COAP

 

Welcome to COAP (rhymes with soap). The history of the lab is ground in research on anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. In recent years, the focus of the lab has moved to now more broadly focus on factors that make pseudoscientific practices appealing to clinicians, the problems associated with the politicization of the mental and medical health professions (specifically antisemitism), and the nature of political discourse in the professions. The politicization work has been multidisciplinary, with collaborators not just in psychology, but also in philosophy/bioethics, political science, anthropology and Judaica studies.

The lab is also focused on how the emotion disgust operates, broadly defined. The role of disgust has been increasingly recognized as central to many clinical conditions, such as phobias, contamination fear, and other conditions marked by avoidance. We have been focused most recently on how this emotion operates in specific forms of discrimination that come from different political perspectives. 

The focus on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders currently emphasizes how treatment is conducted ‘in the wild’ with respect to everyday practitioners.