Thomas G Adams, PhD

I received my Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Arkansas following my completion of a pre-doctoral internship within the traumatic stress track at the Charleston Consortium at the Medical University of South Carolina and the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center. I am currently completing a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship (5 T32 MH062994 13) at the OCD Research Clinic.

I am interested in improving the understanding, efficacy, and efficiency of treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and related psychopathology. To this end, I am developing two parallel arms of research that will: 1) assay psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of change underlying cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for OCD and related psychopathology, and; 2) integrate somatic and cognitive-behavioral intervention strategies to target said mechanisms and improve treatment efficacy. My earlier research was aimed at identifying cognitive and affective mechanisms that maintain obsessive-compulsive and related psychopathology. More specifically, the ways that the emotion of disgust can interact with attentional and inhibitory processes to output dysfunctional appraisals, pathological avoidance, and compulsive behaviors that are relevant to OCD. More recently, I have begun integrating somatic and behavioral interventions to augment several of the aforementioned mechanisms and improve treatment efficacy. For example, we are currently testing the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on extinction learning and exposure-based therapies for OCD.