The Centrality of Emotion to Psychological Change

Despite ongoing discussion over how best to define and operationalize emotions, therapists increasingly agree on emotions’ centrality to psychological health and change. Research suggests that accurately recognizing emotions is critical to psychological health, and most major therapeutic approaches aim to address deficits in emotional awareness. Interventions also strive to regulate emotions, with cognitive-behavior therapy typically working to reduce negative emotions such as anxiety and depression, and experiential and psychodynamic therapists to augment emotional experiencing. Increasingly, however, these approaches are converging toward using emotional experience within therapy to ultimately reduce negative emotions. This application of emotions’ role in meaning change and human behavior points to the way in which drawing on basic emotion research can enable us to create assessments and treatments grounded in an empirically supported understanding of mechanisms of change, and in so doing foster greater psychotherapy integration.