving, restoring, and sustaining psychological well-being is the ability to adapt to the challenges and obstacles of life. In this chapter, we review the literature on coping and emotion regulation as processes by which individuals respond to situational demands, and in particular, negative events. We first define copi...
The objectives of this study were to assess within-person hypotheses regarding temporal cognition-pain associations: (1) do morning pain flares predict changes in two afternoon adaptive and maladaptive pain-related cognitions, and (2) do these changes in afternoon cognitions predict changes in end-of-day pain reports, which in turn, carry over to p...
Background: Expectancies of the positive and negative effects of drinking have been posited to be important moderators of the association between social anxiety and alcohol use. However, investigations of these interactive effects have not examined the moderating role of within-person daily variation in such expectancies. Methods: We used a multi-y...
Introduction
Discrepancies between objective and subjective sleep measures are common, however, they may be amplified within chronic pain populations. We explored factors hypothesized to contribute to discrepancies between self-report and objective sleep measures (i.e., actigraphy; polysomnography) in Temporomandibular Joint Disorder (TMJD), a chro...
Objective:
This study investigated between-person and within-person associations among mean levels and variability in affect, diabetes self-care behaviors, and continuously monitored glucose in Latinos with type 2 diabetes.
Methods:
Fifty participants (mean age=57.8 [SD=11.7] years, 74% women, mean A1c=8.3% [SD=1.5%]) wore a 'blinded' continuous...
Although psychological research on sport injury has long focused on negative responses to injury, investigators have begun to explore positive consequences as well. This study examined adversarial growth longitudinally after anterior cruciate ligament surgery and rehabilitation. Participants (N = 108) completed questionnaires measuring (a) aspects...
Background
Alcohol and marijuana are the two most abused substances in US colleges. However, research on the combined influence (cross sectional or longitudinal) of these substances on academic performance is currently scant.
Methods
Data were derived from the longitudinal 2-year Brain and Alcohol Research in College Students (BARCS) study includi...
Alcohol and marijuana use across each semester.
(TIF)
Frequency and missingness of key variables included in the linear mixed model.
(DOCX)
Previous research suggests that for people living with chronic pain, pain expectancy can undermine access to adaptive resources and functioning. We tested and replicated the unique effect of pain expectancy on subsequent pain through two daily diary studies. We also extended previous findings by examining cognitive and affective antecedents of pain...
Impulsivity is a complex, multidimensional construct with prior theoretically and empirically derived characterizations of impulsivity-related behaviors varying considerably among studies. We assessed college students (N = 440) longitudinally with five impulsivity-related self-reported assessments and three computerized behavioral measures. Using a...
Objective: Traditional college students are at a critical juncture in the development of prospective memory (PM). Their brains are vulnerable to the effects of alcohol. Method: There were 123 third and fourth year college students, 19-23 years old, who completed the Self-Rating Effects of Alcohol (SREA), Modified Timeline Follow-back (TFLB), Brief...
Background and aims:
Alcohol and marijuana are widely used among college students. Emotion regulation strategies have been linked to alcohol and marijuana use, but little attention has been devoted to modeling the directionality of these associations. The aims of the current study were to test whether (a) daytime use of emotion regulation strategi...