Peggilee Wupperman

John Jay College of Criminal Justice | John Jay CUNY · Department of Psychology

Substantial research has noted the serious consequences of (1) co-occurring severe mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorders and (2) use of illicit drugs while methadone maintained for opioid dependence. However, treatment needs of individuals who meet both of the above criteria remain largely unmet. This pilot study investigated the feasibi...

This accessible book presents time- and cost-effective strategies for helping clients break free of dysregulated behaviors—such as substance abuse, binge eating, compulsive spending, and aggression—and build more fulfilling, meaningful lives. Mindfulness and modification therapy (MMT) integrates mindfulness practices with elements of motivational i...

Objectives Disorders of behavioral dysregulation often involve more than one dsyregulated behavior (e.g., drug abuse and aggression, alcohol abuse and gambling). The high co-occurrence suggests the need of a transdiagnostic treatment that can be customized to target multiple specific behaviors.Method The current pilot study compared a 20-week, indi...

Increasing evidence suggests that deficits in mindfulness (awareness, attentiveness, and acceptance of the present moment) play a role in a range of disorders involving behavioral dysregulation. This paper adds to that literature by describing a transdiagnostic psychotherapy (Mindfulness & Modification Therapy; MMT) developed to target behavioral d...

Despite high costs of domestic violence (DV) to survivors and witnesses, widely used treatments do not consistently reduce violence perpetration. Although research has only begun to examine third wave treatments targeting DV, components such as mindfulness demonstrate preliminary support for reducing underlying symptomatology, including trauma symp...

Recent advancements in emotion theory propose that emotional schemas—individualized conceptualizations and beliefs about emotions—serve a fundamental function in guiding emotional processes. To critically assess the validity of this suggestion, the current research proposed and evaluated an integrative model of emotional functioning. Two studies we...

Alexithymia is often characterized as a chronic deficit in processing and communicating emotional information. However, there is a lack of empirical consensus regarding the relationship between alexithymia and other emotion difficulties. The current study aimed to further clarify differences between alexithymia and a similarly conceptualized constr...

The cognitive attentional syndrome (CAS) is characterized by threat monitoring, repetitive thinking, limitation in cognitive resources, unhelpful control strategies, and continued focus on the content of thinking (Wells 2000, 2002, 2006; Wells & Matthews in Cognition & Emotion, 8(3), 279-295, 1994). An alternative model of worry—the avoidance theor...

Background In recent years, the field of emotion research has seen a marked increase in theories and studies of emotional schemas—core beliefs about emotions and emotional experiences. This review serves to organise this growing body of literature, particularly as it relates to clinical practice. Methods The review focuses specifically on literatu...

Despite its connection to mental and behavioral health complications,elevated alexithymia tends to be associated with low responsiveness and high resistance to psychological intervention. To further understanding of potential treatment targets for clients with alexithymic traits, the present study explored the(a) independent contributions of variou...

Alexithymia and low emotion differentiation restrict access to emotional information and increase propensity toward dysregulated and deviant behaviors, such as impulsive aggression. However, mechanisms underlying such effects are largely unknown. This study examined the mediating role of emotion regulation in the relationship between restricted acc...

Background: Despite scientific favor, psychological interventions supported by research are often underutilized by practitioners due to perceived obstacles in implementation. Increased transparency between researchers and practitioners throughout treatment development and dissemination is therefore necessary. The rising popularity of mindfulness-b...

This study investigated whether self-compassion and emotional invalidation (perceiving others as indifferent to one's emotions) may explain the relationship of childhood exposure to adverse parenting and adult psychopathology in psychiatric outpatients (N =326). Path analysis was used to investigate associations between exposure to adverse parentin...

Objectives: The current preliminary study investigated whether deficits in mindfulness (awareness, attentiveness, and acceptance of the present experience) may underlie the relationship of borderline personality disorder (BPD) features to self-injury and overall acts of harmful dysregulated behavior. Method: Nonparametric bootstrapping procedure...

Abstract: Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) often begin in adolescence and follow a long relapsing-and-remitting course. Not only are SUDs prevalent, but existing evidence-based treatments for SUDs show a mean within-subject effect size of less than medium magnitude. Emerging research provides support for the use of mindfulness-based treat...

In recent years, deficits in emotion regulation have been studied as a putative maintaining factor and promising treatment target in a broad range of mental disorders. This article aims to provide an integrative review of the latest theoretical and empirical developments in this rapidly growing field of research. Deficits in emotion regulation appe...

In order to clarify mechanisms underlying the association between emotion regulation and psychopathology, we tested whether the ability to modify negative emotions mediates the associations of other emotion-regulation skills with psychopathological symptoms in two studies. The first study included 151 college students; the second included 121 psych...

As emotion regulation is widely considered to be a primary motive in the misuse of alcohol, our aim in the study was to investigate whether deficits in adaptive emotion-regulation skills maintain alcohol dependence (AD). A prospective study investigated whether emotion-regulation skills were associated with AD and whether these skills predicted alc...

Police officers are routinely exposed to situations that elicit intense negative emotions; thus, officers have a particularly strong need for effective methods of regulating such emotions. The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether a manualized emotion-regulation training (Integrative Training of Emotional Competencies; iTEC; Berking...

This study investigated whether deficits in mindfulness (attention, awareness, and acceptance of the present moment) underlie variability in borderline personality disorder (BPD) features and related impairments in interpersonal functioning, impulsivity, and emotion regulation. A path analytic approach was used to examine the relationships of trait...

To improve understanding of the complex dynamics in intimate partner violence (IPV) in heterosexual relationships, we explored violence and substance use among the female partners of men entering treatment for both IPV and substance-related problems. All male participants (n = 75) were alcohol dependent and had at least one domestic-violence arrest...

The current study investigated whether deficits in mindfulness (the awareness, attention, and acceptance of the present moment) can account for variability in borderline personality (BPD) features and characteristic difficulties in emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and impulsivity. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical regres...

Deficits in emotion-regulation skills have widely been shown to be associated with poor emotional adjustment. However, it is still unclear whether these deficits are a cause or a consequence of poor adjustment. The purpose of the present research was to clarify the reciprocal effects between these 2 concepts. In 2 studies (Ns = 446 and 635), self-r...

Deficits in emotion-regulation skills have been shown to be integral to the development and maintenance of a wide range of mental disorders. To evaluate the importance of these skills as a treatment target in psychotherapeutic interventions. Nine specific emotion-regulation skills were assessed in a sample of 289 inpatients before and after cogniti...

In this commentary, we discuss the main findings of the research study by Gunter et al., "The Frequency of Mental Health and Addictive Disorders Among 320 Men and Women Entering the Iowa Prison System: Use of the MINI-PLUS." This commentary provides an overview on the use of standardized assessments with prison populations; prevalence rates of ment...

There are high rates of co-occurring alcohol dependence and intimate partner violence (IPV) among men seeking substance abuse treatment. The authors examined neurocognitive performance among treatment-seeking alcohol dependent men with (IPV+) and without reported physical violence (IPV-). Twenty-five subjects participated in this pilot study. All p...

Traditional assessments of mental disorders provide highly individualistic evaluations of the patients’ presenting problems, recent stressors and salient symptoms. Such individualized assessments, while rich in detail, lack the necessary standardization for reliable diagnoses. As a result, traditional assessments are often marred by inaccuracies, m...

The current study examined the relations between biological sex, socialized masculinity, rumination, neuroticism, and depressive symptoms in a large sample of young adults (N = 589). As hypothesized, socialized masculinity negatively predicted rumination, neuroticism, and depression even when biological sex was con-trolled. Structural equation mode...

In this comment we highlight critical problems in the estimation of parameters for their hierarchical three-factor model of psychopathy, as assessed with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and their interpretation of these factors as causally related to socially deviant behavior. We argue that there is nothing "causal" about a model in which cross-sec...