Emotion special issue

Abstract

In this issue on an emotion-focused approach to therapy, emotion is seen as a special form of information processing crucial to survival and adaptation. It is now clear that emotion influences modes of processing, guides attention, enhances memory and that much behaviour is in the service of emotion regulation and attachment. People do not only do things because of their views of things but because it feels good or bad. People attempt to regulate affect—to minimize unpleasant and maximize pleasant affect—and this is a driving force in human motivation and action. Emotions, as well as influencing information processing and providing action dispositions, also provide evaluations of goal attainment. These evaluations are not necessarily in language or reflexively self-conscious. In addition emotions have more to do with evaluation of the significance of things to one’s well-being than with their truth or rationality. From an emotion-focused perspective, disorder is seen as resulting more from failures in the dyadic regulation of affect, avoidance of affect, traumatic learning and lack of processing of emotion than from logical error, irrationality or lack of insight. The clarification of the nature and functioning of emotion over the last decade is especially important in light of the proposed relationship between emotion and cognition in the cognitive revolution. In its original form the post-cognitive hypothesis— that emotion was caused by automatic thoughts accessible to consciousness—was interesting and testable but the meaning of cognitive by now has become so all encompassing as to become almost meaningless. So many phenomena are now viewed as cognitive, irrespective of whether they are unconscious, preverbal or perceptual. Modes of processing based on fear or loss have been called cognitive. Complex states such as worthlessness or hopelessness, which are based as much on emotion as they are on cognition and are more feelings than beliefs, have been treated as cognitions. Different personality disorders have been seen as being based on a different cognitive content. Now that cognition is so all encompassing, the thesis that cognition produces emotion and disorder and that therapy should be aimed at changing cognition is much less testable and much less interesting than when cognition meant automatic thought. The cognitive hypothesis has essentially become untestable and non-refutable. The important question for the field now is ‘When is it important that emotion is mediated by cognition and when is it important that cognition is mediated by emotion and what are the best forms of intervention for the different instances?’ Another problem with the dominant cognitive paradigm is that the cognitive therapy proposal that people need to bring troublesome emotion into line with reason’s dictates simply is not humanly feasible. It denies human complexity. In fact a desire to be totally rational can itself produce emotional distress. If reason ruled, people would not do anything simply because they enjoy it. Passion is an important part of life, giving it colour and meaning. We do things for the emotional effects. Emotion therefore needs to be treated as an independent variable that interacts with and influences cognition and behaviour. It is the thesis of this issue that in therapy emotion needs to be validated and worked with directly to promote emotional change and that a comprehensive approach to treatment needs to incorporate a focus on emotion. Greenberg in the first paper on Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) offers Awareness, Regulation and Transformation as three empirically supported principles of emotional change and argues that a deepening of client’s core emotions in therapy, for