Abstract
When are emotions adaptive and when are they not? This question is central to theory and research on emotions, and, although many areas of research address this question, research on mental health is especially salient. Research on mental health considers the full range of emotional functioning, from emotional numbing and inability to experience or express emotions to the depths of depression and the heights of mania. Understanding these and other forms of emotional dysfunction is important in and of itself and as a means of understanding normal emotional variation. As the editors of Emotion Review, we are pleased to inaugurate a new section that will specialize in articles at the intersections of emotion research and theory with research on mental health, including work on emotional difficulties in the context of mental illness as well as insights into how emotional functioning changes (or resists change) in response to therapeutic interventions. This section will welcome submissions from a range of fields, including, but not limited to psychology, psychiatry, clinical neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. Jonathan Rottenberg will serve as the primary editor for the new section.
Emotional symptoms are central to mental health diagnoses (e.g., Jazaieri, Urry, & Gross, 2013). Indeed, emotional dysfunction is a central (and often highly distressing) aspect of mental illness. Emotional difficulties observed transdiagnostically include atypical intensity, frequency, duration, and inertia of emotional responses; situation-inappropriate profiles of felt and expressed emotions; difficulties with perception of emotions based on facial and vocal cues; low levels of affective awareness; and reliance on ineffective emotional regulatory strategies. Further, emotional difficulties may be associated with other cognitive, motivational, interpersonal, and somatic changes. Mental illness does not exist in a social vacuum—research addresses the ways in which emotional difficulties associated with mental illness respond to social cues (including those offered as part of therapeutic interventions) and, in turn, affect social relationships and group dynamics. Studies are exploring these findings’ implications for understanding the emergence and maintenance of distress, responses to treatment, and long-term prognosis. Research is actively examining the extent to which the observed emotional difficulties replicate across social and cultural contexts and respond to cultural models of distress.
These findings have much to offer to the broader interdisciplinary community of emotion scholars. Understanding how emotions go awry has been central to most theoretical models of emotion. Studying emotions in the context of mental illness is critical to models of healthy emotional functioning, and vice versa. Clinical research and practice stand to benefit from interdisciplinary research on emotion. For example, research on attention, memory, and emotions has been integrated with clinical science, with significant insights for understanding internalizing disorders such as anxiety and depression (e.g., Dalgleish & Watts, 1990). At the same time, clinical research provides examples of emotional deficits and dynamics that can yield clues about important emotional phenomena, and challenge emotion researchers to refine their theoretical models. For example, research on emotional deficits in psychopathy and autism has been instrumental for encouraging emotion theorists and researchers to refine their conceptual models (e.g., of threat and fear), and for stimulating new lines of work on emotions and social cognition (Blair, 2008).
Articles submitted to the new section can focus on emotional difficulties associated with mental illness and/or examine emotions in the context of pharmacological or psychological therapy. Because our readership comes from many areas and disciplines, articles for the Perspectives on Mental Health section should be written to engage this audience and to highlight implications of the work for broader emotion research and theory. Submissions should conform to the general instruction for authors applying to all Emotion Review manuscripts.