WVU Professor of Psychology explores correlation between Drug Abuse and Impulsive Behavior
Morgantown, WV, November 8, 2006: Most of us have stopped at a fast food restaurant to grab a quick bite to eat instead of waiting to make a healthier meal at home. But this impulsive behavior, typical to everyone, may also be correlated with other risky behaviors such as drug use.
Dr. Karen Anderson, professor of psychology in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, is currently researching whether impulsive decision-making associated with drug use is a result of an acute drug effect, a consequence of long-term drug exposure, or a pre-existing behavioral history and genetic make-up.
Impulsivity is defined as a person’s choice of a smaller, more immediate outcome over a larger more delayed outcome. Individuals may view the larger outcome as unattractive because of the wait. But unlike eating-on-the-go, drug abusers have shown to avoid the delayed outcome to a greater extent than non-drug abusers. In psychological studies, impulsivity also has been shown to affect gambling, violence and other risky behaviors such as needle sharing.
Dr. Anderson has received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a section of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for the project, “Effects of Abused Drugs and Genetics on Impulsive Choice.” In order to explain human impulsive behavior, she will investigate the acute and chronic effects of drugs on impulsive choice using rats as subjects.
Dr. Anderson received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Program at the University of Florida. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior Research at the University of Mississippi Medical Center where she remained as assistant professor until joining the WVU faculty in 2003.
NIH is one of the world’s foremost medical research centers that aims to acquire knowledge for the treatment, detection and diagnosis of disease and disabilities. For more information on the study, please contact Dr. Karen Anderson at Karen.Anderson@mail.wvu.edu.
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