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Research

Research is the spine of everything we do

Every program IHE runs began as a study, and every claim we publish carries its citation. This page shows what we study and where we stop, the three frameworks that organize the work, and the rules every project follows.

Focus areas

What we study, and where we stop

Four areas, examined with the same discipline: what we look at, what evidence we build on, and the lines we do not cross.

Behavioral & Decision Science

What we study
How biological tendencies, environmental cues, and learned patterns interact to shape the decisions we make.
What we build on
Evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.
What we do not do
We describe tendencies, never laws. Human behavior has identifiable patterns and still resists full prediction, and any claim stronger than that would outrun the evidence.

Emotional Regulation & Skill-Building

What we study
How people learn to understand, modulate, and integrate emotion, with methods adapted from CBT, DBT, and ACT as preventive training.
What we build on
Established therapeutic research and contemplative practice, applied the way exercise applies to health: skills anyone can train, no diagnosis required.
What we do not do
This is preventive skill-building, never treatment. It does not replace psychotherapy or psychiatric care, and when someone needs a clinician, we say so and refer them.

Relationship Science & Intentional Partnering

What we study
What makes a partnership durable, healthy, and mutually flourishing, and how adults can choose a partner deliberately.
What we build on
Gottman Institute research, attachment theory, Eli Finkel's work, including the suffocation model of marriage, and longitudinal studies that follow couples across decades.
What we do not do
No matchmaking, no genetic matching, no reproductive advice, no positions on reproductive policy. We teach how to decide. We never decide for anyone.

Cognitive Skill Development

What we study
How attention, perception, judgment, and metacognition strengthen through structured practice. This is the area where MindWorkIn, our pilot program, lives.
What we build on
Cognitive psychology and learning science, with outcomes measured through calibration tests and cognitive tasks.
What we do not do
No promises of a limitless mind. We measure four declared outcomes: decision clarity, attention regulation, metacognitive accuracy, and wellbeing.

Published frameworks

Three frameworks, each with its limits in writing

Plenty of institutes publish frameworks that promise to explain everything. Ours ship with the section most frameworks omit: a plain statement of what they do not claim.

Perceptual Practice Framework

A structured approach to becoming a more accurate, less reactive perceiver of your own thoughts, environment, and experience.

The practices

Noticing:
seeing your own thinking as it happens.
Sourcing:
distinguishing inherited beliefs from examined ones.
Calibrating:
checking perceptions against evidence and updating accordingly.

Built on: Bayesian reasoning, the Stoic tradition, and cognitive science.

What this framework does not claim

It is not a complete philosophy of mind, not a claim that perception is the only thing that matters, and not a replacement for therapy.

Emotional Architecture Framework

Emotional life treated as a skill domain. Emotions are signals to read, patterns to understand, and capacities to develop.

The practices

Recognition:
naming what is felt.
Regulation:
modulating intensity without suppression.
Inquiry:
understanding what the emotion is communicating.
Integration:
translating insight into aligned action.

Built on: CBT, DBT, and ACT, emotion-focused therapy, and affective neuroscience.

What this framework does not claim

It does not claim emotions are fully controllable, it does not replace clinical mental health care, and it carries no political program.

Intentional Partnering Framework

A research-grounded framework for adults considering long-term partnership, focused on values clarification, self-knowledge, and deliberate decision-making.

The practices

Values Articulation:
clarifying what you actually want in a partnership.
Self-Knowledge:
understanding your attachment style, communication patterns, and relational defaults.
Compatibility Evaluation:
assessing alignment on values, life goals, and relational skills.
Communication Skill:
building the conversational tools partnership requires.
Decision Discipline:
making partnership decisions deliberately rather than by default.

Built on: Gottman research, attachment theory, and decision science.

What this framework does not claim

It is not a genetic-matching system, not a reproductive program, not a matchmaking service, and it makes no claim that romance can be eliminated or partnership reduced to a checklist.

Methods & ethics

The rules every study follows

Independent ethical oversight
We partner with universities so studies run under institutional review board (IRB) supervision, and our own Independent Ethics Committee reviews every protocol before and after launch.
A public registry of methods
Methods are registered publicly before results arrive, so nobody, including us, can move the goalposts afterward.
Negative results get published
We publish what we find, including the findings that disappoint us. An institute that only reports its wins is doing marketing, whatever it calls itself.
The Scientific Advisory Board reviews this agenda every quarter. Meet the people, and the open call to join.

Evidence library

The library starts here

Research briefs and methodology notes will be published on this page as the first studies complete. IHE was founded in 2026, so the shelf is short because the work is young. We would rather show it empty than fill it with borrowed citations.

If you want each brief the week it appears, subscribe to the newsletter at the foot of this page. We write occasionally, and only when there is something worth your reading time.

Where the research goes next

The frameworks above become the programs people join, and everything on this page is open for foundations and partners to examine.

See the programs built on this researchPartner with the institute