astronomy

Richard McNally

Richard McNally is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard McNally rather than just read about it. In short: Richard J. McNally (born April 17, 1954) is an American psychologist and director of clinical training at Harvard University's department of psychology.

Key takeaways

Richard McNally belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard McNally to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard McNally from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard J. McNally (born April 17, 1954) is an American psychologist and director of clinical training at Harvard University's department of psychology. As a clinical psychologist and experimental psycho-pathologist, McNally studies anxiety disorders and related syndromes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and complicated grief.

Biography McNally was born April 17, 1954, in Detroit, Michigan. McNally attended Edsel Ford High School and graduated in 1972. After graduating, he pursued a degree in journalism at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Michigan. He later transferred to Wayne State University in his hometown of Detroit to study psychology. He received his B.S. in psychology from Wayne State University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982. While studying, he was mentored by Steven Reiss. McNally received his clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University's behavioral therapy unit. McNally's clinical and research mentor was fellow University of Illinois alumni Edna B. Foa. He also received clinical supervision from Ford fellowship recipient Joseph Wolpe. In 1984, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Health Sciences/the Chicago Medical School, where he established the Anxiety Disorders Clinic and directed the university counseling center. In 1991, he took a new position at the department of psychology of Harvard University, where he currently serves as a professor and director of clinical training. McNally is a licensed clinical psychologist, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, winner of the 2005 Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Science of Clinical Psychology, and the winner of the 2010 Outstanding Mentor Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. He has been an associate editor for the journal Behavior Therapy, and has served on the editorial boards of Clinical Psychology Review, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, Behavior Research and Therapy, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and Psychological Science. McNally also served on the specific phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder committees of the DSM-IV task force. McNally is on the Institute for Scientific Information's "highly cited" list for psychology and psychiatry (top 0.5% of authors worldwide in terms of citation impact). McNally has over 430 publications, most concerning anxiety disorders, including the books Panic Disorder: A Critical Analysis (1994), Remembering Trauma (2003), and What is Mental Illness? (2011). He has also conducted laboratory studies concerning cognitive functioning in adults reporting histories of childhood sexual abuse (including those reporting recovered memories of abuse). Based upon his research on the controversial topic of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse in adulthood, he concluded that there is no scientifically convincing evidence that people can repress or dissociate memories of truly traumatic events that they have experienced. A recent research emphasis is the application of network analysis to the understanding of psychopathology.

Research McNally's early research revolved much around psycho-physiological experiments involving Pavlovian fear conditioning tests of the preparedness theory of phobias. This work fostered the reformulation of central ideas concerning the evolutionary background of specific phobias. A second early emphasis concerned conceptual, empirical, and psychometric work on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI), a dispositional measure of the fear of anxiety-related symptoms. Anxiety sensitivity is a risk factor for panic disorder and related syndromes. McNally was among the first investigators to apply information-processing paradigms to elucidate biases in attention, memory, and interpretation in patients with panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD. More recent work concerns social anxiety disorder and complicated grief, including experiments designed to attenuate cognitive biases in people with social anxiety. Other publications on various controversies concern the epidemiology of PTSD, psychological debriefing following trauma recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, cognitive and psychophysiology studies on people reporting having been abducted by space aliens or claiming to have memories from their “past lives”, and research on the emotional impact of “trigger warnings” akin to those increasingly common in academia. Current research includes network analytic studies on psychopathology, including PTSD, OCD, social anxiety disorder, complicated grief, rumination, and post-traumatic growth.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard McNally

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard McNally claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard McNally before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard McNally ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard McNally

In research: Richard McNally appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard McNally in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard McNally is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1954 births, 20th-century American psychologists, 21st-century American psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard McNally outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard McNally in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard McNally means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Richard McNally out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Richard McNally in simple terms?

Richard J. McNally (born April 17, 1954) is an American psychologist and director of clinical training at Harvard University's department of psychology.

Why does Richard McNally matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard McNally?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard McNally.