Tom Steffora

Thomas Steffora

Lecturer

he/him/his

Contact Information

• Office: 52-E24B
• Phone Number: 805-756-3750
• Email: tsteffor@calpoly.edu

Education

• PsyD, Counseling Psychology, California Southern University

Courses Taught

• Undergraduate:
  • PSY 3375 Abnormal Psychology
  • PSY 3370 Introduction to Clinical and Counseling Psychology
  • PSY 2205 Personality
• Graduate:
  • PSY 5565 Psychopharmacology for Therapists
  • PSY 5512 Theories of Psychotherapy in Context
  • PSY 5530 Legal and Ethical Issues in Marriage and Family Therapy

Research Interests

My research examines how psychological experience becomes organized into patterns that shape distress, meaning, and therapeutic change. With a particular focus on depression and mood disorders (more broadly), I am interested in how biological, psychological, interpersonal, and sociocultural processes interact, and what is gained by studying their organization in addition to their individual contributions.¶ My doctoral research explored the evidence informing our understanding of depression in adolescents. This work continues to motivate questions about whether prevailing diagnostic categories adequately capture the patterns encountered in clinical practice and lived experience. My interest is not primarily in developing another taxonomy, but in examining what would justify treating a recurring configuration as a coherent and clinically consequential organization.¶ A related strand of my scholarship connects the depth psychological tradition with dynamical approaches to psychological explanation. My writings on this topic explore a framework for investigating relative stability across changing manifestations of experience, with inspiration from and shared intuitions with archetypal theory. Drawing on placebo research as an illustrative case, I consider how meaning becomes consequential through coordinated bodily, affective, cognitive, and relational processes.¶ I am currently developing a collaborative project with graduate students to evaluate evidence for recurring depressive configurations beyond conventional diagnostic symptom sets. Using existing research, we will examine their coherence, persistence, responsiveness to context, and clinical relevance. ¶ Across these efforts, my aim is to support clinically useful explanations that preserve the complexity of psychological life while remaining open to empirical challenge.