Jillian M. Rung

• Ph.D.
• Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Florida

Although crowdsourcing platforms are widely used in substance-use research, it is unclear what percentage of participants use substances at the time of participation and how this might affect data quality, behavioral outcomes, or decision making. We conducted a secondary analysis of data collected on MTurk for a two-session, within-subject experime...

Study Objectives Insomnia has substantial and wide-ranging negative effects on clinical and functional outcomes and on health care expenditures, yet few individuals receive gold-standard insomnia treatment. The current article examines provider and patient outcomes associated with real-world implementation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomn...

Study Objectives Insomnia has profound negative effects on behavioral health, physical health, and functional domains. Leveraging claims data from one of the nation’s largest payor-provider systems, the current study examined the real-world prevalence of insomnia, comorbidity of insomnia with behavioral health and other sleep disorders, and the imp...

Background The clinical outcomes of diabetes can be influenced by primary care providers’ (PCP) treatment approaches. This study explores the association between PCP approaches to management and performance measured by established diabetes metrics and related costs. Methods In phase one, Electronic Medical Records were used to extract diabetes rel...

Background The clinical outcomes of diabetes can be influenced by primary care providers’ (PCP) practices. This study explores the association between PCP practices and performance measured by established diabetes metrics and related costs. Methods Electronic medical records were used to gather diabetes metrics derived from the Healthcare Effective...

To ensure good quality delay discounting (DD) data in research recruiting via crowdsourcing platforms, including attention checks within DD tasks have become common. These attention checks are typically identical in format to the task questions but have one sensical answer (e.g., “Would you prefer $0 now or $100 in a month?”). However, the validity...

Background and objectives: Adverse events during childhood increase the risk for the development of substance use disorders (SUDs). This study examined the association between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and SUD treatment response. Methods: This cohort analysis included data from longitudinal clinical assessments extracted from the reco...

Alcohol use in the U.S. continues to be a prevalent behavior with the potential for far-reaching personal and public health consequences. Risk factors for problematic drinking include negative affect and impulsive decision-making. Research suggests exposure to nature reduces negative affect, increases positive affect, and reduces impulsive choice....

Objectives: Behavioral economic (BE) theory posits that harmful alcohol use is a joint product of elevated alcohol demand and preference for immediate over delayed rewards. Despite cross-sectional research support, whether expected bidirectional relations exist between BE indicators and drinking during recovery attempts is unknown. Therefore, this...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of concurrent cannabis and other substance use and their differential associations with cannabis-related problems and academic outcomes in college students. Participants: Participants were undergraduate students (N = 263; M age = 19.1 years; 61.2% female) who were eligible if they used ca...

Opioid use remains a significant public health crisis. However, few quantitative or qualitative data exist on the prevalence of opioid use and associated mental health conditions in agricultural industries and how it affects the industries themselves. Data on opioid use and associated consequences were collected among agricultural business owners a...

Background Gauging the feasibility of using Amazon Mechanical Turk ® (MTurk) for various types of substance use research is precluded by a lack of information pertaining to the recruitment process in published studies utilizing it and concurrent information on data quality.Objective The present report addressed this gap by documenting the prevalenc...

Introduction Human and nonhuman animal research suggests that greater oxytocin (OT) activity is protective against harmful substance use. Most research on this topic is preclinical, with few studies evaluating the association between substance use and individual differences in the human OT system. The present study sought to fill this gap by evalua...

Rationale Most studies evaluating the safety and tolerability of intranasal oxytocin (OT) have not reported consistent adverse events (AEs), but they have largely focused on young men and single-dose administration. Thus, it is unclear whether these findings translate to older individuals and with longer administration periods. Objective Extending...

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace providing researchers with the opportunity to collect behavioral data from remote participants at a low cost. Recent research demonstrated reliable extinction effects, as well as renewal and resurgence of button pressing with MTurk participants. To further examine the generality of these...

The demand for opioid medication to effectively treat pain has contributed to the surging opioid crisis, which is a major source of morbidity and mortality in the U.S. More than 100,000 people begin opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) annually, the standard pharmacotherapy for opioid use disorder (OUD). Although OMT is the standard care for OUD, pat...

Impulsive choice is related to substance use disorders, obesity, and other behaviors that negatively impact human health. Reducing impulsive choice may prove beneficial in ameliorating these maladaptive behaviors. Preclinical research in rats indicates that one reliable method for producing large and lasting reductions in impulsive choice is delay-...

Many studies support that Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) reduces maladaptive health behaviors and how much individuals devalue the future (steepness of delay discounting). In order to understand the clinical utility of EFT, a control procedure that equates groups in non-specific treatment factors (e.g., expectancy of change, perceived connection of...

Background Opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) is the standard for treatment of opioid use disorder, but some individuals on OMT experience disrupted sleep, heightened sensitivity to pain, and continued relapse to non-medical opioid use. An adjunctive treatment that has potential to address these shortcomings of OMT is aerobic exercise. Objective T...

Most delay discounting studies use tasks that arrange delay progressions in which the spacing between consecutive delays becomes progressively larger. To date, little research has examined delay discounting using other progressions. The present study assessed whether the form or steepness of discounting varied across different delay progressions. H...

Delay-exposure (DE) training consistently and robustly reduces impulsive choice in rats, but the behavioral mechanisms behind this effect are not yet understood. The present study evaluated if DE training works by mitigating aversion to delay-signaling stimuli-those encountered when rats chose the larger-later reward in impulsive choice assessments...

Objective Temporal discounting describes the devaluation of delayed rewards. Because temporal discounting is predictive of substance misuse, its clinical assessment could improve prevention (e.g., identifying at‐risk youth) and treatment (e.g., predicting relapse). However, if discounting rates can be faked (e.g., to avoid treatment), their clinica...

Delay discounting describes the tendency to devalue delayed consequences or future prospects. The degree to which an individual discounts delayed events appears trait-like in that it is stable over time and across functionally similar situations. Steeply discounting delayed rewards is correlated with most substance-use disorders, the severity of th...

This study examined the transdiagnostic effect of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on impulsive decision-making in a community sample. A total of 40 adults were randomized to eight individual sessions of ACT or an inactive control. Participants completed pre-, mid-, and post-assessments for psychological symptoms; overall behavior change; va...

Differential-reinforcement-based treatments involving extinction of target problem behavior and reinforcement of an alternative behavior are highly effective. However, extinction of problem behavior is sometimes difficult or contraindicated in clinical settings. In such cases, punishment instead of extinction may be used in combination with alterna...

Episodic future thinking (EFT), or imagining experiencing one's future, reduces discounting of future rewards, but the mechanisms of this effect are unclear. We examined the role of cues to engage in EFT, possible demand characteristics inherent to those cues (prompting awareness of the hypothesized effects of EFT), and changes in temporal horizon...

Many behaviors posing significant risks to public health are characterized by repeated decisions to forego better long-term outcomes in the face of immediate temptations. Steeply discounting the value of delayed outcomes often underlies a pattern of impulsive choice. Steep delay discounting is correlated with addictions (e.g., substance abuse, obes...

Alcohol is the most commonly used drug in the United States and alcohol abuse can lead to alcohol use disorder. Alcohol use disorder is a persistent condition and relapse rates following successful remission are high. Many factors have been associated with relapse for alcohol use disorder, but identification of these factors has not been well trans...

In the supporting information file, there are 7 columns. The first column is group assignment. The second column is subject ID. The third column is phase. The fourth column is session number. The fifth column is total grams of alcohol drunk during the session. The sixth column is grams of alcohol drunk per kilogram in the session. The seventh colum...

Delay discounting refers to one process by which an individual devalues delayed outcomes. Typical discounting tasks provide no information about events during delays to larger-later rewards. Imposing opportunity costs during the delay increases how steeply delayed rewards are discounted (P. S. Johnson, Herrmann, & Johnson, 2015). The present resear...

Impulsive decision-making is common in addiction-related disorders, with some research suggesting it plays a causal role in their development. Therefore, reducing impulsive decision-making may prevent or reduce addiction-related behaviors. Recent research shows that prolonged experience with response-contingent delayed reward (delay exposure [DE] t...

A variety of delay discounting tasks are widely used in human studies designed to quantify the degree to which individuals discounted the value of delayed rewards. It is currently unknown which task(s) yields the largest proportion of valid and systematic data using standard criteria (Johnson & Bickel, 2008). The goal of this study was to compare t...

Steep delay discounting, or rapid devaluation of future outcomes, is one mechanism that can account for the chronic selection of smaller-sooner over larger-later outcomes; that is, impulsive choice. Because steep delay discounting is correlated with maladaptive behavior, researchers have explored methods for reducing discounting. One empirically su...

Impulsive choice describes preference for smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later rewards. Excessive delay discounting (i.e., rapid devaluation of delayed rewards) underlies some impulsive choices, and is observed in many maladaptive behaviors (e.g., substance abuse, gambling). Interventions designed to reduce delay discounting may provide thera...

In delay discounting, temporally remote outcomes have less value. Cigarette smoking is associated with steeper discounting of money and consumable outcomes. It is presently unclear whether smokers discount health outcomes more than nonsmokers. We sought to establish the generality of steep discounting for different types of health outcomes in cigar...

Little research has focused on training greater tolerance to delays of rewards in the context of delayed gratification. In delayed gratification, waiting for a delayed outcome necessitates the ability to resist defection for a continuously available smaller, immediate outcome. The present research explored the use of a fading procedure for producin...

Background The present study examined the history effects of exposure to reinforcement that increased in magnitude as a function of time between responses in a first-person shooter video game preparation of the escalating interest task. Results When reinforcement density increased as a function of time, it encouraged participants to wait longer be...

Using a continuous impulsivity and risk platform (CIRP) that was constructed using a video game engine, choice was assessed under conditions in which waiting produced a continuously increasing probability of an outcome with a continuously decreasing magnitude (Experiment 1) or a continuously increasing magnitude of an outcome with a continuously de...

Using a video-game-based escalating interest task, participants repeatedly encountered a reward that gradually increased in value over a 10-second interval. Responding early in the interval netted less immediate reward than responding later in the interval. Each participant experienced four different reward contingencies for waiting. These continge...