Treatment Mechanisms, Community Empowerment, & Technology Innovations Lab

Several current projects are currently in the planning phases, and interested students at the graduate, post-baccalaureate, or undergraduate level are encouraged to read through the descriptions below, and otherwise reach out to the lab PI, Dr. Anu Asnaani, for any remaining questions. 

Community-based mental health initiatives

This is an ongoing collaboration with the Community Faces of Utah (CFU), a great community-based organization here in Salt Lake City which brings together 5 diverse communities in the city: Best of Africa (African immigrants and refugees), Calvary Baptist Church (primarily African Americans), Hispanic Health Care Task Force (Hispanics/Latinos), National Tongan American Society (Pacific Islanders), and Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake (American Indians/Alaskan Natives). The CFU was established in 2009, and its member organizations conduct considerable work in the area of addressing health disparities within their own diverse communities and in conjunction with the Utah Department of Health, the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the U, and the Community Collaboration and Engagement Team within the Utah Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS).

Dr. Asnaani’s pilot grant application with her collaborators within and outside the department for this project has been initially selected for funding by CCTS. Our lab will be working in close partnership with CFU to conduct enhanced focus groups in each community to determine mental health definitions, barriers, needs and areas for potential intervention, in order to submit a larger multi-year NIH grant that will test a culturally-responsive treatment for the identified target area(s) across all five communities. These projects will have a central place for students and research assistants to get involved to learn the most effective ways to engage in community-based participatory research.

Experimental/lab-based initiatives:

Building on Dr. Asnaani’s previous extensive experience in conducting mechanistic examinations of a variety of hypothesized factors underlying effective treatments for fear- and anxiety-based symptoms, there will be a series of experimental studies with community and college samples conducted in the lab. Specifically, there is an interest in increasing understanding around the psychophysiological and subjective correlates (including self-reported distress, cultural values, resilience, etc.) of different emotion regulation strategies, distress tolerance indices, and approach behavior toward feared stimuli. Students in the lab will have the opportunity to become involved with a range of methodologies, technologies (including smart applications and mobile wearable devices), and supervised clinical interviewing/intervention skills. Students will have the opportunity to work directly with study participants, administer interventions and self-reports, and collect a variety of psychophysiological and behavioral data. The first experimental study is currently awaiting IRB approval to start data collection in Spring 2020, and it is focused on understanding the effectiveness of a range of evidence-based cognitive behavioral techniques in improving distress tolerance in a sub-clinical college sample.

Global health disparities and education initiatives:

Dr. Asnaani proudly hails from the island nation of Saint Lucia, and has recently begun a series of psychoeducational programs surrounding trauma intervention, stress management, and provider self-care/support/training, conducted either in person or remotely over the past year. Dr. Asnaani would like to expand her global research program to other regions over the next 5 years, and students in the lab would have a chance to be involved with this ongoing line of work and gain first-hand knowledge and experience regarding the joys and challenges of working in international contexts (and often from afar!).

Our lab has concluded data analysis of our most recent trauma education/provider self-care workshop, conducted in Saint Lucia March 2019, and Dr. Asnaani just recently delivered a second workshop in the region in February 2020, which was remotely attended by participants from several other countries in the surrounding region (including providers in Grenada, St. Vincent, Barbados, Antigua and Jamaica). This second workshop was funded by the Equality and Justice Alliance, a U.K.-based human rights group which supports public health initiatives that focus on addressing health disparities for women and the LGBTQI community. Through these and future workshops, the TCT Lab aims to better understand the effectiveness of a brief trainings in increasing knowledge about evidence-based approaches to trauma-exposed populations and reducing stigma around mental health treatment and towards trauma survivors (especially at-risk groups such as adolescents, women, and LGBTQI-identified individuals) in this region and more globally.

---

---

TCT Lab