ABSTRACT
A wealth of evidence attests to the extensive current and lifetime diagnostic comorbidity of the DSM-IV anxiety and mood disorders. Diagnostic reliability studies of the DSM-III-R and DSM-IV disorders have indicated that this endeavor has been largely successful, reflected by the fact that most anxiety and mood disorder categories are associated with favourable reliability It would be important to ascertain whether a dimensional classification system for anxiety and mood disorders is associated with comparable levels of clinical utility and acceptability found in the personality disorders literature. Research on emotion regulation has provided a novel perspective on the treatment of anxiety and mood disorders, which are essentially disorders of emotion. A variant of situational avoidance that is common across the anxiety disorders is the avoidance of internal somatic cues such as avoiding a hot and stuffy room, physical exertion, and situations provoking perceptual distortions associated with dissociation.
