Matt Southward

Dr. Matt Southward is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on mechanisms of change in cognitive-behavioral therapies, particularly for mood, anxiety, and personality disorders. He investigates how patients learn and implement emotion regulation skills to improve outcomes and uses machine learning to personalize treatments. Key interests include optimizing therapies by linking skill use to affective targets and predicting treatment efficacy via baseline patient characteristics.

• Education:
  • PhD, The Ohio State University (2019)
  • MA, The Ohio State University (2014)
  • BA, University of Chicago (2011)

His research on borderline personality disorder (BPD) examines daily emotion regulation patterns and their clinical implications. He has developed treatments like BPD Compass, a short-term, personality-based intervention validated through randomized controlled trials. Dr. Southward emphasizes transdiagnostic approaches and dimensional models to address co-occurring psychopathology.

Notable awards include the APS Rising Star (2024) and the Early Career Investigator Award (2023). His work bridges clinical practice and machine learning, with studies on therapeutic alliance, skill utilization, and aversive reactivity. Current projects explore how cultural identity and neuroticism influence treatment outcomes in the Unified Protocol.

Dr. Southward collaborates on grants involving emotion regulation strategies and has contributed to over 50 peer-reviewed articles. His lab focuses on innovative methodologies, including facial emotion classifiers and daily monitoring studies to assess real-time behavioral changes.