Research Expertise and Interest

alcohol and substance use disorder, externalizing, electroencephalogram (EEG), event-related potentials, ecological momentary assessment, behavioral economics, behavioral genetics

Research Description

Keanan Joyner is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.  His program of research seeks to provide a comprehensive account of the etiology of alcohol and other drug addiction in humans to bolster early identification and prevention efforts. Specifically, the C.R.E.A.M. (Clinical Research on Externalizing and Addiction Mechanisms) Lab focuses on disturbances in cognitive-affective processes across time that give rise to the emergence of substance use disorders (SUDs) and other forms of externalizing psychopathology. He has three complementary substantive areas in pursuit of the mechanisms of risk for addiction: (1) Understanding dispositional trait liabilities promotive of addiction, particularly as concerns the interplay between disinhibition and reward sensitivity, (2) leveraging behavioral economic paradigms to characterize proximal risk and maintenance processes implicated in SUD, and (3) bridging between- and within-subject mechanisms of risk for problematic consumption using ambulatory assessment techniques. To do this work, he uses human neuroscientific methods (primarily electroencephalogram/event-related potentials [EEG/ERPs]), ambulatory assessment techniques (such as ecological momentary assessment), biometric (behavioral genetic) analyses, and a variety of statistical modeling approaches.