[Robert J Klein, Ph.D.]

Learn More about Dr. Klein's research:

I see emotional experiences as the core drivers of human quality of life, both in terms of happiness and the most common mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even suicide.  The foundation of my work rests on my belief that the emotions we experience are determined in large part by the ways in which we think about our life experiences (including our emotions themselves). From this perspective, it is absolutely essential for modern emotional science to clearly understand the relationship between key thinking processes (e.g., distress tolerance) and the emotions or moods we experience.  

In the psychological sciences, better understanding the link between how we think and how we feel begins with research methods capable of measuring emotional episodes with precision. However, modern emotion assessment methods have critical limitations. For instance, existing paradigms cannot distinguish between dynamic phenomena like reaction intensity and reaction duration (and likely conflate them), leading to an incomplete understanding of the psychological processes that are actually driving  the dysregulated emotion that characterizes neuroticism, anxiety, depression, and unhappiness. For these reasons, my early research has focused on developing experimental paradigms that are capable of differentiating and codifying dynamic reactivity processes. This award-winning research suggests that, contrary to many current theories, the processes underlying peak intensity of emotion reactions actually support mental health, while the psychological processes that trigger elongated emotional reactions (e.g., distress intolerance, rumination) are likely the true drivers of dysregulated emotion. This work originally led me to the concept of psychological flexibility, a theory that explains these findings perfectly, and one that has become the core of my current thinking. 

 Importantly, psychological flexibility theory describes perhaps the oldest concept for emotion regulation in recorded history, lending it unique credibility. And because dysregulated emotion underlies the vast majority of psychological problems, including unhappiness, I see transdiagnostic therapeutics based on psychological flexibility theory as an incredibly efficient and powerful  tool that could truly take on the mental health challenges our society faces.