Translational Issues in Psychological Science, Vol 12(3), Sep 2026, 335-342; doi:10.1037/tps0000536
Substance use and addiction pose urgent public health challenges, with nearly 48 million Americans meeting criteria for a substance use disorder in 2024. Effective scientific responses require approaches reflecting the heterogeneous nature of addictive behavior and its consequences. This editorial introduction to the special issue “Substance Use and Addiction” in Translational Issues in Psychological Science presents 12 empirical and methodological studies organized around three themes that span the translational spectrum. The first theme advances etiological foundations by examining how grief, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and psychological distress contribute to substance use across diverse populations, including pregnant women, American Indian and Alaska Native adults, Latine adults, and women engaged in problematic gaming. The second theme illuminates the social, contextual, and structural barriers that determine who is reached by prevention and treatment efforts, with studies addressing gaps in research on perinatal substance use among veterans, stigma-related barriers to alcohol treatment, and family-level influences on adolescent substance initiation. The third theme develops the measurement infrastructure necessary for targeting, designing, and implementing scalable intervention, encompassing a systems-level barriers scale, a behavioral laboratory paradigm for alcohol self-administration, an attitude measure capturing secondhand effects of alcohol, and an implementation evaluation of a culturally grounded prevention program. Across all three themes, contributions center populations historically underrepresented in addiction research, reflecting a growing recognition that cultural equivalence and equity are foundational to scientific rigor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)