Isaiah Sypher’s research while affiliated with Yale-New Haven Hospital and other places

Enhancing the generalizability of neuroimaging studies requires actively engaging participants from under-represented communities. This paper leverages qualitative data to outline participant-driven recommendations for incorporating under-represented populations in neuroimaging protocols. Thirty-one participants, who had participated in neuroimaging research or could be eligible for one as part of an ongoing longitudinal study, engaged in semi-structured one-on-one interviews (84 % under-represented ethnic-racial identities and low-income backgrounds). Through thematic analysis, we identified nine relevant research practices from participants' reports, highlighting aspects of their experience that they appreciated and suggestions for improvement: (1) forming a diverse research team comprising members with whom participants can interact as equals; (2) increasing accessibility to research by providing transportation and flexible scheduling; (3) providing family-oriented spaces; (4) enriching the campus visits to include optional on-campus activities to connect with the University; (5) developing safe strategies to accommodate participants with tattoos during the MRI; (6) incorporating engaging and interactive tasks during neuroimaging sessions; (7) providing small gifts, such as a picture of one’s brain, in addition to financial compensation; (8) sharing research findings with the research participants; and (9) fostering long-term bidirectional relationships. The findings may be used to develop best practices for enhancing participant diversity in future neuroimaging studies.

Introduction: A substantial number of people with substance use disorders recover without formal treatment, though we know little about the process of self-change among Black adults with cocaine use disorder (CUD) and whether racism contributes to the development of CUD and these adults' process of self-change. Methods: The study team conducted qualitative interviews with 29 Black adults using a narrative and phenomenological approach. At the time of the interview, all participants met criteria for DSM-5 CUD prior to the past year but did not meet criteria for CUD in the past year and reported that they reduced their cocaine use without formal treatment. Participants completed a qualitative interview followed by the UConn Racial/Ethnic Stress & Trauma Survey. Thematic analyses informed key themes from the qualitative interviews. Results: Qualitative analyses indicated several major factors that contributed to self-change from CUD: racial identity, responsibility to family, social regard, spirituality, turning point for change, and changing one's environment. These results highlight that self-change from CUD is a complex, ongoing, and multifaceted process. The identified themes align with several theories of recovery, including social control theory and the theory of stress and coping. Furthermore, the results suggest that experiences of racism are common among Black adults recovering from CUD, and that the multiple strategies employed for coping with racism may be consistent with the process of self-change. Conclusions: This study shows that multiple race-related factors contribute to the development of, maintenance of, and self-change from CUD among Black adults. Better understanding these factors can help to inform drug treatment.

Maternal intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure has been linked to negative parenting outcomes. Studies suggest that parenting stress is an intermediary between IPV exposure and parenting, though past work has relied on small, clinically- referred samples. Moreover, it is unclear if parenting is differentially affected by a mother’s recent versus past history of IPV exposure, or whether a mother’s childhood abuse history moderates the associations of IPV with parenting stress and parenting behaviors. The current study examines whether recent IPV, versus past IPV, has stronger associations with parenting stress and parenting behaviors and tests whether maternal abuse history moderates these associations. Using structural equation modeling, we tested relations between IPV (frequency and recency), parenting stress, and parenting behaviors cross-sectionally and longitudinally in a large community sample of IPV-exposed low-income Hispanic and African American mothers of children aged 0–14 years (N = 1159). We found that mothers who reported IPV exposure in the past year reported higher negative and lower positive parenting behaviors than mothers who reported less recent exposure. Further, we found that the frequency and timing of IPV exposure affected parenting indirectly through increased parenting stress. However, a childhood history of abuse did not appear to sensitize women to these effects. These findings suggest that psychological interventions aimed at reducing the subjective experience of parenting stress, as well as increased access to resources that reduce objective childcare burden, are important for promoting resilience among families exposed to violence.

Decades of research have demonstrated that parents and children living in poverty are at higher risk for adversities, including intimate partner violence (IPV), material hardship, and exposure to community violence. There is, in turn, research linking IPV, material hardship, and community violence exposure to negative outcomes in children. One mechanism that may link poverty-related adversities to child outcomes is parenting. Thus, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how contextual factors associated with poverty influence parenting, particularly in vulnerable communities. In addition, it is important to identify how parenting may protect children living in poverty from later maladaptive outcomes. In the current dissertation, I explore how contextual adversities (namely, intimate partner violence and material hardship) influence parenting in low-income largely African American and Latino families. I also examine how parenting may serve as a protective factor for low-income Latino and African American adolescents exposed to community violence. I found associations between IPV and parenting, and limited evidence of a link between material hardship and parenting. In addition, I found an association between community violence exposure and adolescent attitudes about violence, though it appears that parent-child cohesion had a sensitizing effect. These findings are strengthened through the use of multiple approaches and methods, including structural equation modeling, constructs with multiple informants, and qualitative analyses. Taken together, these highlight the need for broad structural-level change aimed at improving the lives of families living in poverty and reducing racial disparities in health and wealth.

Reliable, brief, and cost-effective methods to assess parenting are critical for advancing etiological research and translational efforts within parenting science. In the current study, we adapted the System for Coding Interactions and Family Functioning (SCIFF) for use among a sample of mostly racial minority adolescents aged 15 years old, growing up in a low-income urban setting. A multiethnic team coded videotapes of a family interaction task designed to elicit conflict. First, we assessed the reliability of SCIFF codes (N = 187; 54% female; 77% African American). Second, we tested whether SCIFF codes assessing harsh parenting, positive parenting, dyadic conflict, and dyadic closeness converged with parent-child reports of the same constructs. Third we explored links between observed harsh and positive parenting in early childhood (ages 3 and 5) and SCIFF codes at age 15. Our training and SCIFF coding protocols produced high interrater reliability. In support of convergent validity, we found specificity in the associations between negative aspects of parenting across methods: the SCIFF harsh parenting and dyadic conflict codes uniquely converged with concurrent parent-child reports of the same constructs. There was a longitudinal cross-construct association between more observed harshness in early childhood and lower dyadic closeness at age 15. Finally, the convergence of the SCIFF codes with other parenting measures was similar by gender and for families living below or above 200% of the poverty line. A modified version of the SCIFF can be used with reliability in low-income urban samples with variation in gender and race. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Community violence exposure and harsh parenting have been linked to maladaptive outcomes, possibly via their effects on social cognition. The Social Information Processing (SIP) model has been used to study distinct socio-cognitive processes, demonstrating links between community violence exposure, harsh parenting, and maladaptive SIP. Though much of this research assumes these associations are causal, genetic confounds have made this assumption difficult to rigorously test. Comparisons of discordant monozygotic (MZ) twins provide one empirical test of possible causality, as differences between MZ twins must be environmental in origin. The present study examined effects of parenting and community violence exposure on SIP - specifically aggressive and avoidant social goals - in a sample of 426 MZ twin dyads (N = 852 twins, 48% female). Phenotypically, we found that lower positive parenting and greater harsh parenting were associated with greater endorsement of dominance and revenge goals. We also found that indirect and direct community violence exposure was associated with greater endorsement of avoidance goals. Using an MZ difference design, we found that the relationships between lower levels of positive parenting and endorsement of dominance and revenge goals were due, in part, to environmental processes. Moreover, the relationships between the impact of indirect and direct community violence exposure and avoidance goals, as well as between the impact of indirect community violence exposure and revenge goals, appeared to be due to non-shared environmental processes. Our results establish social and contextual experiences as important environmental influences on children’s social goals, which may increase risk for later psychopathology.

Introduction: Models of attention suggest that endogenous and exogenous factors can bias attention. However, recent data suggest that reward can also enhance attention towards relevant stimulus features as a function of involuntary biases. In this study, we utilized the additional singleton task to determine the neural circuitry that biases perceptual processing as a function of reward history. Methods: Participants searched for a unique shape amongst an array of differently shaped objects. All shapes, including the target shape, had the same color except one distractor shape. Participants randomly received a low or high reward after correct trials. From one trial to the next, target colors could stay the same or swap with the distractor color. Interestingly, and despite the irrelevancy of reward magnitude for task accuracy, the difference in reaction time between swap and non-swap trials usually is more pronounced following a high compared to a low reward. Results: In the current study, we showed that reward modulated attention is larger for individuals with enhanced reward magnitude sensitivity in the ventral striatum. In addition, connectivity data shows that ventral striatum was more positively connected with visual cortex during high reward non-swap trials compared to high reward swap trials for participants showing stronger reward modulated attention. Conclusions: This suggests that involuntary reward modulated attention might be implemented by direct influences of the ventral striatum on visual cortex.

Objective: Youths with disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) (conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder) have an elevated risk for maladaptive reactive aggression. Theory suggests that this is due to an elevated sensitivity of basic threat circuitry implicated in retaliation (amygdala/periaqueductal gray) in youths with DBD and low levels of callous-unemotional traits and dysfunctional regulatory activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in youths with DBD irrespective of callous-unemotional traits. Method: A total of 56 youths 10-18 years of age (23 of them female) participated in the study: 30 youths with DBD, divided by median split into groups with high and low levels of callous-unemotional traits, and 26 healthy youths. All participants completed an ultimatum game task during functional MRI. Results: Relative to the other groups, youths with DBD and low levels of callous-unemotional traits showed greater increases in activation of basic threat circuitry when punishing others and dysfunctional down-regulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during retaliation. Relative to healthy youths, all youths with DBD showed reduced amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex connectivity during high provocation. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex responsiveness and ventromedial prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity were related to patients' retaliatory propensity (behavioral responses during the task) and parent-reported reactive aggression. Conclusions: These data suggest differences in the underlying neurobiology of maladaptive reactive aggression in youths with DBD who have relatively low levels of callous-unemotional traits. Youths with DBD and low callous-unemotional traits alone showed significantly greater threat responses during retaliation relative to comparison subjects. These data also suggest that ventromedial prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity is critical for regulating retaliation/reactive aggression and, when dysfunctional, contributes to reactive aggression, independent of level of callous-unemotional traits.

The Research Domain Criteria ( RDoC ) project is a framework for studying domains of biological and behavioral function that cut across traditional psychiatric diagnostic boundaries with the long‐term objective of creating a new nosology based on specific biobehavioral measures. The initial aim is to provide a framework to drive clinical research. One goal of RDoC is to facilitate the development of biomarkers that could eventually be used for practical clinical diagnostic purposes and allow the development of new treatments targeting specific mechanisms of mental illness. In this entry, RDoC , its development, and the ways that it may evolve are described.