** Graduate Student Enrollment Notice -- Dr. Constantino WILL NOT be accepting applications for Fall 2026 entry into our graduate program.
Directed by Dr. Michael J. Constantino, The Psychotherapy Research Lab is part of the Clinical Psychology Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Broadly, our research centers on diverse aspects of psychotherapy process, outcome, integration, and implementation, all in the service of optimizing evidence-based mental health care. More precisely, my colleagues, students, and I are keenly interested in: (1) investigating patient and dyadic characteristics (traits) and longitudinal processes (states) that influence psychosocial treatment outcomes; (2) developing, testing, and implementing context-responsive therapeutic interventions that draw on both theory-specific (e.g., interpersonal, cognitive) and theory-common (e.g., expectancy-focused, therapy relationship-oriented) principles of clinical change; (3) establishing and understanding therapist differences in effectiveness, and prospectively leveraging such therapist effects as a form of personalized measurement-based care and decision-making; and (4) developing and testing clinical theory at the intersections of psychotherapy, personality psychology, and social psychology.
Across these interrelated foci—and in the context of both controlled studies and naturalistic, community-based care—our lab adopts complementary research designs (e.g., randomized treatment efficacy and effectiveness trials; quantitative correlational and longitudinal process research; observer-based coding of therapy microprocesses; community-engaged participatory surveys, interviews, and focus groups; lab-based analogue experiments), uses both quantitative (e.g., multilevel structural equation modeling [MSEM], actor-partner interdependence modeling [APIM], meta-analyses, machine learning) and qualitative (e.g., consensual qualitative research, grounded theory) analytic methods, and engages multiple mental health care stakeholder groups (e.g., patients, therapists, system administrators, payors).
Accentuating our wide-ranging contributions across multiple domains of psychotherapy science, our team contributed a comprehensive review chapter on “Patient, therapist, and relational factors” (Constantino, Boswell, & Coyne, 2021) to the latest edition of Bergin and Garfield’s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change—the foremost research compendium in the field. We also contributed a chapter, “Can we harness therapist effects for therapeutic benefit?” (Constantino & Muir, 2024), for the American Psychological Association Handbook of Psychotherapy (for which Dr. Constantino was also an Associate Editor).
The Psychotherapy Research Lab suite is located in 143 & 145 Tobin Hall at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. To learn more about the Lab and its related projects, please browse the relevant links on this website, or email Dr. Constantino or one of the lab members directly. You can also contact us at therapyresearchlab@gmail.com.