Regulation of Emotion and Anxiety Disorders Lab, Yale University

My research objective has been to elucidate the nature of human anxiety and to improve treatment for its disorders. I am very interested in examining anxiety disorders in their most complex form (e.g., high levels of comorbidity, unyielding course, poor life satisfaction, refractory response to treatment) and in expanding our knowledge of their etiology, development and maintenance across the lifespan. As a result, my research program broadly focuses on these complicated forms of anxiety disorders and specifically aims to 1) provide evidence for their associated dysfunction and suffering; 2) improve their validation and detection; 3) test a theoretical model that implicates a central role for emotion dysregulation in their refractory nature; and 4) improve existing treatments for the anxiety disorders to address these issues of complexity.

Although I am interested in studying many forms of anxiety disorders, it is the subject of generalized anxiety disorder (a disorder characterized by chronic worry and physical tension) that I have found most clearly fits the goals of my research program. Unlike the other anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has been relatively neglected as an area of study. Most important to improving awareness and treatment of GAD is developing a richer theoretical understanding of generalized anxiety and worry. Conceptualizations of the condition may benefit from attention to recent findings in emotion theory (e.g., Ekman & Davidson, 1994), emotion regulation (e.g., Cicchetti, Ackerman, & Izard, 1995; Gross, 1998), affective neuroscience (e.g., LeDoux, 1996) and the emotion-focused interventions (e.g., Greenberg, 2002). I have recently been developing and empirically evaluating a theoretical model of the etiology and maintenance of GAD that implicates a central role for emotion regulation dysfunction. In particular, individuals with GAD may be highly emotionally sensitive, have difficulty understanding their emotional experience, and possess few skills to modulate their emotions. This may, in turn, cause them to experience emotions as subjectively aversive and use worry as a defensive strategy to control, avoid, or blunt emotional experience. Results from prior empirical investigations support these theoretical suppositions. A focus on emotion regulation may also suggest new directions for improving treatment for GAD. A large percentage of patients continue to experience significant symptoms following existing treatments (approximately one-third to one-half; Borkovec & Whisman, 1996). As such, I have been involved in developing an emotion regulation perspective on treatment of GAD and am translating these ideas into a synthesized integrative approach that combines cognitive-behavioral and emotion-focused, and interpersonal components.

Sample Publications

Mennin, D.S., Holaway, R., Fresco, D.M., Moore, M.T. & Heimberg, R.G. (in press). Delineating components of emotion and its dysregulation in anxiety and mood psychopathology. Behavior Therapy.

Mennin, D.S., Heimberg, R.G., Turk, C.L., & Fresco, D.M. (2005). Preliminary evidence for an emotion regulation deficit model of generalized anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 1281-1310.

Mennin, D.S. (2005). Emotion and the acceptance based approaches to the anxiety disorders. In Orsillo, S. M. & Roemer, L. (Eds.). Acceptance and Mindfulness-Based Approaches to Anxiety: Conceptualization and Treatment (pp. 37-68). Springer.

Mennin, D.S. (2004). An emotion regulation treatment for generalized anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 11, 17-29.

XX Regulation of Emotion and Anxiety Disorders Lab

XX Department of Psychology, Yale University

XX 2 Hillhouse Avenue, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8205

XX mood.reactions (at) yale.edu