Regulatory Focus and Substance Use in Adolescents: Protective Effects of Prevention Orientation.

I am a behavioral health researcher with a background in Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychology.  My research interests include broad processes of behavior change and self-regulation as well as psychometric measurement and research methods/statistics.  My specific research endeavors include 1) the measurement and behavior change applicability of constructs related to self-control, 2) measurement and interventions to improve self-regulatory health behaviors including medication adherence and substance use, and 3) measure development and psychometrics as related to self-reported and patient-reported outcomes.

Sarah M. Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Population Health Sciences and a faculty affiliation in the Duke Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research. She is a Research Investigator and Co-Lead of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Core at the Veterans Affairs Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation (ADAPT COIN). She also serves as the Associate Director of the Duke Center for AIDS Research Social and Behavioral Sciences Core.

Dr. Wilson's research focuses on access to care and systems-level healthcare change to improve inequities in populations who experience systemic discrimination, including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), individuals with low income, sexual and gender minorities, and specific populations of U.S. Military Veterans. Her clinical work as a licensed clinical psychologist focuses on mental health care for patients with comorbid mental health concerns and stress due to systemic discrimination, as well as training for health care professionals on LGBTQ-affirmative care.

Dr. Wilson has expertise in health equity, social determinants of health, community engagement, intervention development, and implementation science. She is a former Fellow in the Implementation Research Institute. She leads VA and NIH research studies related to implementation science and health equity in the areas of tobacco cessation, provider implicit bias, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, and LGBTQ-affirmative mental healthcare.

Research Interests: Research interests include (1) The development of children's ideas and beliefs about the social environment. This includes an interest in the underlying cognitive processes that mediate social reasoning skills, the relationship between parental beliefs and values and children's social perceptions social competence and social rule acquisition and its relationship to social conformity. (2) The relationships between adult values and motivations and depressive states. Also, how social-cognitive biases pertinent to affective disorders develop and are socialized by parental norms and family systems properties. (3) Psychological and social concomitants of obesity, overeating, self-restrictive eating, anorexia and bulimia. Particularly concerned with the relationship between cultural and sex-role norms pertaining to women and the emergence of eating disorders.

Clinical Interests: Community-school consultation, group psychotherapy, psycho- and "socio"-therapy with troubled and troublesome children and their families, individual adult psychotherapy and therapeutic strategies for working with distressed eating-disordered clients.

Professor Strauman's research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological processes that enable self-regulation, conceptualized in terms of a cognitive/motivational perspective, as well as the relation between self-regulation and affect. Particular areas of emphasis include: (1) conceptualizing self-regulation in terms of brain/behavior motivational systems; (2) the role of self-regulatory cognitive processes in vulnerability to depression and other disorders; (3) the impact of treatments for depression, such as psychotherapy and medication, on self-regulatory function and dysfunction in depression; (4) how normative and non-normative socialization patterns influence the development of self-regulatory systems; (5) the contributory roles of self-regulation, affect, and psychopathology in determining immunologically-mediated susceptibility to illness; (6) development of novel multi-component treatments for depression targeting self-regulatory dysfunction; (7) utilization of brain imaging techniques to test hypotheses concerning self-regulation, including the nature and function of hypothetical regulatory systems and characterizing the breakdowns in self-regulation that lead to and accompany depression.