This K23 award would advance Dr. Wolfsdorf's long-term goal to become an independent scientist, investigating the ubiquitous implications of affect dysregulation and coping for treatment of patients with mood, substance-use, and trauma-related disorders, and developing efficacious treatments for these patients. It would also facilitate the research productivity required to advance to the rank of Associate Professor within the next 5 years. The proposed research will enable Dr. Wolfsdorf to achieve the immediate goal of acquiring a rich patient-oriented data set addressing psychiatric diagnosis, affect dysregulation, and coping in the maintenance of nicotine dependence within a psychiatric population. These data will inform future treatment development, and provide a basis on which to pursue R01 grant funding. Dr. Wolfsdorf's multidisciplinary mentoring team, comprised of Drs. Gulliver (primary mentor), Ciraulo (departmental mentor), and Garvey (off-site mentor) will facilitate her goals. Each mentor brings unique strengths to the team in patient-oriented research, methodology and design, data management and analyses, and ethics. Dr. Wolfsdorf's career plan includes individual meetings with each, and well as larger science meetings and selected course work in advanced statistics and ethics. The Boston University School of Medicine, Boston VA, and mentors, have long and productive histories of mentorship and the facilities and resources to support Dr. Wolfsdorf in her pursuits.
The specific aim of this two-cell, quasi-experimental investigation is to increase the understanding of differential smoking-cessation success among two groups of psychiatric smokers - successful quitters and current smokers in terms of diagnosis, and mood-, coping-, and smoking-related variables at baseline, after a stressor, and at 3- and 6- month follow-up. Psychiatric status and mood-, coping-, and smoking-related variables will be assessed using semi-structured interviews, self-report measures, and physiological measures (CO and cotinine) at baseline. Following an experimental stressor (adapted mental arithmetic test) participants will again complete measures of mood- and smoking-related variables (including a manipulation test). Three- and six-month follow-up assessments of smoking status, nicotine dependence, self-reported quit attempts, and psychiatric severity will be conducted.
