Principles of Emotion Change What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

by Pascual-Leone, Antonio

• ISBN13: 9781433836602
• ISBN10: 1433836602
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781433840890
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-12-16
• Publisher: American Psychological Association
• More Book Details

Summary

This book of theory and practice offers an unprecedented exploration of the nature of emotion and the process by which it changes.

Written for mental health providers and psychotherapy researchers, this innovative and unique volume offers an extraordinary synthesis of psychotherapy research, neuroscience, and practical observations to propose a new paradigm of emotion change. The book presents a general theory of how a difficult emotional state changes. Integrating findings across treatment approaches, it resolves contradictions found in different lines of research and reconciles existing theories that have seemed at odds. It explains the different kinds of emotional change, the hypothesized mechanisms driving that change, and when each type of change is most applicable. Dr. Pascual-Leone demonstrates that having a clearer understanding of how emotion change happens enables clinicians to apply more impactful and effective interventions. Chapters explore everything from moment-by-moment work (through engagement, labeling, and expression) to broader process formulations (such as narrative, re-framing, and purpose in life). Extensive clinical examples help therapists get a better grip on what each kind of processing really means.
 

Author Biography

Antonio Pascual-Leone, PhD, CPsych, is a professor in psychology at the University of Windsor, Canada and is an honorary professor of psychiatry at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. Pascual-Leone runs the Emotion Change Lab at the University of Windsor and supervises research on the processes of emotional change as they occur in psychotherapy and in everyday life. Dr. Pascual-Leone usually teaches courses on psychotherapy interventions and has co-authored a book on Emotion-Focused Therapy with Dr. Sandra C. Paivio. He has published seminal contributions to the theory and research of emotion-focused therapy and is regarded as a world expert in emotional processing. His work is recognized by career awards from international societies as well as distinguished publication awards.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. A General Theory of Emotional Processing
Part I: Feel Less and Containing the Feeling
Chapter 2. Down Regulating & Suppressing Emotion
Part II: Notice the Feeling
Chapter 3. Engagement, Awareness, and Symbolization
Chapter 4. Emotional Engagement: Getting in Touch with What's There
Chapter 5. Labeling Emotion: Finding the Right Words
Chapter 6. Deepening and Symbolization Making Meanings from One's Feelings
Part III: Feel More, Express More
Chapter 7. Heightening Arousal, Vividness, Expression, and Enactments
Chapter 8. Emotional Arousal: What matters, how much, and when?
Chapter 9. Getting Physical: "Working from the outside in"
Chapter 10. Enactment and Playing it Out: "Working from the inside out"
Chapter 11. Active Expression Affirms the Self
Part IV: Order the Sequence of Emotions
Chapter 12. Sequential Transformation: The Pattern in Emotion Makes the Change
Chapter 13. "Changing Emotion with Emotion": Understanding the Process in Action
Chapter 14. Adult Emotional Development: The Evolution of one's Emotional Repertoire
Chapter 15. "The only way out is through": Patterns Across Treatments and Disorders
Chapter 16. Tracking Emotional Transformations: Roller Coaster to Resolution
Part V: Re-Contextualizing the Feeling
Chapter 17. Reflecting on Context and Narrative: The Bird's Eye View on Emotion
Chapter 18. Psychological Elaboration: Telling More of the Story
Chapter 19. We have Relationships with our Memories: Revising the "Meta-Data"
Chapter 20. The Story Itself is an Agent of Change: "This is the story of my life..."
Chapter 21. Storying the Self: "It's a matter of perspective"
Chapter 22. Meta-perspective and Existential shift: "I am both the author and the reader"
Closing Remarks
Chapter 23. Working with Emotion: A New Paradigm