Current Research Projects
October 2020
Dr. Mancini gave a keynote address on psychosocial gains from adversity at the 6th International Symposium on Resilience at the Leibniz Institute for resilience research at the University of Mainz, Germany (virtually, of course!). It was a fantastic group of speakers, and he highly recommends this conference in the future.
September 2020
Dr. Mancini was interviewed by Psychology Today in relation to the impact of the pandemic, specifically its widely-varying effects.
A network analysis of grief and personality disorder symptoms was published at Frontiers in Psychology, entitled "Understanding complicated grief symptoms and patterns of personality disorder symptoms in a substance users sample: A network analysis approach." Laura Masferrer-Boix, the first author, spent a semester working in the TSPR lab, and we collaborated with her on this paper. We're pleased to see her work come to fruition. Nice job!
An article examining the role of threat appraisals and neuroticism in generating intrusive memories was also published at Anxiety, Stress, & Coping. All the co-authors on this paper are former members of the TSPR lab.
May 2020
Dr. Mancini was asked to be the co-Chief Editor at Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, a Taylor & Francis journal. He had been serving as an Associate Editor, and he's delighted to be working with Patrick Gaudreau as co-editor.
April 2020
A commentary by Dr. Mancini on the effects of the pandemic was published in Psychological Trauma, Theory, Research, and Practice, entitled "Heterogeneous Mental Health Effects of COVID-19: Costs and Benefits."
February 2020
Lab members had a poster accepted at the Association for Psychological Science (APS) national conference. "Mancini, A.D., Blumberg, A., Iseman, J., & Lynch, R. (2020, May 25-27). Natural Disaster Reduces Attachment Avoidance: A Prospective Quasi-Experimental Study [Conference presentation]. Association for Psychological Science 2020 Convention, Chicago, IL, United States."
A symposium chaired by Dr. Mancini was also accepted at APS. Alas, COVID-19 resulted in it being cancelled. Mancini, A.D., Westphal, M. & Griffin, P. (2020, May 25-27; accepted but cancelled because of COVID-19 pandemic). Social and psychological gains from natural disaster. In A. Mancini (Chair), New Perspectives on the Social, Psychological, and Behavioral Consequences of Adverse Experiences. Symposium at the Association for Psychological Science Conference, Chicago, IL.
September 2019
Dr. Mancini is quoted a number of times in a Mercury News article on the dive boat tragedy in Santa Barbara.
May 2019
(May 22). We just posted a preprint of a manuscript on PsyArXiv entitled "Threat appraisals have causal effects on intrusive memories: An experiment with replication." Here we used random assignment and follow up surveys to examine how threat appraisal influences intrusive memory one, three, five, and seven days later. We found that threat appraisal is a crucial factor, a finding that replicated across two samples and outcome measures.
(May 1). Our PTSD network paper "PTSD Near and Far: Symptom Networks from Two to 12 Months After the Virginia Tech Campus Shootings" was accepted at Clinical Psychological Science! In a collaboration with Heather Littleton, Amie Grills, and Payton Jones, we found that symptom to symptom relationships (i.e., PTSD networks) change over time.
March 2019
Our research was highlighted in an LA Times article on the recent tragic suicides of survivors of school shootings.
December 2018
A solo theoretical paper by A. Mancini, which he had been working on for a long time (how long? we'll keep that quiet), was accepted at Psychological Review! It's entitled "When Acute Adversity Improves Psychological Health: A Social-Contextual Framework." The paper outlines a theory called "psychosocial gains from adversity" (PGA).
May 2018
Lab members presented a poster at the APS conference in San Francisco entitled "Threat Appraisal Mediates the Effect of an Aversive Video on Intrusive Memories: An Experiment with Replication." Grace John, Serena Veith, Laura Aldrich, and Max Weissman did a great job of presenting it!
February 2018
Research from the lab on adaptation to marriage was cited in Stephanie Coontz's Sunday Review article in the New York Times.
January 2018
A poster submission went into the hopper for the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention, this time in San Francisco. We'll update as we get the news. This will be the fifth consecutive year that lab members have submitted posters to this conference.
November 2017
Julianne DeLorenzo (now PhD) successfully defended her dissertation, "Attachment Style, Rumination, and Romantic Relationship Conflict"! A huge congrats to Dr. DeLorenzo, who managed the lab and produced a really fine study. The main finding was that rumination mediates the impact of anxious (but not avoidant) attachment on subsequent relationship conflict.
Christy Denckla and Anthony Mancini, along with other researchers, published a paper on antepartum and postpartum depression trajectories. The key finding was that these patterns are separable and have distinct correlates. We also found a group that was depressed before the birth but not after, a unique pattern that is related to other lab research on psychosocial gains from adversity (among others the pattern of improvement after the Virginia Tech Campus shootings).
October 2017
Another blog post at Psychology Today by Dr. Mancini, this one about the sources of distress after disaster. He argues that when disaster disrupts and undermines our relationships, the damage is greatest.