Research Interests

  • Transdiagnostic mechanisms to improve psychopathological outcomes in minoritized populations

  • Emotion-based personality trait and disorder development across the lifespan

  • Adverse early life experiences

  • Emotion and emotion regulation

  • Aging

  • Health psychology

During my undergraduate research career, my research was involved in developmental and school psychology across 4 psychology labs. Here, I investigated the role of culture, parental socialization, and early life adversity on emotion regulation, personality ,and coping development. During my post-baccalaureate experience, my research shifted to a more clinical focus, and I gained experience working on an NIH-funded clinical trial centered on perimenopausal depression. I also clinically worked with older and middle adult and child populations with diagnoses such as dementia and autism.

My interests in mental and physical health outcomes are interdisciplinary and use sophisticated statistical techniques and research designs. My research focuses on how early life adversity impacts emotion-based personality traits, psychopathology, and coping development for minoritized and historically under-represented populations. My work is the first to identify trait responses to emotion (TREs), personality traits that develop from the consistent ways that one copes with emotions, as personality processes relevant to typical and atypical exposures to stress across the lifespan. My work has demonstrated TREs have a three-factor structure (approach/avoidance, engagement/disengagement, and control/dyscontrol) in majority European-American community samples.

I am currently confirming this factor structure in African-American community samples. Although TREs are impacted by early life adversity, parental emotion socialization and peer support serve as protective factors which reduce the negative effects of early life adversity on later life physical, mental, and psychosocial outcomes. Importantly, therapeutic approaches such as the Unified Protocol (UP), DBT, CBT, and brief behavioral interventions target elements of TREs. Overall, this work suggests TREs are potentially modifiable lifespan developmental mechanisms linking adversity with health which can be targeted in therapeutic contexts.

 

Research Publications

 

Tipsword, J. M., Southward, M. W., Adams, A. M., Brake, A., & Badour, C. L. (2022). Daily associations between experiences of trauma-related mental contamination and use of specific coping strategies: Results of a daily monitoring study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Chentsova-Dutton Y., Leontyeva A., Halberstadt, A. G., & Adams, A. M. (2021). And they all lived unhappily ever after: Positive and negative emotions in American and Russian picture books. Emotion, 8, 1585-1598. doi: 10.1037/emo0001021.

Clasey, J. L., Adams, A. M., Geiger, P. J., Segerstrom, S. C., & Crofford, L. J. (2020). Estimation of cardiorespiratory fitness without exercise testing: Cross-validation in midlife and older women. Women's Health Reports, 1, 584-591.

 

Selected Presentations

 

Adams, A. M. & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, July). A piece of the adversity puzzle: A systematic review of trait responses to emotion and early life adversity [Poster session]. Association for Research in Personality conference, Evanston, IL.

Adams, A. M. & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, March). Is COVID-19 “over?”: A multilevel model of COVID-19 protective behaviors and conscientiousness in older adults [Poster session]. American Psychosomatic Society conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico. *Poster received a Citation Poster award, indicating that it was one of the top 50 posters at the conference.

Adams, A. M., Meyr, K., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, February). Early life experiences and coping with the COVID-19 pandemic [Data-blitz talk]. Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Atlanta, GA.

Tipsword, J. M., Southward, M. W., Adams, A. M., Brake, C. A., & Badour, C. L. (2022, November). Daily associations between trauma-related mental contamination and use of specific coping strategies among women with a history of sexual trauma [Poster session]. International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Atlanta, GA.

Adams, A. M., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2022, March). COVID-19 protective behaviors and conscientiousness in older adults. Poster presented at the American Psychosomatic Society, Long Beach, CA.

Adams, A., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2021, February). Multidimensional structure and demographic correlates of trait responses to emotion [Poster session]. Society for Personality and Social Psychology virtual conference.

Leontyeva, A., Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Halberstadt, A., & Adams, A. (2019, March). Are emotions costly in a harsh world [Poster session]? Society for Affective Science, Boston, MA.

Adams, A. M., Halberstadt, A. G., & Chentsova, Y. (2015, November). Dzek and Jill learn what to feel: Emotions in picture books across Russian and American culture [Poster session]. Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students, Seattle, WA.

Adams, A. M., Brochu, H., Griffin, J., Leon, E. D., & Lozada, F. (2014, April). Mothers’ coping strategy goals for their 3rd grade children: A mixed methods approach [Poster session]. Poster Southwest Psychological Association Conference, San Antonio, TX.

Rogers, M. L., MacCormack, J. K., Castro, V. L., Adams, A. M., & Halberstadt, A. G. (2014, April). Mother’s maladaptive emotion regulation strategies mediate between maternal emotion beliefs & children’s socioemotional skills [Poster session]. Society for Affective Science Conference, Bethesda, MD.

 
 

Ongoing Publications and Projects

 

Adams, A. M., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, under revision). Structure and demographic correlates of individual trait responses to emotions. OSF Preregistration.

McCann, J. P., Adams, A. M., Tipsword, J. M., Semcho, S. A., Flores, J., Hood, C. O., & Badour, C. L. (2023, under revision). Daily associations between PTSD symptoms and motives for non-medical prescription opioid use.

Adams, A. M., Meyr, K., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, in prep - close to submission). Early life experiences and coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. OSF Preregistration.

Adams, A. M. & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, in prep - close to submission). A piece of the adversity puzzle: A systematic review of trait responses to emotion and early life adversity. Prospero Preregistration.

Adams, A. M. & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, in prep). Is COVID-19 “over?”: A multilevel model of COVID-19 protective behaviors and conscientiousness in older adults.

Adams, A. M., Lawrence, K., Eisenlohr-Moul, T., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2024, in prep). Socioeconomic context (SEC) and later life events.

Adams, A. M., Ward, S., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2024, in prep). Optimism, purpose in life, and negative affect in midlife and older adults. OSF Preregistration.

Adams, A. M. (2024, in prep). Development of the trait response to emotion dimensional measure for use in minoritized populations.

Trait response to emotion validation study: OSF Preregistration.

 

For a full list of publications, presentations, and grant writing experiences, please see my CV.