Michelle Craske
Michelle Craske is a clinical psychologist at UCLA, where she is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and directs the Anxiety and Depression Research Center. She is one of the principal figures in the modern treatment of anxiety, and the author of the inhibitory-learning account of exposure therapy. She is senior author on the 2012 study with Katharina Kircanski and Matthew Lieberman that tested whether putting a fear into words helps during exposure. On this site she carries a restraint rather than a result: naming a feeling is at most a candidate ingredient inside a treatment, and is not itself a treatment.
Who they are
Exposure therapy, in plain words, is a treatment in which somebody approaches what frightens them, under guidance and in steps, until the fear stops following. The older explanation was that the fear simply wears out through repetition. Craske's framework says something different: the original fear learning is not erased, and what the treatment builds is a new, competing lesson that sits alongside it. That reframing matters because it explains why fear can come back in a new place or after a gap, and it changes how sessions are designed.
This page describes research. It diagnoses nobody and recommends nothing.
Key papers
Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086 to 1091. Senior author. The study that put affect labelling, saying out loud what you feel and what you are looking at, inside an exposure procedure.
Key ideas
She is the clinical authority behind this site's most important piece of self-restraint on the subject. What has the evidence behind it for anxiety is exposure and cognitive behavioural therapy as whole treatments. Naming a feeling is a candidate ingredient inside them, and there is no evidence base establishing that it improves the clinical outcomes of exposure therapy.
Her framework predicts that the useful thing in an exposure session is a violated expectation, not a comfortable one. That is a claim about how the treatment works, and it is a matter for clinicians, not for readers to apply to themselves.
The distinction this site keeps is between an ingredient and a treatment. A great deal of popular writing quietly promotes the first into the second.
Concepts on this site
Psychological Flexibility and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the neighbouring clinical territory, are named in plain text because neither has a page on this site yet
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086 to 1091.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed against the UCLA psychology and psychiatry records.