Deanna Kaplan

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Emory Universty School of Medicine

Spiritual health practitioners (SHPs), also known as healthcare chaplains, are increasingly involved in facilitating psychedelic-assisted therapies in clinical trials and community settings. Although the motivations of therapeutic practitioners are known to impact clinical decision-making and treatment outcomes, little research has investigated wha...

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are increasingly used in clinical and community settings and show significant potential to address a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes. This potential has led to calls for ever greater implementation of MBIs internationally, particularly with vulnerable populations and in low-resource settings...

Background Inpatient medical settings lack evidence-based spiritually integrated interventions to address patient care needs within a pluralistic religious landscape. To address this gap, CCSH™ (Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health) was developed to leverage the skillsets of healthcare chaplains to improve patient outcomes through spiritual consult...

Objective Consultations conducted by spiritual health clinicians (SHC; also known as healthcare chaplains) offer a unique context for patients to express themselves and are associated with reduced stress and enhanced satisfaction. The language used during these consults may provide insights into emotions and recovery trajectories. This study aimed...

This article reports on the validation of Fabla, a researcher-developed and university-hostedsmartphone app that facilitates naturalistic and secure collection of participants’ spokenresponses to researcher questions. Fabla was developed to meet the need for tools that (a) collectlongitudinal qualitative data and (b) capture speech biomarkers from...

Within mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), mixed results have been found for the role of childhood trauma as a moderator of depression outcomes. Furthermore, childhood trauma and PTSD symptoms have been identified as possible risk factors for the occurrence of meditation-related adverse effects (MRAE). The present research examined multiple forms of...

This article reports on the validation of Fabla, a researcher-developed and university-hostedsmartphone app that facilitates naturalistic and secure collection of participants’ spokenresponses to researcher questions. Fabla was developed to meet the need for tools that (a) collectlongitudinal qualitative data and (b) capture speech biomarkers from...

This article reports on the validation of Fabla, a researcher-developed and university-hostedsmartphone app that facilitates naturalistic and secure collection of participants’ spokenresponses to researcher questions. Fabla was developed to meet the need for tools that (a) collectlongitudinal qualitative data and (b) capture speech biomarkers from...

Psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) is an experimental treatment with transformative promise. Developing standards for PAT psychotherapy protocols is a priority, but psychotherapeutic protocol components of PAT have been subjected to little rigorous research. This study was designed to assess protocol components in a trial of PAT. The Enhanced Critic...

Women are widely assumed to be more talkative than men. Challenging this assumption, Mehl et al. (2007) provided empirical evidence that men and women do not differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day (WPD) each. However, concerns were raised that their sample was too small to yield generalizable estimates and...

Social attitudes, policy, and perceptions of psychedelics are currently undergoing considerable change. Growing public salience of psychedelics has been accompanied by the emergence of conferences focused on psychedelic education and dialogue. Attendees at such events compose an important group of stakeholders in psychedelic science and practice; t...

With a renewed focus on health equity in the United States driven by national crises and legislation to improve digital healthcare innovation, there is a need for the designers of digital health tools to take deliberate steps to design for equity in their work. A concrete toolkit of methods to design for health equity is needed to support digital h...

Objective: Despite considerable research examining the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies (PATs) for treating psychiatric disorders, assessment of adverse events (AEs) in PAT research has lagged. Current AE reporting standards in PAT trials are poorly calibrated to features of PAT that distinguish it from other treatments, leaving many pote...

Background: A healthy nursing workforce is vital to ensuring that patients are provided quality care. Assessing nurses' well-being and related factors requires routine evaluations from health system leaders that leverage brief psychometrically sound measures. To date, measures used to assess nurses' well-being have primarily been psychometrically...

Objective: Despite considerable research examining the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies (PATs) for treating psychiatric disorders, assessment of adverse events (AEs) in PAT research has lagged. Current AE reporting standards in PAT trials are poorly calibrated to features of PAT that distinguish it from other treatments, leaving many pote...

Background Artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) have garnered excitement about their potential for delegating writing tasks ordinarily performed by humans. Many of these tasks (eg, writing recommendation letters) have social and professional ramifications, making the potential social biases in ChatGPT’s underlying language mode...

Mindfulness has considerable potential to benefit global public health. The recently published article by Doug Oman, Mindfulness for global public health: Critical analysis and agenda, offers a comprehensive analysis of this potential and presents a set of axes for examining the correspondence between the priorities and capacities that have been re...

Ambient audio sampling methods such as the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) have become increasingly prominent in clinical and social sciences research. These methods record snippets of naturalistically assessed audio from participants’ daily lives, enabling novel observational research about the daily social interactions, identities, enviro...

BACKGROUND Artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) have garnered excitement about their potential for delegating writing tasks ordinarily performed by humans. Many of these tasks (eg, writing recommendation letters) have social and professional ramifications, making the potential social biases in ChatGPT’s underlying language mode...

Importance: Mounting evidence supports the role of spiritual, existential, religious, and theological components in mediating psychedelic-assisted therapy, yet integration of these elements into the clinical setting is lagging. Observations: Although psychedelic-assisted therapy commonly produces spiritually, existentially, religiously, or theol...

In a recent call to action, we described pressing issues in the health-service-psychology (HSP) internship from the perspective of interns. In our article, we sought to initiate a dialogue that would include trainees and bring about concrete changes. The commentaries on our article are a testament to the readiness of the field to engage in such a d...

A qualitative research project examining facilitators and barriers to implementing mindfulness-based interventions for pain by medical providers.

Individuals’ daily behaviors and social interactions play a central role in the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. Despite this, observational ambulatory assessment methods—research methods that allow for direct and passive assessment of individuals’ momentary activities and interactions—have a remarkably scant history in the clini...

Objective Latent class modeling (LCM) offers a promising approach for examining correlates of heart rate (HR) patterns over multiple exercise sessions. This research examined biological and psychological variables associated with different patterns of HR response to physical activity (PA). Methods In a three-arm randomized controlled trial (exerci...

Objectives Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) touch on concepts deemed spiritual or religious in the popular imagination, which may interact with participants’ own religious beliefs to influence implementation-relevant outcomes. Methods Four studies examined how interactions between different (a) religious framings of MBIs and participants’ re...

Unlabelled: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are often promoted in the Western world as being "secular" in nature, despite the religious/spiritual (R/S) roots of mindfulness itself. Relevant individual characteristics such as R/S, however, have yet to be examined thoroughly in relation to treatment response. Using pre-post experimental desig...

Cambio emocional en su “hábitat natural”: Medición de la regulación emocional cotidiana con métodos de evaluación ambulatorios pasivos y activos Los métodos de evaluación ambulatoria han hecho posible el estudio de fenómenos en tiempo real, con potencial traslacional para la investigación del proceso psicoterapéutico. Este artículo utiliza dato de...

Individuals’ daily behaviors and social interactions play a central role in the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. Despite this, observational ambulatory assessment methods – research methods that allow for direct and passive assessment of individuals’ momentary activities and interactions – have a remarkably scant history in the c...

Objective: Latent class modeling (LCM) offers a promising approach for examining correlates of heart rate (HR) patterns over multiple exercise sessions. This research examined biological and psychological variables associated with different patterns of HR response to physical activity (PA). Methods: In a three-arm RCT (exercise video games vs. stan...

Objectives Although hospital chaplains play a critical role in delivering emotional and spiritual care to a broad range of both religious and non-religious patients, there is remarkably little research on the best practices or “active ingredients” of chaplain spiritual consults. Here, we examined how chaplains’ compassion capacity was associated wi...

Objectives Extensive research suggests that short-term meditation interventions may hold therapeutic promise for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. In response to calls to subject these interventions to more methodologically rigorous tests, a randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a mindfulness meditation intervention and a com...

Over the last decade, numerous interventions and techniques that aim to engender, strengthen, and expand compassion have been created, proliferating an evidence base for the benefits of compassion meditation training. However, to date, little research has been conducted to examine individual variation in the learning, beliefs, practices, and subjec...

The challenges observed in health-service-psychology (HSP) training during COVID-19 revealed systemic and philosophical issues that preexisted the pandemic but became more visible during the global health crisis. In a position article written by 23 trainees across different sites and training specializations, we use lessons learned from COVID-19 as...

Objective: Extensive research suggests that short-term meditation interventions may hold therapeutic promise for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. In response to calls to subject these interventions to more methodologically rigorous tests, a randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a mindfulness meditation intervention and a com...

Objective: Few psychosocial interventions have been tailored to meet the unique needs of patients diagnosed with lung cancer. This pilot study developed and tested a six-week intervention for reducing lung cancer stigma.Design and Subjects: Guided by qualitative interviews conducted with 9 lung cancer patients and 5 thoracic oncology care providers...

The challenges observed in health service psychology (HSP) training during COVID-19 revealed systemic and philosophical issues that preexisted the pandemic, but became more visible during the global health crisis. In a position paper written by 23 trainees across different sites and training specializations, the authors use lessons learned from COV...

Mindfulness-based interventions are increasingly recognized for their efficacy in clinical settings. Because of the historical and social associations of mindfulness-based interventions with spirituality and religion, individual differences in religiosity are likely to play a role in how people perceive these interventions and may ultimately impact...

Sighing is a common nonverbal everyday behavior thought to signal the experiencing of negative emotions. Prior research from a small-scale study suggests that observed daily expressions of sighing is associated with subclinical depression (Robbins et al., 2011). This paper replicates and extends these findings, hypothesizing that individual differe...

Sighing is a common nonverbal everyday behavior thought to signal the experiencing of negative emotions. Prior research from a small-scale study suggests that observed daily expressions of sighing is associated with subclinical depression (Robbins, Mehl, Holleran, & Kasle, 2011). This paper replicates and extends these findings, hypothesizing that...

Since its introduction in 2001, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method has become an established and broadly used tool for the naturalistic observation of daily social behavior in clinical, health, personality, and social science research. Previous treatments of the method have focused primarily on its measurement approach (relative to...

Mindfulness-based interventions are increasingly recognized for their efficacy in clinical settings. Because of the historical and social associations of mindfulness-based interventions with spirituality and religion, individual differences in religiosity are likely to play a role in how people perceive these interventions, and may ultimately impac...

Since its introduction in 2001, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method has become an established and broadly used tool for the naturalistic observation of daily social behavior in clinical, health, personality, and social science research. Previous treatments of the method have focused primarily on its measurement approach (relative to...

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of trait mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N =...

In the present study, we aimed to replicate and extend findings by Mehl, Vazire, Holleran, and Clark (2010) that individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity) and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.g., greater conversation qua...

The present study aimed to replicate and extend findings by Mehl, Vazire, Holleran and Clark (2010) that individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity), and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.g., greater conversation quality)....

The present study aimed to replicate and extend findings by Mehl, Vazire, Holleran and Clark (2010) that individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity), and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.g., greater conversation quality)....

Objective: Maladaptive repetitive thought (RT), the frequent and repetitive revisiting of thoughts or internal experiences, is associated with a range of psychopathological processes and disorders. We present a synthesis of prior research on maladaptive RT and develop a framework for elucidating and distinguishing between five forms of maladaptive...

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) s...

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) s...

Recent research suggests that school-based kindness education programs may benefit the learning and social-emotional development of youth and may improve school climate and school safety outcomes. However, how and to what extent kindness education programming influences positive outcomes in schools is poorly understood, and such programs are diffic...

Retributivist accounts of punishment maintain that it is right to punish wrongdoers, even if the punishment has no future benefits. Research in experimental economics indicates that people are willing to pay to punish defectors. A complementary line of work in social psychology suggests that people think that it is right to punish wrongdoers. This...