August 13, 2007
Associate Professor of Psychology
William Chaplin, Ph.D., recently was invited for the fifth
consecutive year to serve as a faculty member at the National
Institutes of Health’s prestigious annual summer institute on
behavioral-therapy interventions. Chaplin was one of about 15
medical doctors, psychologists and academics selected this year by
NIH administrators to participate in the two-week institute, which
took place last month in Airlie, VA, at the foothills of the
Appalachian Mountains.
The institute, which seeks to advance the applications of
behavior interventions in health care settings, unites its faculty
members with an accomplished crop of post-doctoral and Ph.D.-level
fellows accepted into the program. Each year, close to 400
applicants compete for about 30 fellowship slots.
Chaplin is an expert in “psychometrics” (a technical term for
statistical measurements) and is continually invited back to the
institute because of his appealing instructional style, says
Director Karina Davidson, Ph.D., the Herbert Irving Associate
Professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at Columbia University.
So appealing, notes Davidson, that for the past five years, the
St. John’s professor has been ranked by his NIH students as either
the No. 1 or No. 2 instructor within the program, based on exit
surveys.
“He’s an excellent teacher, viewed as a mentor and collaborator
who takes time with fellows to help them understand their
particular scientific questions and overcome their individual
hurdles,” says Davidson.
As opposed to traditional psychotherapy, which relies on
one-on-one discussions between therapist and patient to root out
emotional baggage, behavioral therapy seeks to demonstrably
moderate a patient’s actions or habits. Behavior therapists rely on
measurement-based interventions to help clients, for example, smoke
less, exercise more or eliminate road rage. Behavioral
intervention, which typically requires a patient to do “homework”
by maintaining schedules or logbooks (“How many cigarettes did I
smoke today?”) has proven to be particularly effective in group
settings.
Controlling behavior, notes Chaplin, can in turn control
emotional symptoms like depression, anxiety and anger.
Because the field relies so heavily on empirical data and,
accordingly, a multitude of statistics, Chaplin’s expertise in
psychometrics is in hot demand. At the institute, for example,
Chaplin’s role is to expose fellows to the “practical aspects” of
testing: recruiting subjects, analyzing trial data, adhering to
statistical ethics, selecting the proper experimental design, and
so on. Ultimately, says Chaplin, fellows should leave the institute
with the ability to write a grant application for a clinical
trial.
Sponsored by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Research and designed under a subcontract from Mt. Sinai Medical
School, the summer institute was launched in 2001 by behaviorists
who wanted to close the sophistication gap between the evaluative
testing used within their own field, as compared with testing used
for drugs and medical devices.
Some might argue the gap has closed already, and Chaplin says
that medical doctors are increasingly relying on behavioral
interventions to keep their patients healthy. The field of
cardiology, for example, has received a noticeable boost from
recent collaboration between Ph.D.s and M.D.s. With the help of
behavioral interventions, notes Chaplin, cardiovascular patients
have lowered their blood pressure by eating healthier and adhering
to strict medication schedules.
The St. John’s professor knows a thing or two about this
subject; for the past several years he has collaborated with
Davidson, who, apart from organizing the NIH summer institute,
directs the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health, located on
the grounds of the Columbia Medical Center. Together, Chaplin and
Davidson have generated interventions that have helped patients
prevent and treat coronary heart disease and hypertension. Chaplin
offers behavioral-intervention counsel to several other clinics as
well.
If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Study
it
Chaplin shies away from the label “statistician” and jokingly
admits that the field of psychometrics is not the first to be
featured in the pop-psychology magazines. Despite his humility,
however, he can’t conceal his deep appreciation for numbers, charts
and graphs.
“Measurement is a pretty fundamental part of research, but it
doesn’t get a lot of attention,” he says. “People want to grab a
measurement off the shelf, and they don’t always realize that it
might not be the appropriate one.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t study it!” he adds.
Having built his original reputation within the field of
personality psychology, Chaplin still teaches undergraduate courses
in that subject, along with graduate courses in quantitative
methods and psychometrics, offered within the University’s
clinical- and school-psychology programs.
The author of more than 50 scientific articles and reviews and a
textbook on personality psychology, Chaplin is a member of the
Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and is a former
associate editor of the Journal of Research in Personality.