Why Can’t Some People Resist Temptation? Rutgers Receives $3.7 Million to Study What Leads to Binge Eating and Drinking and Other Harmful Behaviors
Researchers plan to create a nationwide data resource for the broader mental health field
Rutgers University has received a $3.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to explore why some people struggle to resist everyday temptations and how that may play a role in various mental health conditions, including addiction, depression and impulse-control problems.
“Improving the ability to resist temptations, urges and cravings is central to successfully managing many mental health disorders, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood,” said David H. Zald, a Henry Rutgers Professor of Psychiatry, the inaugural director of the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research at the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and principal investigator of the five-year study. “This study will offer new insights into the connections between self-control, genetics, environmental factors and psychopathology.”
Findings from the study could inform the development of more personalized interventions and treatments to help people manage self-control across a broad range of mental health conditions, according to Zald.
Unlike previous research that focused on a single class of temptations in a given condition, such as examining urges for one specific drug but ignoring other common temptations that the person experiences, the new study will comprehensively examine a wide range of temptations across different mental health conditions.
By studying more than 1,000 participants with various mental health problems, Zald said the project will create one of the most detailed datasets ever collected on how temptations are successfully or unsuccessfully resisted across mental health conditions.
Researchers will use an experience sampling method, in which participants report real-life moments over two weeks, when they feel a temptation or urge, how strong it is, whether they tried to resist, what strategy they used and whether they succeeded. This will allow the researchers to gather a detailed, real-time picture of how people manage temptation in everyday life.
The study also will examine how genetic and environmental factors, such as childhood adversity and neighborhood environments, impact the strength of temptations and an individual’s ability to resist them later in life.
The dataset of the project will be shared with researchers nationwide, creating a resource for the broader mental health field and enabling testing of novel hypotheses about temptations and their resistance in mental health.
Rutgers researchers Danielle Dick, director of the Rutgers Addiction Research Center at the Brain Health Institute, Sarah Brislin, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and Evan Kleiman, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the School of Arts and Sciences are co-investigators on the project.
