Dr. Denton has a dual background in psychiatry and marriage & family therapy and his interest is in the interface of couple/family relationships with health and illness. He has worked for many years with an empirically supported model of couple therapy called emotion focused therapy for couples (EFT) and is currently testing EFT as an adjunctive intervention to antidepressant medication for depressed women with comorbid major depressive disorder and marital discord. This research is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. He has also conducted basic research on couple communication looking at relationships between couple communication with both individual social cognitive abilities as well as physiologic parameters. At the present time he is particularly interested in the demand-withdraw pattern of couple communication. He has developed a questionnaire (the Relationship Discussion Questionnaire) to assess this communication pattern and has explored the role of this pattern in health conditions such as somatoform disorders, cardiac illness, and depression.
Dr. Denton is director of the Family Studies Center which conducts research and also provides clinical training to trainees from a variety of professional backgrounds. Trainees from the Family Studies Center work with patients and families at the Center’s clinic as well as in a variety of clinical locations across the medical center.
He is past President of the North Carolina Association for Marriage and Family Therapy which awarded him the David & Vera Mace award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the profession of marriage and family therapy. He has also served as chair of the North Carolina Marital & Family Therapy Licensing Board.
