A New Unified Treatment Approach for Emotional Disorders Based on Emotion Science

Research on the nature of emotional disorders points toward a common set of diatheses (underlying psychological vulnerabilities) and functionally (but not superficially) similar expression of pathological emotional responding (e.g., Barlow, 2002). Successful drug treatments for different emotional disorders are very similar, with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or related compounds in wide use. Successful psychological treatments, on the other hand, are currently specifically targeted to each individual disorder. Distilling common principles among existing empirically supported psychological treatments, and giving attention to new findings on emotion regulation and dysregulation from emotion science, we propose and describe a new unified psychological treatment for emotional disorders.

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