In this study, average-interpolating radial basis functions (RBFs) are successfully integrated with central high-resolution schemes to achieve a higher-order central method. This proposed method is used for simulation of generalized coupled thermoelasticity problems including shock (singular) waves in their solutions. The thermoelasticity problems include the LS (systems with one relaxation parameter) and GN (systems without energy dissipation) theories with constant and variable coefficients. In the central high resolution formulation, RBFs lead to a reconstruction with the optimum recovery with minimized roughness on each cell: this is essential for oscillation-free reconstructions. To guarantee monotonic reconstructions at cell-edges, the nonlinear scaling limiters are used. Such reconstructions, finally, lead to the total variation bounded (TVB) feature. As RBFs work satisfactory on non-uniform cells/grids, the proposed central scheme can handle adapted cells/grids. To have cost effective and accurate simulations, the multiresolution–based grid adaptation approach is then integrated with the RBF-based central scheme. Effects of condition numbers of RBFs, computational complexity and cost of the proposed scheme are studied. Finally, different 1-D coupled thermoelasticity benchmarks are presented. There, performance of the adaptive RBF-based formulation is compared with that of the adaptive Kurganov-Tadmor (KT) second-order central high-resolution scheme with the total variation diminishing (TVD) property.