NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)

of Mental Health (NIMH) formed a working group to implement Strategy 1.4 of its Strategic Plan that called for the “development, for research purposes, of new ways of classify-ing psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behaviors and neurobiological measures. ” This project became known as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC; Insel et al., 2010). RDoC marks a shift in psychi-atric research. For the past 30-plus years, most research on mental disorders has been based on clinical syndromes as defined in the DSM. The structure of RDoC departs from clinically described syndromes and attempts to “carve nature at its joints ” by studying psychopathology based on objective behav-ioral, neurobiological, and genetic measures while remaining agnostic concerning tradi-tional diagnoses based on clinical description (Sanislow et al., 2010). History and Rationale Efforts to codify psychiatric diagnosis for research purposes began in the 1970s with the advent of the Feighner criteria, later the Research Diagnostic Criteria, which served as the foundation for the 1980 DSM-III (Feighner et al., 1972). These developments marked a Authors ’ note: The authors thank Lisa Alberts and Bruce Cuthbert for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this entry