Thrive Lab
Director: Dr. Angela Coreil
“Building contexts for Better Living.”
University of Louisiana at Lafayette | Department of Psychology
Thrive Lab investigates the factors that drive optimal human functioning and clinical change, with a foundation in behavior analysis. Thrive Lab strives to use innovative technological solutions to measurement and intervention when possible to stay more theoretically and methodologically consistent with its roots in behavior analysis. We focus on understanding how verbal behavior can both reflect and facilitate shifts toward better psychological functioning.
Our research bridges the fields of behavior analysis and positive psychology, and takes an eye towards using technology to achieve more contextualized measurement and interventions. We study a variety of clinical and non-clinical phenomena to better understand how context can be harnessed to promote well-being.
Our topics of focus include:
• Deictics: “Deictics” is a behavior analytic term for ‘self’ relating.
• Clinical Behavior Analysis
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, trauma, dissociation, and fear conditioning
• Contextual Intervention Design: Creating and testing responsive technologies that may be used to improve functioning.
Our methods include:
• Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA): Capturing real-time verbal and behavioral data in naturalistic environments.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Analyzing samples of human speech and writing to detect and predict behavioral patterns.
The ultimate goal of our work is to create scientifically grounded models of how language and context can be shaped to foster resilience, meaning, and psychological health in everyday life.