Kerry Cannity, PhD

Dr. Cannity is a clinical psychologist with a doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For her dissertation on emotion regulation, she studied how short-term training in mindfulness helps people perform better on sustained attention tasks. People typically spend a lot of time imagining the future or dwelling on the past: mindfulness exercises are about being in the present moment. Learning to focus the attention and bring the mind back when it wanders has been shown to provide cognitive benefits as well as healthy relaxation.

Dr. Cannity has completed research studies on physician communication skills and on the treatment of anxiety and depression in association with chronic health conditions. She specialized in health psychology and psycho-oncology during her internship at the Denver Health Medical Center. With a strong focus on how the body and the mind affect each other, the field of health psychology is concerned with how medical illnesses impact the rest of people’s lives. Dr. Cannity sees herself as bridging the gap between the medical side and the many things people want besides good health. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) at New York-Presbyterian Westchester Division. Because of her experience with multiple therapeutic approaches, she can call upon an array of different tools to address whatever her patient needs.

In addition to her clinical work, she serves on the faculty at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she teaches psychology to undergraduates, and as a research associate with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She has published articles in Health Psychology and the Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, and she is a member of the National Register of Health Service Psychologists and the Society of Behavioral Medicine.