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McNally’s early research concerned psychophysiological 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 posttraumatic stress disorder. 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 posttraumatic stress disorder , 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 posttraumatic stress disorder , obsessive-compulsive disorder , social anxiety disorder , complicated grief , rumination , and posttraumatic growth.

For further details, see: www.mcnallylab.com.