Research

Research into the efficacy of Stoic ideas and practices is still in its early days. The first attempt to gather data, so far as we are aware, was via the Stoic Week experiment that began in 2012, run by Modern Stoicism. The Director of Research for Modern Stoicism, Tim LeBon, is a member of the Centre. 

Below we list published academic research that has just started to appear in recent years: 

• MacLellan, A., Derakshan, N., ‘The Effects of Stoic Training and Adaptive Working Memory Training on Emotional Vulnerability in High Worriers’, Cognitive Therapy and Research 45 (2021), 730–744, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10183-4

• Brown, M. E. L., MacLellan, A., Laughey, W. et al., ‘Can Stoic Training Develop Medical Student Empathy and Resilience? A Mixed-Methods Study’, BMC Medical Education 22 (2022), 340, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03391-x

• Karl, J. A., Verhaeghen, P., Aikman, S. N. et al., ‘Misunderstood Stoicism: The Negative Association between Stoic Ideology and well-Being’, Journal of Happiness Studies 23 (2022), 3531–3547, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00563-w

• MacLellan, A., Brown, M. E. L., LeBon, T., Guha, N., ‘The Application of Stoicism to Health Professions Education’, in Brown, M. E. L., Veen, M., Finn, G. M. (eds), Applied Philosophy for Health Professions Education (Singapore: Springer, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1512-3_22

• Menzies, R. E., Whittle, L. F., ‘Stoicism and Death Acceptance: Integrating Stoic Philosophy in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Death Anxiety’, Discover Psychology 2, 11 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-022-00023-9

• Connery, A., Cavanna, A. E. Coleman, R., ‘Can Stoicism inspire stuttering intervention? The clinical usefulness of an ancient philosophy’, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 58 (2023), 977–987,https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12832

• Moreno-Monsalve, N., Delgado-Ortiz, M., Sanabria-Ospino, A., Pardo Ezcurra, T. T., Nicolás Rojas, Y. W., Fajardo-Moreno, W., ‘High-Performance Project Teams: Analysis from the Stoic Approach’, Sustainability 15, 16095 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3390/su152216095  

• Hammer, K., Van Gordon, W., ‘Joyful Stoic Death Writing: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Newcomers Contemplating Death in an Online Group’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678231178051

• Garcia, M. V. F., ‘What Every Intensivist Should Know about Stoicism to Prevent Burnout’, Journal of Critical Care 80 (2024), 154454, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrc.2023.154454