Richard J. Zeifman

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by behavioral dysregulation, emotion dysregulation, disturbances in self-identity, and social functioning. Despite the existence of evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions for BPD, these interventions have important limitations (e.g., limited treatment effic...

Psychedelic therapy shows promise as a novel intervention for a wide range of mental health concerns but its therapeutic action is incompletely understood. In line with acceptance and commitment therapy’s (ACT’s) transdiagnostic model, qualitative research has suggested that reductions in experiential avoidance are an important component of therape...

Comorbid borderline personality disorder (BPD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe and complicated clinical presentation characterized by especially high rates of suicide, healthcare utilization, and psychosocial impairment. Although guidelines exist for treating each of these disorders alone, there remains limited guidance on the...

Objective: Suicide is a global health concern, and innovative interventions that target suicidality are needed. While psychedelic therapy shows promise for a range of mental health concerns, including suicidality, not all psychedelic therapy trials have published their suicidality results and no meta-analysis has been published on the topic. Theref...

Background: The Relaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics (REBUS) model proposes that serotonergic psychedelics decrease the precision weighting of neurobiologically-encoded beliefs, and offers a unified account of the acute and therapeutic action of psychedelics. Although REBUS has received some neuroscientific support, little research has examined its p...

This theoretical article revives a classical bridging construct, canalization, to describe a new model of a general factor of psychopathology. To achieve this, we have distinguished between two types of plasticity, an early one that we call 'TEMP' for 'Temperature or Entropy Mediated Plasticity', and another, we call 'canalization', which is close...

Borderline personality disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder with limited treatment options that are associated with large heterogeneity in treatment response and high rates of dropout. New or complementary treatments for borderline personality disorder are needed that may be able to bolster treatment outcomes. In this review, the authors comm...

To investigate preferences for evidence-based treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the role of likely PTSD in those preferences. Undergraduate students (N = 119) and participants recruited from trauma support groups (N = 126) read descriptions of front-line recommended treatments for PTSD, including prolonged exposure therapy (PE...

The purpose of the RElaxed Beliefs-Questionnaire (REB-Q) is to measure changes in an individual’s certainty in their personally-identified core beliefs (a) within experimental conditions and (b) over time. Administration of the measure involves two components: (a) At baseline, participants identify core beliefs that they hold about themselves and/o...

Objective: Elevations in distress, self-harm and suicidal ideation or behavior are of significant concern in clinical practice. We examined these in a pilot trial of Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) for transitional age youth (aged 15- 25 years) exposed to interpersonal trauma and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Meth...

Background: Across psychotherapeutic frameworks, the strength of the therapeutic alliance has been found to correlate with treatment outcomes; however, its role has never been formally assessed in a trial of psychedelic-assisted therapy. We aimed to investigate the relationships between therapeutic alliance and rapport, the quality of the acute psy...

Background Evidence suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy carries transdiagnostic efficacy in the treatment of mental health conditions characterized by low mood and the use of avoidance coping strategies. Aims While preliminary evidence suggests that psychological flexibility and emotion regulation processes play an important role within psy...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1021/acsptsci.1c00024.].

People with advanced cancer are at heightened risk of desire for hastened death (DHD), suicidal ideation (SI), and completed suicide. Loss of Meaning (LoM), a component of demoralization, can be elevated by a cancer diagnosis and predicts DHD and SI in this population. We completed a randomized controlled trial in which psilocybin-assisted psychoth...

Use of classic psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin, ayahuasca, and lysergic acid diethylamide) is increasing, and psychedelic therapy is receiving growing attention as a novel mental health intervention. Suicidality remains a potential safety concern associated with classic psychedelics and is, concurrently, a mental health concern that psychedelic ther...

Rationale Suicidality is a major public health concern with limited treatment options. Accordingly, there is a need for innovative interventions for suicidality. Preliminary evidence indicates that treatment with the psychedelic ayahuasca may lead to decreases in depressive symptoms among individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, t...

Background : Cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) are two prominent evidence-based treatments for social anxiety disorder (SAD). It is not clear, however, whether outcomes of these two treatments are moderated by similar factors. For example, whereas anger suppression and anger expression each predict outcomes...

Objective: Depression, and its treatment, is a concern among college students. Research indicates decision aids (DA) improve patients' treatment knowledge, decision making, and decisional conflict; however, it is unknown whether they are helpful for disseminating depression treatment information to college students. This study evaluated a DA for d...

Although the relationship between perfectionism and suicidal ideation is well established, little is known about the pathways through which perfectionism and suicidal ideation are linked. Therefore, the current study explored emotion dysregulation as an indirect effect of the relationship between perfectionism and suicidal ideation. Among universit...

Despite research supporting the effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for borderline personality disorder (BPD), few studies have examined how DBT leads to clinical change. DBT is theorized to lead to improved clinical outcomes by enhancing the capacity for emotion regulation, including improvement in skills (e.g., mindfulness and dis...

Objective: Suicide is a major public health concern. It is unknown whether self-compassion is associated with suicide risk above and beyond suicide risk factors such as self-criticism, hopelessness, and depression severity. Participants: Participants were 130 ethnically diverse undergraduate college students. Methods: Participants completed self-r...

Suicide is a major public health problem. Given increasing suicide rates and limitations surrounding current interventions, there is an urgent need for innovative interventions for suicidality. Although ayahuasca has been shown to target mental health concerns associated with suicidality (i.e., depression and hopelessness), research has not yet exp...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) treatments emphasize emotion labeling to decrease negative emotion and facilitate emotion regulation. However, no studies have examined emotion labeling in BPD or its impact on intentional emotion regulation. The present study examined the impact of emotion labeling on emotion and intentional emotion regulation...

This work examined the influence of trait experiential avoidance (EA) on the relationship between functional versus dysfunctional emotion regulation (ER) strategies and next-day negative emotion. Participants (N = 154) reported levels of EA, and then provided daily measurements of negative emotional intensity and frequency of the use of dysfunction...

Objective: This study aimed to examine which specific emotion processes influence self-inflicted injury: basal respiratory sinus arrhythmia, baseline negative emotional intensity, emotional reactivity, or emotion regulation deficits. Method: Self-injuring individuals with borderline personality disorder (N = 22) reported their lifetime self-injury...

Research on processes and mechanisms of change aim to explain how and why an intervention leads to change. Despite some theoretical and empirical progress in understanding processes and mechanisms of change in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), this remains an understudied area in the DBT literature. This chapter considers how DBT conceptualizes...

There is little research examining whether the selection of emotion regulation strategies is compromised among individuals characterised by emotion dysregulation. In a sample of 149 undergraduates, we examined the selection and effectiveness of 2 emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal or distraction) in response to emotionally evocative stimuli...

In the current study, we investigated whether adolescents high in perfectionism are prone to experiencing self-stigma for seeking psychological help. This work is based on the premise that the need to seek help for psychological difficulties is not consistent with idealistic personal goals of perfectionistic young people and their desire to retain...