Dr. Steadman is NOT accepting applications for new clinical psychology Ph.D. students for his research lab for the 2018-2019 year. Nonetheless, I hope you will still consider applying to ETSU's program. We are pretty great and have several other faculty that are actively recruiting.
My lab is called the CAPTVRE/CHIPC lab, which stands for Childhood Anxiety, Play Therapy, and Virtual Reality Environments and Community Health and Integrated Primary Care. My research as a whole, then, spans three major, over-arching interests: 1) Child/adolescent mental health, 2) A desire to discover what things kids enjoy doing in their every day lives and then figuring out how to make those things as therapeutic as possible, and 3) Reaching underserved and underprivileged populations. I'll discuss each of these in detail below:
As a child clinician, I am interested in all aspects of youth mental health. If you read my biography, you'll find that I have been particularly engaged through much of my training with childhood trauma, and the childhood trauma population still remains a passion of mine and an area I plan to research throughout my career. I am particularly interested in attachment, object-relations, and children's development of a well-integrated, healthy sense of self. These areas are, in my mind, of particular relevance to childhood trauma, as a significant portion of childhood trauma is of an interpersonal type, coming from someone the child knows, which can cause confusion in a child's sense of self in relation to others. However, attachment, object-relations, and sense of self are not exclusively limited to childhood trauma. In fact, they apply to practically all aspects of child mental health. Study 2, below, represents one way that my lab looks at some of these issues.
Additionally, during graduate school I became interested in childhood anxiety, in particular. For the purposes of my research, I categorize childhood anxiety as the DSM-5 does. That is, although anxiety plays a role in a multitude of mental health difficulties for children (and adults too, for that matter), I am particularly interested in anxiety when it becomes strong enough to fit criteria for one of the major DSM-5 anxiety disorders (which include Separation Anxiety Disorder, Selective Mutism, Specific Phobias, Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Agoraphobia). My anxiety research involves exploring theoretically integrative etiological models of anxiety, particularly focusing on the complex interactions between the child's self and the world around him or her and how these things lead to problematic levels of anxiety. I am also interested specifically in the treatment of childhood anxiety, especially how to improve treatment applicability, tolerability, and palatability (see below). Finally, I am interested in clinical decision making in the treatment of childhood anxiety (and other child mental health disorders as well). In other words, I want to collect a better scientific knowledge base about how good clinicians make decisions about how and when to adapt treatment based on an individual client's specific needs.
In clinical psychology, we actually know quite a lot about psychotherapy. We have numerous, very specific models of psychotherapy, most often modeled after the work of physicians. That is, we identify patients that have a need and those patients come to us to receive a service (treatment). That treatment is usually applied in an office setting, often with recommendations for the patient to keep applying learned lessons at home, in between sessions, and this treatment continues until the patient shows significant-enough improvement that they no longer warrant treatment (or until the patient stops coming for another reason). What this all means is that 1) most often, people have to be identified as needing treatment before they receive it, and, more importantly, 2) they must then have access to treatment, which is fairly rigorous, lasting usually several months (or, if intensive, many hours per day), and requires a considerable amount of work. The problem with this is that many people, especially children, do not have ready access to such services and, even if they do have access, they may tire quickly from the amount of work required to maintain treatment gains. This is one of the reasons that many children now, sometimes despite clear recommendations to the contrary, are placed on psychotropic medications. Medications provide a possibility of a quick, relatively inexpensive, and work-minimal symptom improvement. Please note, this is not to say that children should never be placed on medications. Much research and clinical experience shows clearly that many kids do benefit from medications, but medications are not a panacea (cure-all) and all come with potential side effects. Furthermore, most research also suggests that psychotherapy either alone or in combination with medication can produce comparable changes, without long-term side effects, which persist even after the treatment is stopped.
Given all of the above, one key area of research for my lab is focused on identifying ways to make therapy practical, applicable, and palatable to as wide a range as children as possible. By practical, I mean that the therapy involves interventions that children are most likely to be able to practically follow. By applicable, I mean that therapy is accessible to as many children as possible and that it can be used with children across the age range (in other words, for example, a therapy that requires a lot of reading material would not be applicable to a child who cannot (or hates to) read). And by palatable, I mean that therapy is likely to be most effective, especially with children, when it maximizes enjoyability and minimizes clients' sense of how much work they're doing. Palatability increases effectiveness by increasing the likelihood that children will employ treatment out home, in between office visits.
For these reasons, my major research program focuses on play-based approaches to therapy, which includes traditional, dynamically-oriented play therapy, videogame use in therapy, and other virtual reality or game-based therapies. I use play not only due to the fact that children enjoy play and will engage in some form of play every day, but also because children often communicate, experience, and test their world through play. Across the world, in all cultures, children use play to learn essential skills for use in adulthood. Therefore, it makes sense to use play similarly in psychotherapy. To gain a better understanding of play therapy, I have developed a manualized, dynamically-informed, theoretically integrative play therapy called Fantasy-Exposure Life-Narrative Therapy (FELT). This 12-session (3-month-long) therapy has been applied in pilot trials with anxious children and has shown very good results. My plan for research at ETSU is to carry FELT through clinical trials and hopefully establish it as an evidence-based treatment. My long term goal is to use the lessons learned from FELT to help teach the general public how to maximize the potential of play to be beneficial to child mental health. My hope, then, is that the public can then begin to utilize therapeutic play in children's everyday lives, thereby preventing potential mental health issues for most children. Also, another hope is that by gaining a better understanding of therapeutic play, providers will be able to access more underserved communities, even potentially in foreign, war-torn countries or in refugee camps, where they can teach children and communities in large groups how to employ therapeutic play to manage the stressors they experience in every day life.
The latter point above transitions nicely to my third area of research interest, which involves increasing access to mental health services among underserved and underprivileged populations. One of the key ways to do this is to improve psychological/behavioral health services in primary care settings, which often tends to be the first area of access to treatment services in the United States. Thus, by integrating with primary care, psychologists and other mental health workers can reach more people than they otherwise might. Consistent with my passion for underserved and underprivileged populations, I am particularly interested in integration with community health centers (including Federally-Qualified Health Centers), who often serve patients and community members who do not have the economic means to access treatment elsewhere. Thus, a portion of my research involves gaining a better understanding of pediatric psychology in primary care and community health centers.
1. Ongoing FELT research
FELT trials are currently paused while I set up my lab at ETSU. Announcements regarding FELT will be posted here once FELT trials begin again.
2. Proximal and distal influences on youth self-identity: An exploratory study
This study seeks to explore how youth between the ages of 6 and 17 incorporate influences from their environment into their self-identity. We are particularly interested in how the characteristics of the people in a youth's life become integrated into that youth's sense of who he or she is as an individual. We plan to look at traditional influences, such as parents, friends, family, and teachers, but we also plan to look at influences which have thus far not been thoroughly explored in scientific literature – namely, TV/book characters, sports figures, other fictional heroes, and social media connections
We are currently recruiting participants for this study. To sign up for the study, you can call the lab at 423-439-4113 or 423-439-4475. You can also email Dr. Steadman at steadmanjl@etsu.edu. Alternatively, you can go to our booking page (by clicking the link) to schedule an appointment directly.
You can access a flyer for this study by clicking this link.
This study is partially supported by an ETSU Summer Research Fellowship awarded to Tiffany Pierce, one of my research assistants.
3. Yik-Yak content analysis
This study involves a content analysis of posts on the social media app Yik-Yak. We are interested in discovering what kinds of things people post most frequently to Yik-Yak, which is a popular social media app in which people can make completely anonymous posts
This content analysis is being completed in preparation for a later study, which will then investigate how Yik-Yak users are affected psychologically by the app.
4. Player personality effect on gaming response
The goal of this study is to examine stress responses while playing different types of video games and to evaluate how personality characteristics and gaming motivations impact stress responses to the video game play. Participants will wear a stress monitor device while answering two short scales, playing two different genres of video games, answering one survey, and participating in an interview with a researcher. Time is expected to last between 90-105 minutes.
This study is available only to students with current SONA accounts. Students may sign up through SONA.
This study is supported by an ETSU student-faculty collaborative grant awarded by the ETSU Honors College to Michele Garcia, one of my research assistants.
5. Videogame use: Personality characteristics, motivations, and patterns of emotional and physical responses
This is an online survey study open to anyone ages 14 and up. The survey takes approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. The official, approved ad is included below. Please feel free, if interested, to access the link and take the survey yourself.
Why do people play videogames? What do they like about them? What kinds of games do most people prefer? What emotional and physical reactions do people have to videogames? Are there certain kinds of people who have more negative reactions than others? A researcher at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) is conducting a research study on all of these above issues. The anonymous, online survey is available here https://eSurv.org?u=Videogames_Use_Motivations_Reactions_Survey.
Participation is confidential, anonymous, and voluntary. Anyone who has ever played videogames regularly may participate. If you choose, you can also enter to have a summary of the study results sent to you by email, once the study is complete. Instructions for this are included in the survey.
Please feel free to invite your friends and to share the link on social media. More details on the survey are available once you click on the above link.
The study has been approved by ETSU’s Institutional Review Board.
6. Biofeedback gaming: A practical, user-friendly approach to the therapeutic applications of biofeedback (pending IRB approval)
This is a study recently granted funding by ETSU's Research Development Committee, which investigates the use of new innovations in biofeedback gaming as a potential therapeutic tool. Due to substantial technological improvements over the past two decades, biofeedback training no longer requires expensive equipment and is no longer restricted to use within specialized, medical settings with trained practitioners. Several, low-cost biofeedback sensors are now available to the general public and they can interact with games to give direct, interpretable results to almost any user. The games are essentially controlled, at least to some extent, with biofeedback data (e.g. heartrate, electrodermal response). This study seeks to investigate the use of two such tools through a small, randomized, controlled, pilot study. This study is currently pending IRB review, and the goal is to launch the study during the Summer or Fall of 2016.