Utah State University
Jeremy Haynes earned a BS in psychology at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, where he was a research assistant in Dr. Williams’s and Dr. McCarley’s laboratory, involved in several studies regarding learning in college students. Currently, he is completing his Ph.D. at Utah State University under the guidance of Dr. Amy Odum. At Utah State he has been involved in several research projects with non-human animals examining the behavioral effects of drugs on relapse and timing. His interests are focused on nicotine self-administration in rats as a model of nicotine abuse in humans as well as within-session manipulations that affect impulsive decision-making in humans and non-human animals.
Jeremy received the SABA grant for a project aimed to develop a procedure for studying the ability to delay gratification in rats. Rats will complete two assessments: a delay discounting assessment and a delayed gratification assessment. In the delayed gratification assessment, rats will choose between a smaller, more immediate reward and a larger, more delayed reward, as in typical delay discounting assessments. However, after choosing the larger, more delayed reward, rats will have the option to defect during the delay to receive the smaller reward immediately. This procedure is designed to more closely capture the decisions humans face in which the initial decision for a larger, more delayed outcome (e.g., quit smoking cigarettes to avoid the negative health consequences in the future) cannot be maintained during the delay and they defect to receive the immediate outcome at the cost of the larger, delayed outcome (e.g., relapse back into smoking to avoid withdrawal). This study will further dissociate the relation between the degree of delay discounting and the ability to delay gratification, both of which are related to maladaptive behaviors in humans (e.g., cigarette smoking, risky sexual behavior, or substance abuse). Furthermore, by developing a procedure to examine the ability to delay gratification within session, researchers can determine what variables affect delay discounting and delayed gratification similarly and what variables affect them differently (e.g., acute drug administration).
Back to Master's Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation Grants
