Dr. Derek Hopko
Research
Derek R. Hopko, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Associate
Department Head of Psychology at The University of Tennessee. He
graduated from West Virginia University (2000) and completed his
residency and post-doctoral training at the University of Texas Medical
School in Houston. In general, his research and clinical interests are
in the areas of mood and anxiety disorders. More specifically, Dr.
Hopko conducts treatment outcome research as it pertains to the
behavioral treatment of clinical depression, also addressing
co-existent medical conditions (i.e., cancer) that may be involved in
the etiology and maintenance of depressive syndromes. Recent research
in this area has addressed the practicality of extending a brief behavioral
activation approach to treating depression within a primary
care environment. In the area of anxiety disorders, primary areas of
interests include the investigation of attentional processes among
individuals with performance-based anxiety disorders (i.e., social
anxiety, test anxiety, math anxiety), relations among
anxious-responding, skill deficits, and motivational differences as
these factors relate to substandard performance in social and academic
contexts, and psychometric work evaluating the validity and reliability
of current methods of assessing the construct of anxiety.