Furthering addiction research
Cristina Bares, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work, was recently awarded a National Institute on Drug Abuse Diversity Supplement. The project, Developmental Trajectories in the Comorbidity between Smoking and Depressive Symptoms, will develop and test comprehensive models of risk that include genetic factors in addition to dynamic behavioral and social influences on behavior.
Bares was first intrigued by the determinants of individual behavior and subsequently focused her graduate training at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on better understanding the contextual determinants of behavior through the combined study of social work and developmental psychology. As a postdoctoral research fellow, she was then able to apply theoretical constructs and frameworks to understanding the psychological, familial, and peer influences on substance use and mental health problems. Now as a developmental scientist, Bares explores the determinants of individual behavior as well as the social and familial determinants of behavior with pilot funding and mentoring from Jim Anthony, Ph.D. at Michigan State University.
“A desire to understand the complexities of the factors that interact across the lifespan to lead to a number of healthy and risky behaviors is what drives me to conduct my research.”
This current project extends Bares’ previous training and experiences and allows examination of the degree to which genetic factors contribute to problems that are frequently experienced by adolescents: substance use and mental health. The prevalence and severity of both substance use and mental health problems change during the adolescent period so it is important to account for the longitudinal changes in the genetic contributions to these. In her previous work, she found that an adolescent’s personality, experience of depressive symptoms as well as decreases in how much parents monitor their teens’ activities all increase the chances that they will use cigarettes. In this project Bares will compare the degree to which pairs of adolescent twins are similar on smoking behavior and depressive symptoms using various existing datasets that are currently being examined by Hermine Maes, Ph.D. in her project: Developmental Genetic Epidemiology of Smoking. She will further examine whether the genetic influence on smoking behavior and depressive symptoms differ by racial/ethnic group.
Categories Awards and honors, Faculty and staff, Research