Biography
Always good at math, I took accelerated math in high school and was a NSF summer science trainee in 1965. I received a BS in mathematics in 1969 from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute after six semesters. I went on to to study empirical logic and operational statistics with Charles Randall and David Foulis at the University of Massachusetts, receiving my PhD in mathematics and statistics in 1977. They had applied their ideas to physics. During my training with them, I got interested in psychology and possible applications there. Also from my teaching of mathematics I got interested in mathematics anxiety. These two interests converged eventually in my becoming a therapist.
I subsequently got a combined MD/PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, writing my PhD dissertation and psychology on how cognitive load affects the descriptors one ascribes to. As part of my clinical training there I received a certificate from the Marriage Council of Philadelphia in family and sex therapy, having completed enough patient contact and supervision to become a clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). I also completed training in cognitive therapy at Aaron Beck's Center for Cognitive Therapy, and I served as research assistant for Joseph Wolpe for four years, including attending a course that he gave.
I left the University of Pennsylvania to continue my training in the psychiatry residency program at Indiana University, where I was also a social psychology NIMH research fellow in the Department of Sociology under the direction of Sheldon Stryker, where I interacted extensively with members of both the psychology and sociology departments.
In 1995 I accepted a job in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona, where I taught for six years. (This is a department that studies how people communicate, not radio and television.) The position initially seemed like a good fit, and had been recommended to me by Dr. Stryker. The department had strong interest in health communication which connected to my MD, they were a strongly empirical department and interested in my statistical background, and their interest in interpersonal communication was very much in line with my work in social psychology. I learned a great deal in my years there, including great appreciation of the nuances of language, as well as having considerable experience teaching conflict management. For several reasons, in the end, this did not work out, so I decided to return to psychiatry and complete the residency that I had gone in Indiana.
I was a resident in the department of psychiatry at the University of Arizona from July 2001 through December 2003. I was appointed to the faculty in January 2004 where I have served since that time. During my tenure in the department I have been involved in telemedicine, initially working with the hospital in Tuba City, then continuing into the present doing consultation with Frank Bejarano at the Mariposa clinic in Nogales, Arizona, meeting for an hour each month to staff patients, and occasionally evaluating one of their patients. More recently I have stepped into more innovative use of telemedicine, using both equipment provided by the Arizona telemedicine program and the computer program/service provided by better healthcare, to continue seeing patients, running groups, supervising residents and teaching my courses, even when I was not in Tucson.
For six years during my time on the faculty I was the director for group psychotherapy, greatly expanding that program to include in-the-room discussions with the group leaders at the end of each group with the patients observing (what Irving Yellen calls the "fishbowl technique"), followed by a half an hour supervision with those group leaders. I listened to each of the three groups live each week so that my participation in the post-group discussion was fully informed. In addition, there was a weekly hour of supervision and group therapy didactic for the six residents together.
Degrees
- Ph.D. Psychology
- University of Pennsylvania, Amherst, Pennsylvania, United States
- "Self-esteem, self-certainty and desirable responding: Cognitive load does not always increase extremity"
- M.D. Medicine
- University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
- M.A. Clinical and Social Psychology
- University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
- "Intimate acquaintance via intentional effort vs. as a byproduct of shared activity"
- Ph.D. Mathematics & Statistics
- University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- "Projection-valued states"
- M.A. Mathematics & Statistics
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States
- B.S. Mathematics
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
Work Experience
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychology (2014 - 2015)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2009 - Ongoing)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2008 - 2015)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2006 - 2011)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2004 - 2009)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2004 - 2007)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2004 - 2006)
- University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, General Clinical Research Center (2003 - 2006)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2003 - 2004)
- University of Arizona, Department of Psychiatry (2003 - 2004)
- University of Arizona, Department of Communication (1995 - 2001)
- Madison State Hospital Medical Center (1994 - 1995)
- Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science (1987)
- University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology (1985 - 1990)
- Kansas State University, Department of Mathematics (1978)
- University of Massachusetts, Department of Math (1978)
- Smith College, Department of Mathematics (1977)
- University of Massachusetts, Department of Math & Statistics (1969 - 1977)
Awards
- Howard E. Wulsin Excellence in Education Award
- Arizona Psychiatric Society, Spring 2017
Licensure & Certification
- Psychologist, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs (1991)
- Physician, State of Arizona Medical Board (2001)
- Certificate in Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Center for Cognitive Therapy (1990)
- Board Certified Psychiatrist, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (2008)
Interests
Teaching
To teach critical thinking, including making connections between basic research and clinical practice, and seeing their clinical practice in the larger context of society, scholarship and the patient as a unique human being. Content interests include teaching about DBT, CBT, mindfulness, research design and statistics, psychotherapy generally.
Research
Sex roles, methodology, self-certainty vs self-uncertainty.
Courses
No activities entered.
Scholarly Contributions
Journals/Publications
- Wright, R., Reidel, R., Sechrest, L., Smith, R. W., & Lane, R. D. (2018). Sex differences in emotion recognition ability: The mediating role of trait emotional awareness. Motivation and Emotion, 42, 149–160. doi:10.1007/s11031-017-9648-0More infoAbstract Although previous research on emotion recognitionability (ERA) has found consistent evidence for a femaleadvantage, the explanation for this sex difference remainsincompletely understood. This study compared males andfemales on four emotion recognition tasks, using a communitysample of 379 adults drawn from two regions of theUnited States (stratified with respect to age, sex, and socioeconomicstatus). Participants also completed the Levels ofEmotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a measure of trait emotionalawareness (EA) thought to primarily reflect individualdifferences in emotion concept learning. We observed thatindividual differences in LEAS scores mediated the relationshipbetween sex and ERA; in addition, we observedthat ERA distributions were noticeably non-normal, andthat—similar to findings with other cognitive performancemeasures—males had more variability in ERA than females.These results further characterize sex differences in ERAand suggest that these differences may be explained by differencesin EA—a trait variable linked primarily to earlylearning.
- Wright, R., Riedel, R., Sechrest, L., Lane, R. D., & Smith, R. (2018). Sex differences in emotion recognition ability: The mediating role of trait emotional awareness. Motivation and Emotion, 42(1), 149–160. doi:https://doi-org.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/10.1007/s11031-017-9648-0More infoAlthough previous research on emotion recognition ability (ERA) has found consistent evidence for a female advantage, the explanation for this sex difference remains incompletely understood. This study compared males and females on four emotion recognition tasks, using a community sample of 379 adults drawn from two regions of the United States (stratified with respect to age, sex, and socioeconomic status). Participants also completed the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a measure of trait emotional awareness (EA) thought to primarily reflect individual differences in emotion concept learning. We observed that individual differences in LEAS scores mediated the relationship between sex and ERA; in addition, we observed that ERA distributions were noticeably non-normal, and that—similar to findings with other cognitive performance measures—males had more variability in ERA than females. These results further characterize sex differences in ERA and suggest that these differences may be explained by differences in EA—a trait variable linked primarily to early learning.
