Todd B. Kashdan

Introduction

Todd Barrett Kashdan is an American psychologist, professor of psychology at George Mason University, and director of the Well-Being Laboratory there. His research asks two questions that he treats as connected: why some people suffer when others do not, and what makes life feel worth living. The first has led him to study the boundary between ordinary anxiety and clinical anxiety disorder; the second, to the roles of curiosity, meaning and purpose, and psychological flexibility.

Kashdan is unusual among positive psychologists in that much of his reputation rests on criticising the field from inside. His work on the value of negative emotional states, and his involvement in edited volumes that took stock of positive psychology's first decade, position him as a reformer rather than an advocate. He is also the author of books intended for general readers, most notably Curious? and The Art of Insubordination.

Early Life and Education

Kashdan was born in New York and received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1996. Between college and graduate school he worked as a research assistant with Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University on the character traits that drive attraction between people, and with Jan Loney on how parents interact with children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

He then took his MA and PhD in clinical psychology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, completing the doctorate in 2004 under the direction of Francis Fincham. Working with Paul Rose, he examined how people's curiosity affects their relationships, a topic that became the seed of his later research programme. His graduate training began in 1998, the year Martin Seligman used his American Psychological Association presidential address to launch positive psychology as a movement, and Kashdan has described his career as beginning alongside the field he would later criticise.

The two pre-graduate-school jobs are a fair summary of what followed. One was about what draws people together; the other about why some children are harder to parent. Kashdan's research has stayed at exactly that intersection — the mechanisms of approach, and the mechanisms of difficulty — and his distinctive move has been to refuse to treat the second as merely the absence of the first.

Academic and Professional Career

Kashdan joined George Mason University as an assistant professor in 2004 and was made full professor in 2014. He directs the Well-Being Laboratory, which studies how happiness and meaning are created and sustained, along with strength use, stress and anxiety, mindfulness, social relationships, and self-regulation. The laboratory received a research grant of about one million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation by 2020.

He has served as an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Positive Psychology, positions that placed him at the centre of editorial decisions in personality and well-being research. He received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Early Career Award in 2013.

In 2019, George Mason University concluded that Kashdan had violated its rules against sexual or gender-based harassment of graduate students and had shown a lack of appropriate professional behaviour, in connection with conduct reaching back to 2013. He was reprimanded, barred from teaching graduate courses and mentoring graduate students for two years, and required to complete harassment prevention training; he continued to teach undergraduate courses. Kashdan denied the substance of the findings and sued the university in federal court in 2019, arguing that the investigation was flawed, that it displayed bias against men, and that it violated his rights to due process and freedom of speech. A federal judge ruled against him in 2020, and in 2023 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected his appeal.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Curiosity as a well-being mechanism

Kashdan's best-known research concerns curiosity, which he treats not as a pleasant extra but as a functional capacity with measurable consequences. Working with John Roberts and others, he has examined how curiosity operates inside relationships: whether curious people listen more actively, show more interest in a partner's disclosures, and ask more thoughtful questions. His broader claim is that curiosity makes even tedious tasks more engaging by directing attention to detail, and that it opens people to experiences they would otherwise avoid. He contributed the chapter on curiosity as a character strength to the Character Strengths and Virtues handbook edited by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman.

The programme also produced a distinction that has held up better than the popular framing of curiosity as a virtue. Kashdan and his colleagues separated the breadth of curiosity — how many things a person finds interesting — from its depth, and from the willingness to sit with the discomfort that novelty brings. On that account curiosity is not simply pleasant: it requires tolerating uncertainty, which is why it correlates with anxiety as well as with well-being, and why a person can be curious and unhappy at once.

Psychological flexibility and the anxiety boundary

A second line of work addresses why distressing emotions become disorders in some people and not others. Much of it was conducted in the clinic rather than the laboratory, and Kashdan's early reputation rested substantially on social anxiety — on the mechanisms by which fear of evaluation narrows a person's life, and on why some anxious people avoid and others do not. His findings suggest that the intensity of anxiety matters less than its context: infrequent positive events, a deficit of positive emotion, and an unwillingness to experience distressing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations distinguish people with emotional disorders from people with ordinary anxiety more sharply than does how much anxiety they feel. This supports the concept of psychological flexibility, the capacity to remain open to a full range of internal experience and to adapt behaviour to the situation, which Kashdan treats as central to mental health.

Gratitude, work, and adverse events

Kashdan has also published on gratitude, finding that people who practise it respond less aggressively to slights and act more considerately toward colleagues and partners. In work on unemployment he found that losing a job can affect a person for years, because re-employment does not remove the expectation that it will happen again, though the effect is smaller after a mass layoff than after an individual dismissal.

Criticism from within positive psychology

Kashdan has been one of the field's most prominent internal critics. He co-edited Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward and Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology, volumes that pressed the movement to confront its measurement problems and its tendency to treat positive states as unqualified goods. His best-known statement of this position is The Upside of Your Dark Side, written with Robert Biswas-Diener, which argues that anger, guilt, selfishness, and anxiety each do real work and that a culture which treats happiness as the only legitimate psychological state limits people.

Major Publications

Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (2009) — his popular book on the science of curiosity and its role in a meaningful life.
Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (2011, edited with Kennon M. Sheldon and Michael F. Steger) — a critical survey of positive psychology's first decade and its future directions.
Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven Foundations of Well-Being (2013, edited with Joseph Ciarrochi) — connecting acceptance-based approaches to well-being research.
The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self, Not Just Your "Good" Self, Drives Success and Fulfillment (2014, with Robert Biswas-Diener) — the argument that negative emotional states are functional and that relentless positivity is limiting.
The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (2022) — on why organisations and societies suppress principled dissent and what makes dissent effective.

Impact and Legacy

Kashdan's influence runs through three channels: the scientific literature on curiosity, which he helped establish as a legitimate research topic within personality and clinical psychology; the internal reform of positive psychology; and a substantial public readership for his books and writing. His framing of psychological flexibility has been taken up well beyond his own laboratory, and he has published several hundred peer-reviewed articles.

The criticisms of his work fall into two groups. The methodological ones apply to much of the field. Much of the evidence linking curiosity to well-being is correlational and rests on self-report or experience-sampling designs, so the causal direction is not settled: it is at least as plausible that feeling well makes people curious as that curiosity makes them well. The measurement of curiosity itself is less settled than its popularity suggests — self-report scales of "trait curiosity" correlate substantially with openness to experience, and it is not always clear what the trait measures add beyond the broader dimension already in the personality taxonomy.

Psychological flexibility also overlaps heavily with established constructs such as openness to experience, experiential avoidance, and emotion regulation, and critics have questioned how much it explains that those constructs do not already cover. The construct is central to acceptance and commitment therapy, and much of the supporting evidence comes from researchers with a stake in that tradition, which is a familiar hazard when a therapy, a construct and a measurement instrument develop together. Positive psychology as a whole has been hit hard by the replication crisis, and several of its flagship findings have not survived large-scale replication attempts, which casts a general shadow over well-being research of this kind.

There is also a tension in his own position that is worth naming. Kashdan built a career arguing that the field overvalues positive states, and he is largely right; but the remedy he proposes — psychological flexibility, willingness to experience distress, whole-self authenticity — is itself a positive psychological trait, measured by self-report and promoted as a route to success and fulfilment. The Upside of Your Dark Side is, in the end, a self-help book with a more interesting title. The critique of the happiness industry reproduced several of its features while claiming to oppose them.

There is also the question of funding. The roughly one million dollar grant his laboratory received from the Charles Koch Foundation has been noted in discussions of donor influence on university research. Kashdan has maintained that the funding supported his work without directing it, and no impropriety has been established, but the arrangement is part of a wider debate about philanthropic funding of social science, and the Koch network's political commitments make the question particularly pointed for research on dissent and on organisational nonconformity.

The most consequential controversy, however, is not about his science. The 2019 finding that he violated his university's rules against sexual and gender-based harassment, the sanctions that followed, and the unsuccessful litigation in which he argued anti-male bias have become part of his public record. The university has consistently declined to discuss the personnel matter; Kashdan has maintained the findings were wrong and the process unfair, and he continues to hold his professorship. For readers assessing his work, the episode is relevant both to his standing in the field and to the broader reckoning over power and mentorship in academic psychology.

Learn More

Robert Biswas-Diener — his co-author on the case for negative emotion, and a leading researcher on happiness across cultures
Martin Seligman — who launched positive psychology, the field Kashdan works in and criticises
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — whose work on flow and intrinsic motivation underpins much of the well-being research Kashdan builds on

References

Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. William Morrow.