When Emotion Goes Wrong : Realizing the Promise of Affective Science

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued that emotions are adaptive when they are about the right things, are expressed in the right way, arise at the right time, and last the right amount of time. By contrast, emotions are maladaptive when they are about the wrong things, are expressed in the wrong way, arise at the wrong time, or are the wrong duration. This analysis led Aristotle to recommend moderation, and he provided vivid cautionary examples of emotional excesses and deficiencies of both positive and negative emotions. The issue of how best to distinguish adaptive from maladaptive emotion remains as important to clinical scientists and practitioners today as it was when Aristotle wrote more than two thousand years ago. Happily for us, the past few decades have witnessed an explosion of research on emotion, accompanied by new theories (e.g., evolutionary analyses of emotion; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990), methods (e.g., anatomically based systems for coding facial expressive behavior; Ekman & Rosenberg, 1997), and findings (Cacioppo & Gardner, 1999). These developments have provided new tools with which to address the role that emotions play in health and illness. Although it remains a daunting task to arrange into a meaningful conceptual scheme the many ways that emotions can go wrong, these tools promise to enable researchers and clinicians to formulate more sophisticated conceptualizations of emotional disturbance that will enhance their capacity to describe, diagnose, and treat disorders. In the rich tradition of Aristotle, Berenbaum and colleagues (2003; this issue) classify emotional disturbances on the basis of observed excesses or deficiencies in emotion. In this comment, we consider what affective science is teaching us about both the generation and the regulation of emotional responses, and how each of these processes may relate to clinical phenomena. We argue that it is only by fully harnessing the insights of contemporary affective science that it will be possible to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of emotional disturbances that is grounded in a causal analysis of the underlying processes. Throughout, we