Dr. Justin Strickland: Translational Research on Behavioral Economics to Inform Substance Use Disorder Intervention Development

Abstract

Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field that uses psychological, economic, and neuroscience principles to inform behavioral health and decision-making science. Behavioral economic approaches posit that reinforcers are integrated over a temporal window that determines the relative value of drugs and prosocial alternatives such that brief, immediate, intense, and reliable reinforcers (e.g., substance use) are overvalued compared to alternatives lower in their intensity, variable in their outcome, and delayed in their value accumulation (e.g., employment). This talk will describe data from preclinical, human laboratory, and clinical settings showing applications of behavioral economics to advance behavioral and medications development work in substance use disorder. These data will demonstrate the improved translational potential achieved through behavioral economics across a pipeline of preclinical rodent studies to the human laboratory to clinical assessment. A broader public health view of behavioral economics will also be explained to describe how these approaches have rendered novel insights to guide policy development and thus garnered widespread attention outside of academia.