Jonathan Rottenberg

• Doctor of Psychology
• Professor at Cornell University

Objectives Loneliness is a significant public health concern associated with adverse mental and physical health outcomes in older adults. This study examined the nature and correlates of predominant loneliness trajectories in a nationally representative sample of older U.S. military veterans. Methods Participants included 2,441 veterans (mean age...

Conventional research on people with psychological disorders is negatively focused, concentrating on what is aberrant and harmful about psychopathology. Characterizing patterns of emotional and behavioral disturbances has helped illuminate the origins of psychopathology and led to useful treatments. Yet we argue that the conventional approach to ps...

Background Depression is prevalent among Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) Veterans, yet rates of Veteran mental health care utilization remain modest. The current study examined: factors in electronic health records (EHR) associated with lack of treatment initiation and treatment delay; the accuracy of regression and...

People with depression often underutilize mental health care. This study was conceived as a first step toward a clinical decision support tool that helps identify patients who are at higher risk of underutilizing care. The primary goals were to (a) describe treatment utilization patterns, early termination, and return to care; (b) identify factors...

Does what a person desires to feel (affect valuation) predict their future affective reaction to salient life events? We tested this idea in the context of an exam, a salient achievement-oriented event for college students. One to two weeks prior to taking an exam, 180 university students rated their ideal affect, depression symptom severities, and...

Introduction: Social anxiety is associated with elevated suicidal ideation (SI). One potential explanation is that socially anxious persons experience frequent interpersonal stressors that elicit SI. Longitudinal designs with temporal ordering are needed to adequately test this hypothesis. Therefore, this study leveraged a longitudinal design comb...

Loneliness is a rising global problem just as digital communication platforms have afforded people greater opportunities to interact. This paradox suggests that increased opportunities for social interactions may be insufficient for relieving loneliness. Using daily diary methodology, we examined how features of social interactions—type and perceiv...

The status of mental health for adolescents and young adults has aptly been termed a “crisis” across research, clinical, and policy quarters. Arguably, the status quo provision of mental health services for adolescents and young adults is neither acceptable nor salvageable in its current form. Instead, only a wholesale policy transformation of ment...

How often do clinical psychologists have a lived experience with, or close connection, to their research? Does the field of psychology accept this “me-search”? We undertook the first investigation of self-relevant research (aka “me-search”) and attitudes toward self-relevant researchers in a representative North American sample ( N = 1,776) of facu...

Background Most people who survive suicide attempts neither re-attempt suicide nor die by suicide. Research on suicide attempt survivors has primarily focused on negative endpoints (e.g., increased suicide risk) rather than positive outcomes. One important outcome is psychological well-being (PWB), defined as positive functioning across emotional,...

How common are mental-health difficulties among applied psychologists? This question is paradoxically neglected, perhaps because disclosure and discussion of these experiences remain taboo within the field. This study documented high rates of mental-health difficulties (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) among faculty, graduate students, and others af...

If one struggles with depression, anxiety, or suicidal impulses, what is the best outcome that one can hope for? Can psychopathology be a bridge to a better place where people operate with autonomy and self-mastery, enjoy healthy relationships, experience frequent positive emotions, and view life as meaningful and purposeful? Studies of national sa...

Optimal functioning after psychopathology is understudied. We report the prevalence of optimal well-being (OWB) following recovery after depression, suicidal ideation, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders. Using a national Canadian sample ( N = 23,491), we operationalized OWB as absence of 12-month psychopatho...

Optimal functioning after psychopathology is understudied. We report the prevalence of optimal well-being (OWB) following recovery after depression, suicidal ideation, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders. Using a national Canadian sample (N = 23,491), we operationalized OWB as absence of 12-month psychopathol...

Depression is a syndrome. This chapter explains the general concept of a syndrome and outlines the specific symptoms that characterize the mood syndrome of clinical depression. Evidence for the validity of the depressive syndrome is briefly discussed. For each symptom, clinical examples are provided. In addition to the official symptoms of depressi...

This chapter details how depression affects relationships, careers, and health. It is important to consider the evidence that depression harms relationships, careers, and health and to explore the reasons why depression may create such harms. Depression is also often quite commonly accompanied by other mental health problems, such as substance prob...

Although some aspects of depression have improved, depression remains a rampant and misunderstood problem. One major obstacle is that dialogue concerning depression is still clouded by a number of myths about the condition. This chapter reviews these myths and discusses steps that the individual can take to challenge these myths and improve the bro...

This chapter grapples with the challenges of defining depression, including challenges that arise from imprecise use of language. Depression is at its core a kind of mood state. Mood states organize humans’ minds and bodies and motivate them to pursue goals. It is possible to understand depression by focusing on the scientific principles that expla...

This chapter reviews the three main empirically supported treatments for depression: cognitive–behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, and antidepressant drugs. These therapies and their supportive data are described, including the principles behind each therapy modality and what a depressed person can expect from each. Less well-established but...

Several reasons explain why depression remains a difficult topic for everyday conversation. Depressed people themselves can be resistant to talking, and it is difficult to help a depressed person without first opening a channel of communication. This chapter considers the value of opening up and breaking conversational barriers as well as the pract...

This chapter explores the contemporary depression epidemic in more detail, explaining it from the perspective of mood science. There is an epidemic of depression because there is an epidemic of low mood. Major environmental factors adversely affecting mood in the modern environment are reviewed, such as low levels of sunlight exposure, disruptions...

Most writing on depression considers how depressed people might become well rather than what they should do to stay well once they have recovered. This chapter focuses on the concept of life “after” depression. Guidance is offered regarding how formerly depressed people might think about their history of depression and learn from the experience of...

Depression sufferers and their loved ones commonly ask, “Will this depression end? Will this depression come back later in life?” This chapter considers the epidemiology of depression, offering an overview of what is known about recurrent versus non-recurrent forms of depression, including the major risk factors for recurrent depression. After the...

This chapter considers the long-term course of depression. Epidemiology has shown that a large segment of depressed persons have a difficult future course, marked by recurrence of disorder and intermittent impairment of function. More benign courses of depression have been overlooked, in part because research has not used samples of depressed perso...

Depression currently affects more than 15% of the population overall, and it is striking people at increasingly younger ages. Depression is all too familiar, yet this condition remains shrouded in mystery, confusion, and fear. What is depression, exactly? How is it different from sadness? It is said that depression is a “chemical imbalance,” but wh...

This chapter reviews what a person can do to expand his or her zone of control over their mood. Degree of control over mood likely depends on the severity of depression, yet even people who are severely depressed can take some important first steps. The chapter invites the reader to experiment with several potential mood control techniques or progr...

Depression has been called the “common cold” of psychiatry, but just how common is it? In this chapter, the challenges of arriving at accurate prevalence numbers are considered, including the absence of historical data. Contemporary international prevalence figures for both point and lifetime prevalence of depression are reviewed. Depression is a s...

This chapter considers biological aspects of depression, including what it means to state that depression is a chemical imbalance or a genetic problem. The evidence for neurotransmitter theories of depression is reviewed, with a focus on both what is known and what is not known about the role of neurotransmitters in depression. Similarly, depressio...

Over the life course depression affects different groups of people in different ways. This chapter considers the ways that depression manifests in children, the prevalence of child depression, the challenges of assessing child populations, and the ways that depression can adversely affect development. As children move into adolescence, they are par...

How can people determine when they are depressed? This chapter offers the reader clues from the kinds of symptoms and experiences that distinguish normal sadness from an episode of clinical depression. Barriers to diagnosing depression are discussed, including problems that accompany a self-diagnosis. Some problems that accompany self-diagnosis are...

This chapter considers the role of several psychological and environmental factors in depression. One key factor is stressful life events, which often but not always precede episodes of depression. Life stress may precipitate depression. In turn, there is evidence that depression can generate stress in a person’s life. Similarly, negative thinking...

To what extent does a suicide attempt impair a person’s future well-being? We estimated the prevalence of future well-being (FWB) among suicide attempt survivors using a nationally representative sample of 15,170 youths. Suicide attempt survivors were classified as having high FWB if they reported 1) a suicide attempt at Wave I; 2) no suicidal idea...

Can positive events and positive emotions reduce the impact of a stressful event in people with depression? In previous research, studies have found that positive events and positive affect (PA) that co-occur with daily stressors can reduce – or offset – the emotional impact of the stressors. However, this effect has not been examined in people wit...

Researchers often have personal experiences that motivate engagement with a research topic. We performed the first systematic investigation of self-relevant research (SRR; “me-search”) among psychologists. The prevalence of SRR and attitudes towards SRRers were examined in a representative North American sample (N = 1,778) of faculty, graduate stud...

How common is mental illness among applied psychologists? This question is paradoxically neglected, perhaps because disclosure and discussion of lived mental health difficulties remains taboo within the field. This study documented high rates of current and lifetime mental health difficulties and diagnoses (MHDD) among faculty, graduate students, a...

How common is mental illness among applied psychologists? This question is paradoxically neglected, perhaps because disclosure and discussion of lived mental health difficulties remains taboo within the field. This study documented high rates of current and lifetime mental health difficulties and diagnoses (MHDD) among faculty, graduate students, a...

Background: Although preliminary research has explored the possibility of optimal well-being after depression, it is unclear how rates compare to anxiety. Using Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panic Disorder (PD) as exemplars of anxiety, we tested the rates of optimal well-being one decade after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Base...

Background : Although preliminary research has explored the possibility of optimal well-being after depression, it is unclear how rates compare to anxiety. Using Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panic Disorder (PD) as exemplars of anxiety, we tested the rates of optimal well-being one decade after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Bas...

Over 48,000 people died by suicide in 2018 in the United States, and more than 25 times that number attempted suicide. Research on suicide has focused much more on risk factors and adverse outcomes than on protective factors and more healthy functioning. Consequently, little is known regarding relatively positive long-term psychological adaptation...

Automatic interpretation biases (AIB) are theorized to be a risk factor for depression. However, documenting AIB in depressed persons has been challenging and the source (affective vs cognitive) of AIB remains unclear. We conducted a psychophysiological investigation of AIB in a sample of 25 clinical interview assessed individuals experiencing a cu...

We know relatively little concerning the links between the events and emotions experienced in daily life and long-term outcomes among people diagnosed with depression. Using daily diary data from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), we examined how positive daily life events and emotions influence long-term (10 years later) depress...

Persons with depression consistently report a different pattern of music preference, compared to nondepressed persons. Are such preferences maladaptive or beneficial? We tested this question in a study with 3 parts that examined 77 participants' (39 with and 38 without clinical depression) music choice in daily life, affective changes after music l...

Affective dynamics have been increasingly recognized as important indicators of emotional health and well-being. Depression has been associated with altered affective dynamics, but little is known about how daily life affective dynamics predict depression’s naturalistic course. We investigated positive and negative affective dynamics (e.g., inertia...

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding...

COVID-19 presents humanity with one of the greatest health and economic crises of the 21st Century. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate a huge increase in mental health problems, we believe that clinical science must also play a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, we explain why CO...

We review knowledge concerning public presentations for depression. These presentations impact illness beliefs and may influence public stigma, self-stigma, and depression literacy. We provide a critical review of messages, images, and information concerning depression's causes, continuum conceptualization, timeline, curability, coping/treatment re...

Why do people with psychopathology use less adaptive and more maladaptive strategies for negative emotions if such usage has self-destructive consequences? Although researchers have examined the reasons for people’s engagement in maladaptive “behaviors,” such as nonsuicidal self-injury, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reasons why...

Background: Both depression and anxiety (two of the most common internalizing psychopathologies among youths) are associated with difficulties in emotion regulation (ER). Little is known about whether anxiety as a comorbid condition has an effect on the habitual use of different ER strategies in youngsters with depression histories. We aimed 1) to...

We review knowledge concerning public presentations for depression. These presentations impact illness beliefs and may influence public stigma, self-stigma, and depression literacy. We provide a critical review of messages, images, and information concerning depression’s causes, continuum conceptualization, timeline, curability, coping/treatment re...

Over 48,000 people died by suicide in 2018 in the United States, and more than 25 times that number attempted suicide. Research on suicide has focused much more on risk factors and adverse outcomes than on protective factors and more benign trajectories. Consequently, little is known regarding good long-term psychological adaptation in those who at...

One of the cardinal symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD) is persistent sadness. Do people with MDD actually prefer sad stimuli, potentially perpetuating their depression? Millgram, Joormann, Huppert, and Tamir (2015) observed such preferences and interpreted them as reflecting a maladaptive emotion regulatory goal to upregulate sad feelings....

Can people achieve optimal well-being and thrive after major depression? Contemporary epidemiology dismisses this possibility, viewing depression as a recurrent, burdensome condition with a bleak prognosis. To estimate the prevalence of thriving after depression in United States adults, we used data from the Midlife Development in the United States...

We address a key issue at the intersection of emotion, psychopathology, and public health—the startling lack of attention to people who experience benign outcomes, and even flourish, after recovering from depression. A rereading of the epidemiological literature suggests that the orthodox view of depression as chronic, recurrent, and lifelong is ov...

Affect dysregulation in response to rewarding stimuli has been proposed as a vulnerability factor for major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it remains unclear how affective behavioral dynamics may be altered among individuals who are at high risk for depression but not currently depressed. We examined the dynamics of affective facial behavior d...

Objectives We performed a conceptual and meta-analytic review of the relationship between negative cognitive and affective evaluations of negative emotional experiences (negative ATE) and depression. We examined the negative ATE-depression relationship in terms of three ATE constructs: fear of emotion, non-acceptance of emotion, and distress intole...

Background: Adversity during early development has been shown to have enduring negative physiological consequences. In turn, atypical physiological functioning has been associated with maladaptive processing of negative affect, including its regulation. The present study therefore explored whether exposure to adverse life events in childhood predi...

Objectives: Impaired positive autobiographical memory (AM) is closely linked to emotional disorders. AM impairments are often found in depressed adults and may be related to the difficulties such persons have in regulating their dysphoric mood. By contrast, less is known about AM disturbances among adolescents, or about the functional relationship...

Experimental induction of sad mood states is a mainstay of laboratory research on affect and cognition, mood regulation, and mood disorders. Typically, the success of such mood manipulations is reported as a statistically significant pre- to post-induction change in the self-rated intensity of the target affect. The present commentary was motivated...

Major depressive disorder is among the most common and costly of all mental health conditions, and in the last 20 years, emotional dysfunction has been increasingly seen as central to depression. Accordingly, research on emotions in depression has proceeded with fury. The urgency of the work has tempted investigators to issue premature declarations...

Disordered sleep is strongly linked to future depression, but the reasons for this link are not well understood. This study tested one possibility – that poorer sleep impairs emotion regulation (ER), which over time leads to increased depressive symptoms. Our sample contained individuals with a wide range of depression symptoms (current depression,...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and unipolar depressive disorders (UDD) have been shown to differ from each other in dimensions of affective functioning despite their high rates of comorbidity. We showed emotional film clips to a community sample (n = 170) with GAD, GAD with secondary UDD, or no diagnosis. Groups had comparable subjective respon...

Because depressive illness is recurrent, recurrence prevention should be a mainstay for reducing its burden on society. One way to reach this goal is to identify malleable risk factors. The ability to attenuate sadness/dysphoria (mood repair) and parasympathetic nervous system functioning, indexed as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), are impaired...

Depressive disorders that onset in the juvenile years have been linked to far-reaching adverse consequences, making it imperative to elucidate key mechanisms and contributory factors. Excessive use of regulatory responses that exacerbate sadness (maladaptive mood repair) or insufficient use of regulatory responses that reduce it (adaptive mood repa...

This special section endeavors to facilitate the integration of biologically-based assessments of emotion into the clinical setting. This goal is consistent with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative, which aims to identify transdiagnostic biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie mental disorders. We focus on four challenges to applying biol...

Disordered sleep has been linked to impaired emotional functioning in healthy and depressed individuals. Little is known, however, about how chronic sleep problems influence emotional reactivity in everyday life. Participants with major or minor unipolar depressive disorder (n = 60) and healthy controls (n = 35) reported on sleep and emotional resp...

Although hedonic capacity is diminished during clinical depression, it is unclear whether that deficit constitutes a risk factor or persists after depression episodes remit. To examine these issues, adolescents with current/past major depression (probands; n = 218), never-depressed biological siblings of probands (n = 207), and emotionally well con...

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity, an index of cardiac vagal tone, has been linked to self-regulation and the severity and course of depression (Rottenberg, 2007). Although initial data supports the proposition that RSA withdrawal during a sad film is a specific predictor of depression course (Fraguas, 2007; Rottenberg, 2005), the robus...

Cognitive theories emphasise automatic interpretation biases (AIB) in the development and maintenance of depression. The current study examined AIB using the word sentence association paradigm for depression (WSAP-D) via endorsement rates and reaction time indices. We directly tested the importance of self-relevance for AIB by modifying the WASP-D...

Affect regulation skills develop in the context of the family environment, wherein youths are influenced by their parents', and possibly their siblings', regulatory responses and styles. Regulatory responses to sadness (mood repair) that exacerbate or prolong dysphoria (maladaptive mood repair) may represent one way in which depression is transmitt...

Exaggerated cardiovascular (CV) reactivity to laboratory challenge has been shown to predict future CV morbidity and mortality. CV recovery has been less studied and has yielded inconsistent findings, possibly due to the presence of moderators. Reviews on the relationship between CV recovery and CV outcomes have been limited to cross-sectional stud...

Reward learning has been postulated as a critical component of hedonic functioning that predicts depression risk. Reward learning deficits have been established in adults with current depressive disorders, but no prior studies have examined the relationship of reward learning and depression in children. The present study investigated reward learnin...

Stress-induced anhedonia is associated with depression vulnerability (Bogdan & Pizzagalli, 2006). We investigated stress-induced deficits in reward learning in a depression-vulnerable group with analogue generalized anxiety disorder (GAD, n = 34), and never-depressed healthy controls (n = 41). Utilizing a computerized signal detection task, reward...

Background: Impaired emotion regulation is increasingly recognized as a core feature of depressive disorders. Indeed, currently and previously depressed adults both report greater problems in attenuating sadness (mood repair) in daily life than healthy controls. In contrast, studies of various strategies to attenuate sad affect have mostly found t...

Can atypical patterns of parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity serve as endophenotypes for depression? Using respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as an index of PNS function, we examined this question in two studies involving mothers with and without depression histories and their offspring (at high- and low-risk for depression, respectively)...

Objective Depression in adults is associated with risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD). It is unclear, however, when the association between clinical depression and cardiac risk factors develops or how early in life this association can be detected.Methods In an ongoing study of pediatric depression, we compared CVD risk factors including...

Objective Low resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) levels and blunted RSA reactivity are thought to index impaired emotion regulation capacity. Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with aberrant RSA reactivity and recovery to a speech stressor task relative to healthy controls. Whether impaired RSA functioning reflects aspects...

Depression is associated with protracted despondent mood, blunted emotional reactivity, and dysregulated parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity. PNS activity is commonly indexed via cardiac output, using indictors of its level (resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) or fluctuations (RSA reactivity). RSA reactivity can reflect increased...

Females are at greater risk of depression than males, a pattern arising in adolescence and continuing in adulthood. One hypothesis is that major risk factors operate more robustly for females. We tested whether parental depression history imposes greater prospective depression risk for female emerging adults in a large community sample (ages 18-19,...

Compromised respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA, i.e., low cardiac vagal control) frequently characterizes clinically depressed adults and also has been detected in infants of depressed mothers; however, its existence has not been established in older at-risk offspring. We investigated developmental patterns of RSA in a sample of 163 5- to 14-year-ol...

Although crying is woven through the life course, from the doctor’s slap to a deathbed vigil, there is no well-established lifespan tradition of studying crying. Instead the study of crying is broken into separate bodies of work on childhood (mostly on infants) and on adults. In this contribution, we share our enthusiasm and our ideas for the const...

Background / Purpose: The general aim of the current study was to investigate potential differences between children with first and subsequent major depressive disorder episodes. We were specifically interested in looking at negative life events, comorbidities, emotion regulation strategies and parental psychopathology. Main conclusion: The da...

The Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) method permits researchers to overcome some of the limitations of typical self-report methods and enable study of the dynamics of experiences and behaviors as they occur over time and across settings in daily life. Since Myin-Germeys and colleagues (Psychological Medicine:1533–1547, 2009) recently published...

We aimed to examine the connections between individual affective characteristics and crying, and to evaluate Rottenberg, Bylsma, and Vingerhoets’ (2008) framework for studying crying and mood. We analyzed the relationship among features of the social environment, mood characteristics of the crier, crying frequency/urge to cry, and mood change acros...

Although emotional dysfunction is an important aspect of major depressive disorder (MDD), it has rarely been studied in daily life. Peeters, Nicolson, Berkhof, Delespaul, and deVries (2003) observed a surprising mood-brightening effect when individuals with MDD reported greater reactivity to positive events. To better understand this phenomenon, we...

Traditionally, positive emotions and thoughts, strengths, and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy have been seen as the cornerstones of psychological health. Without disputing their importance, these foci fail to capture many of the fluctuating, conflicting forces that are readily apparent when peop...