ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the content-specificity hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that emotional disorders have a specific cognitive content or theme running through them. For example, devaluation or loss in depression, danger or threat in anxiety, situationally specific danger in phobia, transgression in anger, and expansion in happiness. These themes Beck's concept of the 'personal domain', i.e. anything that the person considers important in her life. The nature of a person's emotional response or emotional disturbance depends upon his domain. A person may experience different emotions to the same event on separate occasions depending on the event's relevance to his personal domain, e.g. anxious on Monday when the train is late as he will then be late for a meeting, while on Tuesday he is angry when the train is late as it means more people will board the train at his station thereby restricting his personal space on the train. The content-specificity hypothesis was validated by empirical research in the 1980s.
