Regulation of Emotion and Anxiety Disorders Lab, Yale University

Emotion Dysregulation Perspective on Anxiety and Mood Disorders

The Regulation of Emotion and Anxiety Disorders (READ) Lab is focused on understanding and treating chronic and recurrent forms of anxiety and mood disorders, particularly generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depression (MDD), from a perspective that highlights how emotions are poorly processed and become dysregulated. An affect science perspective stresses a number of emotion characteristics that are relevant to adult psychopathology and its treatment. First, although not always productive, emotions are signals for both approach and avoidance 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 in order to maintain stability through changing environmental contexts. This regulatory function of emotions has been shown to be important to well being and to the promotion of mental health. In contrast, disorder and dysfunction may represent perturbations to the flexible balancing of these emotional response systems.

Drawing from the basic affective sciences, Dr. Mennin has developed an emotion dysregulation model of anxiety and mood disorders, which highlights the contributory role of 1) heightened intensity of emotions (i.e., emotional reactions occur intensely, easily, and quickly); 2) poor understanding of emotions (i.e., difficulty identifying emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and joy and instead experiencing emotions as undifferentiated and confusing); 3) negative cognitive reactivity to one's emotional state (i.e., activation of negative beliefs about emotions and lack of emotion acceptance); and 4) maladaptive emotional management responses (e.g., difficulty knowing when or how to enhance or diminish emotional experience in a manner that is appropriate to the environmental context and personal goals).

In the READ lab at Yale University, we are currently working on testing aspects of this model through (1) experimental delineation of multicomponential (i.e., subjective, physiological, expressive) processes that contribute to emotion reactivity and dysregulation in GAD, MDD, and their co-occurrence; (2) development of more ecologically-valid measures of emotion-related deficits relevant to anxiety and mood disorders, which might be sensitive to treatment change; and (3) the development of an integrative emotion regulation treatment for GAD, which is being piloted both at Temple University and at the Yale Anxiety and Mood Services (YAMS).

XX Regulation of Emotion and Anxiety Disorders Lab

XX Department of Psychology, Yale University

XX 2 Hillhouse Avenue, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8205

XX mood.reactions (at) yale.edu