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Anna Rose Childress, Ph.D.

Res. Assoc Professor
Dept. of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA. 19104

email: childress_a@mail.trc.upenn.edu

Click here for selected publications since Dr. Childress's arrival at Penn

RESEARCH INTERESTS

RESEARCH TECHNIQUES

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Dr. Childress' addiction research has focused on the motivation for drug use/relapse, with an emphasis on understanding and treating the craving ("GO!")states elicited by drug cues. Her early work characterized the subjective and physiological responses of heroin patients to opiate cues, and attempted to reduce drug-related craving and arousal through passive cue exposure. When the national cocaine epidemic began in the mid-1980's, Dr. Childress was the first to document cocaine patients' craving and arousal to cocaine cues (audiotapes, videotapes and paraphernalia) in a controlled laboratory setting. She developed a widely-requested manual of active tools for Coping with Cocaine Craving; the manual was later adapted by NIDA for national distribution. The "anti-craving" tools were also effectively adapted for smoking cessation. Both the laboratory techniques and the clinical strategies have since been adopted or adapted by multiple laboratories and clinics, in this country and abroad (England, France, Spain, Australia, and South America). Behavioral strategies for drug craving "triggers" are now a mainstream feature in most relapse prevention programs, across drug dependence disorders.