Emotional Schema Therapy: Distinctive Features offers a concise overview to what is distinctive about this new approach to helping clients cope with "difficult" emotions. Written by a researcher with many years of clinical experience, it provides an accessible, bitesize overview. Using the popular Distinctive Features format, this book describes 15 theoretical features and 15 practical techniques of Emotional Schema Therapy.

Emotional Schema Therapy will be a valuable source that is written for psychotherapists, clinical, health and counselling psychologists, counsellors, psychiatrists, and all who wish to know more about the role of emotions and emotion regulation.

Robert L. Leahy, PhD, is Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York and Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. His research focuses on individual differences in emotion regulation.

Emotional Schema Therapy: Distinctive Features offers a concise overview to what is distinctive about this new approach to helping clients cope with "difficult" emotions. Written by a researcher with many years of clinical experience, it provides an accessible, bitesize overview. Using the popular Distinctive Features format, this book describes 15 theoretical features and 15 practical techniques of Emotional Schema Therapy.

Emotional Schema Therapy will be a valuable source that is written for psychotherapists, clinical, health and counselling psychologists, counsellors, psychiatrists, and all who wish to know more about the role of emotions and emotion regulation.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Emotional Schema Model

1. From Cognition to Emotion
2. Emotions Are Multifaceted
3. Evolutionary Adaptation and Emotion
4. Social Construction of Emotion
5. Emotions Are an Object of Cognition
6. Beliefs about Emotions Reflect Cognitive Biases
7. Fourteen Dimensions of Emotional Schemas
8. How Others Respond to Our Emotions
9. Affective Forecasting- Predicting Future Emotions
10. Normalizing and Pathologizing Emotions
11. Metaphors of Inclusiveness of Emotions
12. Emotional Perfectionism
13. Identifying Maladaptive Emotion Regulation Strategies
14. Emotional Socialization
15. Emotional Schemas in Therapy

Part II: Modifying Emotional Schemas

16. Identifying and Evaluating Theories of Cause and Change
17. Adaptive Emotion Regulation Strategies
18. Case Conceptualization
19. Expression of Emotion
20. Validation, Self-Validation and Self-Compassion
21. Problematic Strategies for Seeking Validation
22. Emotions are Universal
23. Guilt and Shame
24. Emotions are Not Permanent
25. Escalation and Control
26. Personal Empowerment
27. Tolerance for Ambivalence and Complexity
28. Relating Emotions to Values
29. Interpersonal Emotional Schemas
30. Research on Emotional Schemas