Whether it is the rising sense of dread as one’s heart beats furiously and unexpectedly, the vivid memory of a painful event that occurred long ago but is not easily forgotten, or the sharp craving of a substance that seems so certain to quickly take away pain or ensure pleasure, experiences of individuals struggling with distress are replete with emotions. However, despite periodic calls for attention, only relatively recently has the field of clinical psychology begun to systematically incorporate the basic science of emotions into its various frameworks for psychopathology and psychotherapeutic intervention.
An affect science perspective stresses the importance of several emotion characteristics that are relevant to adult psychopathology and its treatment. First, although not always productive, emotions are signals for both reward- and safety-based motivations in service of survival adaptation or societal function. Second, emotions are defined by multiple interacting systems, which operate through both convergent and divergent means. Third, these emotion systems mutually regulate each other to maintain stability through changing environmental contexts. This regulatory function of emotions has been shown to be important to wellbeing and to the promotion of mental health. In contrast, disorder and dysfunction may represent perturbations to the flexible balancing of these emotional response systems.
Dr. Douglas Mennin has focused his research program on utilizing this affect science perspective to understand and treat individuals with chronic distress and negative self-referential processing (NSRP; e.g., worry, rumination, self-criticism), particularly those with high levels of comorbidity, an unyielding course, poor life satisfaction, and refractory response to treatment, with the aim of expanding our knowledge of their etiology, development, and maintenance across the lifespan. Because approximately one-third to one-half of individuals will remain symptomatic even after treatment, he and his collaborator, Dr. David Fresco at the University of Michigan, have developed an emotion regulation perspective to the treatment of these conditions and have translated these ideas into an approach called emotion regulation therapy (ERT). To date, the efficacy of ERT has been demonstrated in several open and randomized clinical trials. In recent years, ERT has also been adapted for distressing contexts such as caregiving of those with cancer and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The READ lab has also been working to extend this research through experimental and ecological investigations of subjective and physiological emotional responses. Ongoing projects aim to delineate the multi-componential (subjective, physiological, expressive) processes that contribute to emotion reactivity and dysregulation.