Reading focus
Syllabus: How Should We Classify Psychopathology?
Follow the framework’s updated remit, including development, environment and diagnostic sampling.
Why you’re reading it. Contrast a process-oriented research strategy with HiTOP’s organization of observed covariation.
A question to consider. For the low-mood and worry example, how would an RDoC study choose participants and measurements differently from a study comparing diagnostic groups?
Why this reading
A research programme can organize investigation around processes without first sorting everyone into existing diagnoses. This update explains RDoC’s aims and development, and addresses misconceptions about what the framework requires.
Before you read
Research Domain Criteria is a research framework, not a clinical diagnostic manual. Units of analysis include different ways of studying a process. Sampling across a dimension can address questions that selecting only diagnostic groups would constrain.
Read for
- Connect the framework’s dimensions and measurement choices to developmental and environmental contexts.
- Distinguish illustrative research progress from validation of the framework as a whole.
Consider afterwards
- How would a study change if recruitment followed a process dimension instead of one diagnosis?
- What evidence would connect a process-based finding to a useful classification?
Editorial context
This update is written by program developers and describes a framework that changes with evidence. It explicitly clarifies that NIMH did not stop funding research using existing diagnoses. RDoC is neither an exhaustive catalogue of human experience nor demonstrated proof that one biological level explains all psychopathology.