Angela Bryan, director of the Health Psychology Department, was recently awarded $3.3 million to research ways to help troubled adolescents change their sexual risk-taking behavior by studying genetics.
Daily Lobo: What is the purpose behind your research?
Angela Bryan: I'm a health and social psychologist, and so that means that I have a number of different areas that I do research in. The overall goal is to try to figure out ways to help people change their behavior to be healthier. And so it's all about finding out why people engage in the behaviors they do, how to get them to do things that are healthier for them and what the best strategies are to get people to change.
DL: How will these studies into providing effective intervention techniques affect UNM as a whole?
AB: Hopefully, we can develop intervention techniques that help everyone. And, through research from my last grant, one of the things that we know that impacts risky sexual behavior is alcohol use. There are a lot of ideas about why that might be. One of the ideas is that alcohol compromises your judgment and it becomes difficult for you to make good decisions about whether or not you should engage in a particular behavior. Over time, these techniques can help people to choose different lifestyles, which will be beneficial for everyone.
DL: Do you think that an improved intervention style will only work on risk-taking demographics or on the community overall?
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AB: It's an interesting question. Some of the work that's been done where they tried to assess people's tendencies just by having them do questionnaires - what they find is that if they develop interventions that help the higher-risk-taking people, they tend to help everyone in general. And what really is intriguing is the idea that we should tailor the interventions to age demographics - adolescents tend to take more risks than older people or people in relationships - so it's something to think about, because interventions aren't a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.
DL: How will you use the grant?
AB: The grant that we received was from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and this grant is about trying to understand that type of behavior and help change it. We're hoping to study the genetic predispositions and neurocognitive tendencies that people have that leads them to engage in risk-taking behavior and use intervention techniques to improve upon those ideals.
DL: Do you think this is something that will happen soon, or will it take a long while to get these interventions perfected?
AB: Well, science is always like that. No one scientist is going to find the correct answer and be done. Human behavior is way too complex for that, and especially the more we learn about the roles our genetics play and the role of interactions between us and the environment play with our risk-taking behavior, the more we learn, the more complicated it gets. Do I hope we find the answer soon? It would be great, but it's going to be an intermittent process.
DL: Do you think the behavior is based more on nature vs. nurture, or is it a mixture?
AB: It's always both - there's no getting around that. All the research indicates that we come into the world with a particular set of genetic information - our physiology, our neurocognition - and those have a huge influence on the way we develop, but there is always interaction between the environment and the raw material. I think of nature as the raw material . but in a different environment, different pieces of that raw material can always change. It's a false dichotomy to say that there is any way we are ever going to know for sure.
~Julie Wilmes
