ABSTRACT
One of psychotherapists’ greatest skills is recognizing, understanding, and working with emotion: Psychotherapists are, in effect, applied affective scientists. With their training and experience, therapists become experts in the expression, action tendencies, and consequences of emotional experience. This is usually necessary, as dysphoric emotion is one of the main complaints that leads people to seek therapy, and a positive shift in emotional experience is one indicator for therapy termination. Although emotion has not always maintained a primary place in the theories of change and psychotherapy, it has been central to practicing therapists who must assist clients in managing their emotional states. Humanistic and experiential therapies attend to and use clients’ emotional experiences as a key component in understanding their clients and as a means of facilitating change. The advent of process-based therapies and process research has begun to provide empirically validated evidence for the use of emotionally focused approaches with individuals (e.g., L. S. Greenberg & Paivio, 1997) and with couples (e.g., S. M. Johnson, 2002; S. M. Johnson & Denton, 2002).
