Thomas Ehring
Thomas Ehring is Professor of Clinical Psychology at LMU Munich, where he holds the chair and heads the outpatient treatment centre. With Edward Watkins he set out repetitive negative thinking as a single process that cuts across diagnoses: worry and rumination treated as the same machinery running on different content, showing up in depression, in anxiety, in obsessive compulsive disorder, in post-traumatic stress and in psychosis, rather than belonging to any one of them.
Who they are
Transdiagnostic, in plain words, means the thing being described is not tied to one diagnosis. The practical consequence is that you would expect the same treatment ingredient to help in several conditions at once, and that is the bet the idea makes.
The distinction being collapsed is worth stating. Worry is usually about the future and rumination about the past. Ehring and Watkins argue that the difference is in what the thinking is about, not in what the thinking is doing, and that the shared feature, repetitive, hard to stop, and unproductive, is the part that matters.
His other work is on post-traumatic stress and on the effects of childhood maltreatment in adulthood. His post was confirmed on 11 September 2026.
Key papers
Ehring, T., & Watkins, E. R. (2008). "Repetitive negative thinking as a transdiagnostic process", International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 1(3), 192 to 205. First author.
Key ideas
The idea reorganises the subject rather than adding to it. If the same process is running under several different labels, then the useful question about somebody lying awake is not which category their thinking falls into but whether it is going anywhere.
It is the theoretical background to rumination-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, which targets the style of thinking rather than its content.
Anything on this page is descriptive. Treatment is a matter for clinicians.
Concepts on this site
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, his other field, which has no page on this site yet
Sources
- Ehring, T., & Watkins, E. R. (2008). International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 1(3), 192 to 205.
- Vault record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed as chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment, LMU Munich.