In the area of Clinical Psychology I am interested in taking my basic research in human memory and applying it to clinical populations. Accordingly, my graduate training reflected an emphasis in Clinical Psychology. Further, I was registered as a Psychological Assistant in California for the purpose of accruing hours for licensure. To that end, I completed a Fellowship at the Behavioral Health Services unit of one of the Hospitals in the Sharp Healthcare system (ranked 8^th in the nation). My work there included group and individual therapy with acute and chronic populations, with Axis I diagnoses of schizophrenia, major mood disorders, and schizoaffective disorder (the most common on the unit). This fellowship reflects my post-graduate training in clinical psychology (prior to my move to the Experimental program at the University of California, San Diego,  UCSD), as well as additional training at the UCSD Neurobehavioral Institute, in the area of clinical neuropsychology.

With respect to addictive disorders, I spent the year prior to entering graduate school at a research/service program affiliated with the UCSD Cancer Center (directed by Shu-Hong Zhu). Briefly, we developed a smoking cessation telephone intervention that, unlike most interventions in the area of smoking cessation, demonstrated a dose - response relation. Whereas, traditional interventions are more group oriented with sessions spaced at weekly intervals, this program included a telephone intervention at the individual level with sessions spaced according to a relapse-sensitive schedule. This simple idea of scheduling interventions according to the risk of relapse proved to be an effective aid for those smokers who had previously failed in other attempts to quit smoking. Our research was reported in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (this article was voted one of the top ten in smoking cessation during the last decade).

I was subsequently hired (while in graduate school) as a consultant by the State of California to work with the Asian and Pacific Islander Health Forum in San Francisco for the purpose of training a multi-cultural staff of peer counselors for the area’s Asian/Pacific Islander population. Although I am no longer actively involved in the California Smoking Cessation Program (except for occasional grant writing exercises), I remain open to further research (both basic and applied) in this area. It is, after all, a great model for the treatment of substance abuse.

A final interest in the clinical area concerns the history of agoraphobia (its diagnosis and treatment) from Carl Otto Westphal to Joseph Wolpe. Currently, I have been invited (by Terry Knapp) to coauthor a series of papers on this subject. The first of these should be submitted for review sometime in the near future.

Zhu, S., Stretch, V., Balabanis, M., Rosbrook, B., Sadler, G., & Pierce, J. (1996). Telephone  
    counseling for smoking cessation: Effects of single-session and multiple-session
    intervention. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 201-211.

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