The Study of Affective Disorders’ Classification And Treatment Lab invites you to take part in COMET, an online wellness activity for college students.
Benefits of participating include:
If you participate, you will be asked to:
The information obtained during this study will be kept strictly confidential. Only the researchers will have access to the information you provide. You also have the opportunity to earn up to $15 for your participation.
If you have questions or concerns regarding your participation in this research study or about your rights as a research subject, you may contact lolorenz@indiana.edu
You can read the consent form to decide if you want to participate in the study by scanning the following QR code:
Psychological interventions are effective treatments for depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, and other common mental health concerns. Despite this, it is very difficult for most people to access treatments because they are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to find. We have several projects studying interventions that are not as expensive as face-to-face psychotherapy with trained therapists, including internet apps and books. The projects include:
One commonality of depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, and other common mental health concerns may be that people have a hard time regulating their emotions, especially negative emotions. When we conduct studies, we usually include measures of emotion regulation, usually the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross and John, 2003). The ERQ measures the habitual or regular use of two emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Projects that specifically focus on emotion regulation include:
Heterogeneity of depression and the contribution of specifier symptoms like melancholia to heterogeneity (PI: Buss)
Social media
Social media is a relatively recent development. As of 2021, over 75% of adults in the United States are on a social media platform. That alone makes social media an interesting topic to study.
Most relevant to our work, there are reported correlations between social media use and poorer mental health with some worrying that social media use causes poorer mental health, at least in some people. While we do not know if this is true, social media is also interesting from a research perspective because people openly talk about their mental health and some social media behaviors can clue you in to people’s mental health (e.g., when individuals discuss feeling sad). Moreover, we can make inferences about people mental health and emotions based on their behavior. For example, in one study, we looked at the timing of activity on Twitter as an index of a person’s sleep/wake cycle. We found differences between Twitter users who reported being depressed and a random sample suggesting that people who were depressed were more active into the night and less active early in the morning. Watch me talk about this study below:
We have several ongoing studies under the umbrella of the Surveys of Online Cohorts for Internalizing symptoms And Language (SOCIAL). In SOCIAL-I, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1121 U.S. adults and administered a transdiagnostic battery of symptom assessments. We also obtained their consent to access their social media accounts. The aim of the project is to triangulate self-reported mental health data and social media activity. SOCIAL-II is an ongoing study that has overlapping measures with SOCIAL-I but expands the assessments to include temperament and eating pathology. We’ve recruited at least 2,015 college students and continue to collect each semester.