Research Agenda

Delay discounting is the tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards. People who are greater discounters (meaning they tend to prefer the smaller, immediate rewards) participate in more health-risk behaviors such as substance misuse, tobacco use, and gambling. Our research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, was the first to establish a link between clinical risk behaviors in bipolar disorder and delay discounting (Gold and Otto, 2023). See the article here.

Currently, we are in the process of evaluating an adaptation of an intervention that can help decrease delay discounting among people with bipolar disorder and tobacco use disorder. People with bipolar disorder are more likely to start smoking compared to people without bipolar disorder, and they have lower quit rates. The adapted intervention, based on episodic future thinking, encourages people to visualize positive, future events that they are looking forward to that may be positively impacted by stopping smoking (Epstein et al., 2021; Rung and Madden, 2018). This process is thought to decrease delay discounting by helping people emotionally connect with the idea that this positive future event holds greater reward value than the reward value obtained through smoking (an immediate reward). This research is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.