Averi N. Gaines, MS

Education and Training

MS, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2022

BA, Haverford College, 2017

Biographical Sketch

Averi Gaines is a fifth-year graduate student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2017, Averi graduated with honors from Haverford College with a BA in Psychology. After graduating, Averi worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Center for Psychotherapy Research at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. She began her graduate work at UMass in 2019, and she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship during her first year. Her Master's thesis examined the association between patient-therapist convergence in treatment outcome expectation and posttreatment symptoms/functioning. Other projects have focused on patient perspectives on leveraging therapist performance differences via therapist referral/assignment, psychotherapy belief variables, relational attunement, patient perspectives on their own psychotherapy outcomes, aptitude-by-treatment interactions, implementing patient-therapist matching in community-based mental health care, and discipline-wide consensus in psychotherapy. This work has been disseminated at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Research Interests

Psychotherapy process, outcome, and integration; common treatment factors; patient-therapist attunement; mental health care disparities; patient-centered research; measurement-based care; therapist effects; psychotherapy training; consensus in psychotherapy