studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Three studies of substance abuse
These studies offer interesting perspectives on substance use by teens. First, Adamsons & Russell (2023) published “Longitudinal Transmission of Risk Behaviors Between Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract with bold:
Challenges for rural youth
I have written before about the greater prevalence of suicide in rural youth (Runkle et al. 2023) and the value of telemedicine in working with rural clients (Kaur et al., 2022). Here, I speak to substance abuse and telepsychiatry. First, Kopak & Raggio (2023) published “Substance Use Disorder and Rural Detention Center Readmission: Results from a 3-year prospective cohort study” in Journal of Rural Mental Health. Here are the impact statement and abstract, edited with some information in bold:
Drug use talk and social learning
Two recent studies utilize social learning theory to investigate drug use. Otten & Ha (2022) published “Drug Use Talk in Adolescent Friendship Interactions: Long-term effects of social learning on lifetime diagnosed substance use disorders” in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Here’s their abstract: