Emotion Regulation and Psychopathology
Inappropriate emotional responses are implicated
in a large number of forms of psychopathology
(Gross & Levenson, 1997; Thoits,
1985). Indeed, more than half of the Axis I
clinical disorders (such as the anxiety disorders
and mood disorders), and all of the Axis II personality
disorders (such as borderline personality
disorder), involve problematic emotional
responses (American Psychiatric Association,
2000). What's proven more difficult than one
might expect, however, has been moving from
broad statements such as these to specific empirically
grounded insights concerning how differences
in emotional reactivity and/or emotion
508 V PERSONALITY ISSUES
regulation contribute to different forms of psychopathology
(Rottenberg & Gross, 2003;
Rottenberg & Johnson, 2007), and how therapeutic
interventions might be used to correct
dysregulated emotion (Moses & Barlow,
2006).
Take major depressive disorder. This disorder
is a devastating psychiatric condition
whose definition includes increased negative
affect and anhedonia (diminished positive affect).
From this definition, it might seem obvious
that depression leads to disrupted emotion
regulation (Gross & Munoz, 1995). However,
there are no fewer than three competing views
of how depression disrupts emotional responding,
and without clarity about the nature of the
problematic emotions, it is very difficult to
draw conclusions about the role of emotion
regulation (Rottenberg, Gross, & Gotlib,
2005). The first view is that depression involves
diminished emotional reactivity to positive
situations. In support of this "positive attenuation"
view, convincing evidence from a
variety of induction contexts suggests that individuals
who are depressed respond with less
positive emotion than individuals who are not
depressed. The second view is that depression
involves increased negative emotional reactivity.
Like the positive attenuation hypothesis,
the "negative potentiation" view seems to follow
directly from the very definition of depression,
as well as from major theories of depression
(e.g., Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979).
However, the preponderance of empirical evidence
actually suggests that individuals who
are depressed show lesser rather than greater
emotional reactivity.
These findings suggest a third view-namely,
the "emotion context insensitivity" view
(Rottenberg et aI., 2005). This view derives from
evolutionary accounts of depression as characterized
by disengagement (Nesse, 2000), and
sees emotional responses (whether negative or
positive) as involving energetic engagement with
the environment. In this view, depression leads
to pervasive disengagement, and hence to diminished
levels of both positive and negative emotional
reactivity. Consistent with this third view,
Rottenberg and colleagues (Rottenberg, Kasch,
Gross, & Gotlib, 2002; Rottenberg & Johnson,
2007) have presented studies showing that relative
to either formerly depressed or neverdepressed
participants, depressed individuals
showed less