ABSTRACT
The consequences of failures in a healthy regulation of emotions range from personal distress and unhappiness to socially maladaptive and self-destructive patterns of behaviour. A sound understanding of a process-oriented approach of emotion regulation is a basic tool for each ISTDP therapist. This chapter focuses on the assessment of degree and quality of a patient's healthy regulation of emotion and on the role of defences in emotion regulation. Emotions are elicited by essential stimuli from the outside world or from inside. The functions emotions serve may vary from providing the individual with information about ongoing interpersonal processes, ongoing intrapsychic processes, to facilitating decision-making and behavioural responses. For the emotion to be experienced, conscious perception of external demand characteristics and conscious perception of physiological peripheral reactions are important, but the conscious awareness of action tendencies in combination with the feedback of behavioural reaction is crucial.
