Takin' It to the Streets: Approach/Avoidance Motivation in the Lives of At-Risk Youth.

Professor Strauman’s work is grounded in the premise that mental health and well-being are fundamentally shaped by self-regulation—how individuals pursue goals, respond to challenges, and adapt over time. His research integrates clinical psychology, affective neuroscience, and behavioral science to characterize the psychological and neurobiological systems that support self-regulation, and to understand how disruptions in these systems contribute to vulnerability to depression and related conditions.

Across a program of experimental, clinical, and neuroimaging research, his work has examined self-regulation as a multi-level system, including its cognitive and motivational mechanisms, its development through socialization, and its links to affective and immunological processes. This work has also informed the development and evaluation of novel interventions targeting self-regulatory dysfunction.

More recently, his work has focused on translating this science of self-regulation into scalable approaches to intervention and prevention. This includes the development of new models of treatment that target regulatory processes across disorders, as well as efforts to extend effective self-regulation skills beyond traditional clinical settings and into everyday contexts. This translational focus reflects a broader aim of building integrated, system-level approaches to mental health that can improve outcomes at population scale.