Digital interventions for emotion regulation in emotional disorders

Abstract

The present doctoral dissertation has been supported by the Marie Curie EF-ST AffecTech Project, approved at call H2020 -MSCA - ITN -2016 (project reference: 722022). This sets out two important points. First, the intimate link of two systems with the concepts of positive and negative affect and emotions. Second the relevance of considering positive affect as a different facet from negative affect, and the implications this entails for the regulation of affect and particularly of emotions as a lower order factor. Research suggest that the two-factor solution of affect may be a suitable construct to establish differences between individuals, and discrete emotions withinperson differences (N. C. Jacobson et al., 2020), but both should be considered.Compelling research has demonstrated that higher-order variables, such as neuroticism or extraversion, are greatly associated with the development, maintenance, and severity of emotional disorders (Barlow et al., 2014). In particular, research linking neuroticism and psychopathology has a longstanding tradition (Eysenck, 1947), but also extraversion (Watson et al., 2019).Neuroticism and negative affectivity are central in the prediction of emotional disorders as a spectrum beyond specific disorders (Brown & Naragon-Gainey, 2013). This has been studied not only cross-sectionally but also longitudinally (Jeronimus et al., 2016;Khazanov & Ruscio, 2016). Despite the increased understanding of how emotional disorders co-occur, it is of paramount to clearly identify intermediate transdiagnostic mechanisms that are more related to clinical utility (Ruggero et al., 2019).Naragon-Gainey and Watson (2014) found that clinical traits (e.g., anxiety sensitivity, perfectionism) were strongly related to neuroticism and generally showed limited incremental predictive power beyond it, although anxiety sensitivity made notable incremental predictive contributions in several cases (e.g., PTSD and panic). Thus, these findings clearly indicate that clinical traits overlap considerably with neuroticism. As it has been found with other clinical traits, the subscales of the DERS would be expected to overlap especially strongly with neuroticism (Stanton et al., 2016).Likewise, extraversion is intimately linked with positive affectivity, which indicates the possibility of encountering potentially pleasurable intra and interpersonal experiences (Watson et al., 1992;. Those individuals who present higher levels of positive affectivity tend to experience more pleasure events and make more effort to obtain those situations. However, clinical traits are of paramount importance because they reflect proximal individual differences that differentiates in a better way those individuals who may develop specific dysfunctional symptoms (Naragon-Gainey et al., 2018). After many decades using the biomedical paradigm, the scientific community has started to call into question not only the metaphysical veracity of this taxonomy and treatment conceptualization, but also its usefulness for the clinical practice (C...