Douglas S. Mennin, Ph.D.
Position
Associate ProfessorDepartment of Psychology
Hunter College and Graduate Center
City University of New York
About
Dr. Douglas Mennin obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical) from Temple University in 2001. Since that time, he has held faculty positions at New York University, Yale University, and, since January 2011, Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). In these past 11 years, he has focused his research program on utilizing this affect science perspective to understand and treat anxiety and mood disorders, particularly in their most complex form - high levels of comorbidity, unyielding course, poor life satisfaction, refractory response to treatment - and to expand our knowledge of their etiology, development and maintenance across the lifespan.
While Dr. Mennin is interested in studying many forms of complex emotional disorders, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; a disorder characterized by chronic worry and physical tension) and its co-occurrence with major depression (MDD) most clearly fit the goals of his research program. He has published extensively on the topic of GAD and is a co-editor of the authoritative book on the disorder, published by Guilford Press (Heimberg, Turk, & Mennin, 2004). He currently serves on the editorial board of six journals including Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Behavior Therapy, the executive boards of the APA Division of Clinical Psychology and the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, and was recently chosen to chair the prestigious New Research Symposium at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America conference. The organization invites leaders in psychology and psychiatry to come to the conference to speak on a single topic that is viewed as integral to future directions in the field, and he is excited to lead this endeavor and increase attention to the importance of delineating biobehavioral mechanisms of interventions for anxiety and mood disorders. As an expert on these disorders, he is frequently sought out to consult in various media and events.
Dr. Mennin developed and empirically evaluated a theoretical model of the etiology and maintenance of GAD and MDD that implicates a central role for emotion regulation dysfunction. Given the refractory nature of these conditions, with approximately one-third to one-half remaining symptomatic even after treatment (Borkovec & Whisman, 1996), he and his collaborator, Dr. David Fresco at Kent State University, have worked extensively in developing an emotion regulation perspective on treatment of GAD and co-occurring MDD and have translated these ideas into an integrative yet mechanism-based approach called Emotion Regulation Therapy (ERT; Mennin & Fresco, 2009; Fresco, Mennin, et al., in press). A pilot study of ERT was previously conducted at Temple University and at the Yale Anxiety and Mood Services (YAMS), where Dr. Mennin was director, and is ongoing at Kent State and Hunter College.
For more information about Emotion Regulation Therapy, go to EmotionRegulationTherapy.com
For professional inquiries, go to NYCStressAnxiety.com For Dr. Mennin's page on the Hunter College Psychology Department website, click here.