Mindfulness, Health, Emotional Acceptance & Regulation Team (My HEART) Lab

Frank L. Gardner, PhD, ABPP

Dr. Frank Gardner’s My HEART Research Lab includes independent yet overlapping areas of study, including but not limited to:

Mindfulness and Acceptance

As a recognized, decades-long expert in mindfulness and acceptance-based theory and research, mindfulness and acceptance-based constructs are often at the forefront of Dr. Gardner’s work and cut across most lab projects and scholarly contributions.

Psychological Variables and Health

A frequent line of lab research focuses on the relationship between psychological variables (such as emotion regulation, mindfulness, and resilience) and health/illness, including their relationship to psychopathology, various physiological metrics, and pathophysiology. Dr. Gardner and his team are presently investigating the use of wearable biometric technologies to better understand and predict these relationships.

Elite Human Performance

Understanding and enhancing expert/elite performance (e.g., athletes, surgeons, military personnel, performing artists) from the context of optimizing attention, awareness, and emotion regulation is an area that Dr. Gardner is known for worldwide. As such, the My HEART Lab focuses on the use of mindfulness and acceptance-based mental skills training interventions, such as his co-authored Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) protocol for optimizing performance and personal well-being, which is used by Olympic organizations, professional teams, and organizations across the world.

Anger, Aggression, and Interpersonal Violence

The My HEART Lab also investigates the relationship between anger, aggression, interpersonal violence, and emotion (dys)regulation. Dr. Gardner maintains a long-standing research line on associated anger and aggression constructs, and Lab projects frequently cover this area of study.

Overall, the mission of the My HEART Research Lab is to allow students to flourish as critical thinkers and competent researchers. Dr. Gardner invites students to pursue research that broadly crosses through these varied topics. Students are also encouraged to see these broad topics as starting points for their own ideas, as they evolve into independent scholars.