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The goal of our research is to make cancer prevention-control programs more effective by identifying the distinctive ways in which individuals make decisions, adjust to risk information, and manage recommended screening, treatment, follow-up, and prevention regimens. Our efforts focus on the application of assessments and interventions that are specifically targeted and tailored to individual differences among patients and their families. A series of interrelated projects provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of the psychosocial-biobehavioral links that underlie adaptive responses across the spectrum of cancer risk, disease, and survivorship. The studies in our program are conceptually derived from our integrative theory-based framework, the Cognitive-Social Health Information Processing (C-SHIP) model. This model addresses how different types of individuals process information about cancer threats and prevention-control options, and specifies that behavior is influenced by an individual’s perceived vulnerability to cancer, self-efficacy in dealing with it, expectations about the disease, health values and goals, emotions, and coping strategies. The C-SHIP model also recognizes two main styles of processing cancer risk feedback: high monitoring, which involves scanning for and amplifying threat-related cues; and low monitoring, which involves distracting from such cues and minimizing their impact.

The model enables us to develop both traditional and new technology interventions that help overcome psychosocial barriers to behavioral change, as well as approaches to navigating the health system that help bridge disparities in access to care and thereby contribute to achieving health care quality goals. Based on our model, we are currently exploring decision-making; adherence to recommended screening, prevention, and treatment regimens; adjustment to cancer feedback; biobehavioral linkages from cancer risk through survivorship; and the translation and dissemination of interventions into clinical, community, and other real world service settings. Employing a transdisciplinary team approach, our work focuses particularly on biobehavioral factors in tobacco control; decision making for genetic and biomarker risk feedback, as well as for cancer treatm ent and clinical trial decision making; cancer prevention and control outreach efforts; and psychosocial, behavioral, cognitive, and systems factors in survivorship, as well as in integrated models of survivorship care.

1. Miller SM, Roussi P, Daly MB, Scarpato J. New Strategies in Ovarian Cancer: Uptake and Experience of Women at High Risk of Ovarian Cancer Who Are Considering Risk-Reducing Salpingo-Oophorectomy. Clin Cancer Res. 2010 Nov;16(21):5094-106.
2. Miller SM, Roussi P. Psycho-oncology 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Psychosocial issues in cervical cancer screening. Forthcoming 2009.
3. Miller SM, Bowen D J, Croyle RT, Rowland J, editors. Handbook of cancer control and behavioral science: a resource for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 2009. 650 p.
4. Miller SM, Bowen DJ, Lyle J, Clark M, Mohr D, Wardle J, Ceballos R, Emmons K, Gritz E, Marlow L. Primary Prevention, Aging, and Cancer: Overview and Future Perspectives. Part of Invited Supplement: Aging in the Context of Cancer Prevention and Control: Perspectives from Behavioral Medicine. Cancer. 2008;Sup 12:3484-92. PubMed
5. Hiatt RA, Miller SM, Vernon SW. Translational research and good behavior. Cancer Epidem Biomar. 2007;16(11):2184-85. PubMed
6. Miller SM, McDaniel S, Rolland J, Feetham S, editors. Individuals, families and the new era of genetics: biopsychosocial perspectives. New York: Norton Publications; 2006. 578 p.