NOVEMBER 8, 2024
Amanda C. Collins, PhD
T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Center for Technology and Behavioral Health
Dartmouth College
Geisel School of Medicine
About the Presentation: Cannabis use disorder (CUD) frequently co-occurs with major depressive disorder (MDD): 25% of cannabis users and 4.7% of persons with CUD meet criteria for MDD in their lifetime. Annually, there are approximately 2,800 adults with CUD/MDD per provider in the US alone, resulting in an urgent need to treat CUD and MDD. Digital interventions may improve accessibility, but current approaches target CUD and MDD sequentially or have frequent clinician check-ins, limiting the impact and scalability of these interventions. Deficits in reward processing impact both CUD and MDD: persons with CUD and/or MDD show a diminished response, anticipation, and/or motivation for nondrug rewards (e.g., social), and persons with CUD have a greater motivation for obtaining or using drug rewards. Treatments targeting reward deficits demonstrate promising outcomes for changes in reward processing, CU, MDD symptoms, and positive affect (PA); however, no integrative treatments for CUD and MDD exist, including digital interventions. As such, this presentation will focus on a project funded by P30 Center of Excellence grant: the development of Amplification of Positivity for Cannabis Use Disorder (AMP-C), a digital intervention that targets reward dysfunction in co-occurring CUD and MDD. I will describe the process of developing AMP-C in an iterative design with persons of lived experiences who are seeking treatment for their CU and depression. Further, I will share lessons learned from implementing feedback from persons with lived experiences throughout the one-year timeline of developing and preliminary testing of AMP-C. Finally, I will discuss key takeaways from this P30 project and share future plans regarding testing the efficacy of AMP-C.
About the Presenter: Dr. Amanda Collins is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health working with Dr. Nick Jacobson. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from Mississippi State University in 2023 under the mentorship of E. Samuel Winer. Her research focuses on reward dysfunction as a transdiagnostic mechanism underlying the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The two areas of her research focus on: (1) the application of advanced statistical methods to predict changes in psychopathology and (2) the development and testing of both in-person and digital interventions. Moreover, she is particularly interested in bridging these two areas of research by using advanced methods to understand what interventions work best and for whom, with the overall goal of developing more personalized interventions to treat reward dysfunction transdiagnostically. Dr. Collins utilizes a multimodal approach, including self-reports, experimental paradigms, ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) and passive sensing, to investigate the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of psychopathology. She also has extensive experience with longitudinal data analysis, including multilevel and time-varying vector autoregressive modeling, mixed-effects modeling, and machine learning to investigate how reward dysfunction changes over time and influences the course, severity, and treatment of psychopathology.