Emotion in psychotherapy: a practice-friendly research review.

This article reviews the process and outcome research on emotion in psychotherapy. Four distinct types of emotion processes are identified in the literature as useful in therapy, depending on a client's presenting concerns: emotional awareness and arousal; emotional regulation, active reflection on emotion (meaning making), and emotional transformation. Research findings are summarized to highlight the practical implications of these different emotion processes to psychotherapy. A range of selected treatments from different therapeutic orientations are addressed collectively as different types of emotion-focused, experiential therapies and are compared on the basis of how they work with emotion in session. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 62: 611-630, 2006.