What is an emotional disorder? A transdiagnostic mechanistic definition with implications for assessment, treatment, and prevention

By J. Bullis, Hannah T. Boettcher, S. Sauer‐Zavala, T. Farchione, David H. Barlow. Clinical Psychology, 2019

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this article is to define a term that has been widely used by both researchers and practitioners in the field since at least 1924 (Miller, 1924), but has never been included in any official nomenclature: emotional disorder. Our reasons for doing so are twofold. First, the literature on emotion and emotion regulation has been plagued by widespread variability in the terminology used to refer to emotion‐related constructs and processes (Gross, 2015; Gross, Sheppes, & Urry, 2011). For example, terms like affect, emotion, and mood are often used interchangeably or in the absence of any definition. This lack of conceptual clarity over key terms continues to impede scholarly efforts to consolidate and integrate existing research findings. We will demonstrate that the frequent use of the term emotional disorder, in the absence of explicit operationalization, has only contributed to an illusory consensus whereby the same term is being used with different meanings. Even without a clear definition, the term emotional disorder continues to feature prominently in contemporary literature; Google Scholar indexed over 1,300 publications for the year 2017 with emotional disorder in the article. Given that use of the term emotional disorder is a popular umbrella term and is likely to persist, there is considerable advantage to leveraging its use. Second, and more importantly, by presenting a definition for emotional disorder that connects putative mechanisms to clinical syndromes, we are also proposing a heuristic for grouping disorders together that transcends traditional diagnostic categories by reclustering disorders into larger groups Received: 17 July 2018 | Revised: 10 December 2018 | Accepted: 10 January 2019 DOI: 10.1111/cpsp.12278

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1335ebdb34a8d4a8c1ca7135f345dcb17b115173