The Costs of Emotion and Affect: How Affective Frameworks Harm rather than Help in Clinical and Everyday Contexts

The constructs of emotion, affect, and emotion regulation are widely emphasized as central to psychological health and well-being. Although the conceptualization of emotion is a matter of much debate, two key features pervade affective frameworks despite diversity in theories and disparate usage of terms: (a) the assumption of an innate and universal valence-determining process, and (b) a conceptual approach involving the grouping of multimodal responses into unitary emotion states, often viewed as genetically inherited patterns with situation-specific aims. These features heavily inform psychotherapy theories and popular framings of psychological experience. I first subject these features to a critical examination. I then demonstrate how they can obscure more critical and meaningful targets and foster unwarranted assumptions, potentially contributing to iatrogenic effects and limited treatment efficacy, suboptimal intrapersonal and interpersonal functioning, and concerns pertaining to social control and justice. Keywords: affect, emotion, valence, emotion regulation, intervention science