About Sam (he/him)

Sam Cooper PhD

NOTE: This website will be changing to a lab website for my new lab at UT Austin soon - thank you for your patience while we update everything

I received my PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota’s Clinical Science and Psychopathology and Research Program in 2019. I study human fear and anxiety, and their precipitants, mechanisms, and consequences. Although fear and anxiety are relevant for everyone, the majority of my work has particular relevance for PTSD and OCD. I largely use classical and instrumental conditioning paradigms as a framework for my research. Measurement modalities include psychophysiology, neuroimaging, eye-tracking, cognitive testing, and good ol’ asking people about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences (i.e., interviews and questionnaires). More recently, I have become interested in using multivariate approaches to examine the structure of psychopathology, and then link that structure and broadband personality individual differences to neurobehavioral fear and anxiety mechanisms. Relatedly, I am a member of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium, which works to advance the empirical classification of psychopathology using quantitative techniques.

You can find links to my CV, email, Twitter, and various academic and open science profiles on the navbar above. For more detail on research interests and publications (plus much more jargon!), see the the research Questions and Methods pages.

I am also the current editor of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (SSCP) newsletter, Clinical Science. If interested in writing for an upcoming issue, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

All recommendations and opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of academic institutions with which I am affiliated.