Jack Keefe, Ph.D.

Background

I received my Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and completed my clinical internship and an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, followed by a research fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I am currently affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein.

How Therapy Works

A central question in my research is what actually changes during psychotherapy — not just whether people feel better, but what shifts in how they understand themselves and relate to others along the way. I have studied how patients develop a deeper capacity to make sense of their own emotional experiences and symptoms over the course of treatment, and how that growing self-understanding contributes to lasting improvement. I am also interested in what therapists do that helps: how the emotional intensity of therapy sessions, the use of therapeutic interpretation, and the quality of the patient-therapist relationship each contribute to change. Some of this work has involved large-scale reviews that synthesize findings across many studies to draw broader conclusions about what therapeutic processes matter most and what treatment approaches seem effective on the whole.

Matching Patients to Treatments

Not everyone responds to the same therapy in the same way (nevermind that every therapy entails a different relationship between two people). A second line of my research uses computational and statistical tools to try to identify, in advance, which patients are most likely to benefit from which form of treatment. This work has focused especially on personality disorders and PTSD — conditions where many people try multiple treatments before finding one that helps, and where getting the match right earlier could make a real difference.

Current and Emerging Projects

I am also studying how living in an environment that is hostile toward sexual and gender minorities affects mental health and the experience of therapy. For example, in a large national study of college counseling centers, my collaborators and I found that while LGBTQ students enter therapy with more distress, therapy was just as effective for them regardless of how much anti-LGBTQ stigma existed in their surrounding community — suggesting that therapy can serve as a meaningful buffer, even in difficult environments.

I am currently leading a funded study (supported by the American Psychological Foundation and APA Division 39) examining what happens when people turn to AI chatbots for emotional support or therapy. The project explores who is drawn to AI as a source of care, what kinds of relationships and expectations people develop with these tools, and whether sustained use helps or potentially harms more vulnerable individuals.

I am also beginning work on the psychology of lasting change in psychedelic-assisted therapies — in particular, the relationship between personality, the nature of the psychedelic experience itself, and the psychological shifts that help people sustain improvement over time.

Publications

A full list of my publications is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.