Associated Centers & Laboratories
Center for Technology and Behavioral Health
The CTBH is a P30 "Center of Excellence" funded by NIDA and directed by Lisa Marsch, PhD. The CTBH is located off campus, one mile from Dartmouth College campus and a quarter mile from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. The CTBH affiliates are based at institutions across the country. Comprised of an interdisciplinary team of leaders in behavioral science and technology, the overarching aim of the CTBH is to integrate expertise across multiple disciplines and provide an infrastructure to enhance the quality, pace of achievement and impact of innovative scientific research and development activities that systematically combine science-based behavior change interventions with state-of-the-science technologies to create, empirically test and disseminate technology-based interventions targeting substance use disorders and related issues.
CTBH is comprised of a wide array of researchers, technologists and clinicians with interest in developing, studying, and using technology-based tools for the assessment, treatment and prevention of substance use and related disorders.
The CTBH team shares a common goal of seeking to harness existing and emerging technologies to effectively develop and deliver evidence-based interventions for substance use and co-occurring disorders. CTBH faculty is organized into two primary cores: Scientific Core and Dissemination & Implementation Core. Core activities focus on identifying and studying state-of-the-art issues related to each of these core topics as they relate to technology-delivered therapeutic tools targeting behavioral health.
Cancer Control Research Program of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center
The Norris Cotton Cancer Center is an NCI-funded comprehensive cancer center, one of 40 such centers in the United States. NCCC is home to some 250 active research projects, led by its 135 cancer research scientists, and supported by 68 million in grants each year from federal and other sources. Research is divided into 6 programs based on the research theme. The program applicable to our T32 is the Cancer Control Research Program (CCRP), which is located in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. CCRP investigators study cancer risk behaviors (tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy eating) and the delivery of cancer care. Dr. James Sargent, M.D. shares program leadership with Anna Tosteson of TDI, and directs the Behavioral Science portfolio of the CCRP. The primary focus of Dr. Sargent's research is tobacco control, which increasingly is studying how FDA tobacco policy may impact tobacco use in adolescents, young adults and persons with severe mental illness. The NCCC/CCRP includes an array of supportive core resources, including Biostatistical Shared Services, a Geospatial Resource (important in our studies of proximity to point of sale marketing), a Media Resource (that aids in identifying and content coding movies and marketing for substance use), and a Registry Resource (which is developing a registry of tobacco users).
Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory
The Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory is located in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Our research is focused on understanding the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying emotion and social interactions. For example, How do we learn about others’ mental states, beliefs, and feelings? What are emotions and how do they impact our social interactions? How do we encode information, compress it, and transmit it to others? Answers to these questions could have substantial impact on our overall relationships with others, but might also provide insight into what happens when these processes go awry in psychiatric conditions and the mechanisms that underlie successful psychological and medical treatments. Our approach has several unique aspects that differentiate it from others. First, we attempt to study these questions in their natural contexts to ensure that our findings will generalize beyond the laboratory. Second, we try to use computational models to make precise experimental predictions about complex psychological phenomena, which is necessary to combat our limited cognitive capacity to integrate many independent dimensions of information. Third, studying psychological processes in natural contexts often requires developing new measurement and analytic techniques and we are committed to developing new open source software and hardware to assist in studying these social and emotional processes.
Dartmouth Social Neuroscience Lab
Meghan Meyer, PhD, Director
Two-thirds of human socializing centers on exchanging information about people: their behaviors, thoughts, and traits. Yet, how we track the social information swarming our everyday lives remains largely unknown. Our research integrates social and cognitive neuroscience to understand what drives our tendency, ability, and need to think about the social world around us. We aim to answer questions such as: How do we juggle multiple social cognitive demands on the fly? How do we learn and consolidate information about the people and groups with whom we interact? Why do the negative and positive experiences with people from our past seem to linger with us, either by haunting us with pain or consuming us with nostalgia? Our three primary areas of research are Social Working Memory, Social Cognition and the Default Network, and Social Cognition and Affect.
Open Recordings
We are a multidisciplinary group of researchers, patients, caregivers, and doctors working together to understand how to improve the communication of clinic visit information. We are particularly interested in the application of audio and video recordings of clinic visits to support this communication. Our team is principally based in the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, at the Geisel School of Medicine.
Smith Laboratory-Neuroscience of Reward and Action
We are in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Our lab's research centers on understanding how the brain generates reward, motivation, actions, and habits. To do this, we incorporate a range of techniques for monitoring and studying the activity of brain cells. We also study how disorders of reward and action arise, like addictions, Parkinson's disease, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.