Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, Vol. 3, No.

3, 1993
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Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy

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Integration
Leslie S. Greenberg1,2 and Lome Korman1

In this paper we discuss the nature of emotion, in the light of modern

evolutionary and cognitive theories. An empirical measure of clients' emotion
episodes is presented that implicates cognitive, affective, and motivational
components in emotional processing. We argue that emotion plays an
important role in therapy, providing information about clients' reactions, needs,
beliefs, and appraisals. Because sound emotional processing is integral to
adaptive human functioning, schemes governing affective processing constitute
key therapeutic targets. To this end, we argue that differential emotionally
focused intervention is needed for different types of emotional problems.
KEY WORDS: emotion; psychotherapy integration.

INTRODUCTION

There is increasing awareness within psychology that emotion is a key

component in the study of mind. To be comprehensive, theories of human
functioning must integrate cognition, behavior, interaction, motivation, and
emotion. In this paper, we first will discuss the nature of emotion and emo-
tional experience, particularly in light of modern evolutionary and network
theories, in which emotion is viewed as a system of organized components.
An empirical measure of emotion episodes that implicates cognitive, affec-
tive, relational, and motivational components in emotional processing will
then be presented. This measure empirically grounds our definition of emo-
tion. We will then discuss ways in which emotion is important in psycho-
1
Department of Psychology, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada.
2
Reprint requests should be sent to Leslie S. Greenberg, Department of Psychology, York
University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3.

249
1053-0479/93/0900-0249$07.00/0 © 1993 Plenum Publishing Corporation
 250 Greenberg and Korman

therapeutic change, and argue that the differential assessment of clients'

current emotional processing is necessary for the execution of different
types of emotionally focused interventions.

ON THE NATURE OF EMOTIONS

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The current view of emotions as biologically based changes in rela-

tional action readiness (Frijda, 1986; Greenberg & Safran, 1987, 1989; Sa-
fran & Greenberg, 1991; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992) has particular relevance
for psychotherapy integration because it sees emotion as an integration of
affect, cognition, motivation, and relational action. According to Frijda
(1986), emotions are relational action tendencies that result from the ap-
praisal of a situation based on a concern. This view implicates both moti-
vation and cognition in emotion. Affect, however, cannot be reduced to
either cognition or motivation. Rather, affect is a neuropsychologically in-
dependent means of informing the organism, by means of bodily sensations
and action tendencies, of its evaluative responses to internal and external
situations. Emotion involves automatic perceptual appraisal of the situation
in relation to the self's survival or well-being — i.e., appraisals about what
is good or bad for the self. On the other hand, cognition generally conveys
information about the content and structure of situations and relates fun-
damentally to factual veracity. Motivation in turn is a disposition to desire
the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a given kind of situation — i.e., a need
or a goal. A concern, need, or goal then serves as an internal representation
of standards for situations. If the appraisal of the situation and the concern
are sufficiently mismatched, emotion ensues in the form of an action ten-
dency and organizes the person to act in a manner consistent with attaining
the goal. In this way, emotional responses are of central interest since they
indicate that an important value or goal of the subject may be harmed or
advanced in the situation (Frijda, 1986), and they are involved in setting
goal priorities (Oatley & Jenkins, 1992).
Relational action tendencies have been defined as the readiness to
act in a particular way to establish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with
one's environment (Arnold, 1970; Frijda, 1986). In this view, different ac-
tion tendencies correspond to different emotions. Anger, for example, is
associated with the urge to attack, push away, or break free. Fear corre-
sponds to the readiness for flight, while joy is associated with the tendency
to be open to contact. Emotions that are more readily characterized in
terms of action readiness and facial expression correspond to what have
been called primary or fundamental emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1975).
More complex emotions such as pride and jealousy are defined more clearly
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 251

by the situation, story, or script. They appear to have no characteristic facial

features and may have no particular action tendency.
Primary emotions therefore organize us for action. They are imme-
diate action tendencies or dispositions. They have the quality of urges, de-
manding attention and execution, and interrupt other behavioral or
cognitive programs. These action tendencies are then mediated by higher
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level processing and translated into goal-directed behavior. If there is

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smooth, uninterrupted movement toward the goal of the action tendency,

the emotion often is not experienced in focal awareness, and action is exe-
cuted without the experience of emotion. However, if the path to satisfying
the concern is blocked, stronger awareness of the feeling is developed in
order to enhance motivation to overcome the interruption of the action
(Tomkins, 1962).

Emotional Experience: Networks and System Theories

In addition to involving changes in action readiness, emotions involve

the phenomenological experience of feeling. Network theories characterize
emotional experience as the synthesis of different level of processing. In
this view, emotion serves as a source of feedback about our reactions to
situations, providing information about the meaning of events. Recognizing
and attending to one's feelings is therefore important for organizing adap-
tive responses to situations (Greenberg & Safran, 1984, 1987, 1989).
Leventhal (1979) sees emotion as a form of tacit knowing, integrating
three different levels of processing. The expressive motor level is cue de-
pendent and serves a biologically adaptive function. In an infant, for ex-
ample, fear is evoked by a looming shadow, while anger is elicited by
violation or restriction. The second level is one of schematic emotional
memory, which, as the individual develops, forms representations of the
individual's specific emotional experiences.
Schemes serve as repositories of the key perceptual features that elic-
ited the experience and of the evoked expressive-motor responses (see Note
1). These schemes, then, link eliciting stimuli to emotional experience, re-
sulting in automatic emotional reactions. Thus, emotional reactions such as
fear of being engulfed, are coded in emotion schemes both autonomically,
in terms of increased heart rate, and semantically, in terms of subjective
meanings like the image of my mother's face staring down at me. Emotion
schemes such as these are of fundamental importance in emotional life.
The third level of processing proposed by Leventhal is conceptual in
nature, involving sequential, volitional, and propositional processing, such
as the belief that I will be engulfed or controlled if I become close to some-
 252 Greenberg and Korman

one. This level represents memories, abstractions, and beliefs about emo-
tional experience and its regulation, rather than involving emotional mem-
ory per se. As the individual develops intellectually, the conceptual
processing (e.g., beliefs, evaluations) that accompanies emotional experi-
ence is incorporated into the network or emotional scheme representing
the lived experience. This conceptual processing is incorporated into the
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emotion scheme along with the expressive motor responses to, and repre-
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sentations of, the key perceptual features that elicited the response.
Thus, the generation of emotional experience is dominated initially
by automatic associative processes that produce primary responses based
on simple perceptual appraisals. However, these are quickly followed by a
more complex response, as the person brings various sensory, ideational,
and memorial inputs together, guided by a prototype. This high-level inte-
grative scheme, which we have termed an "emotion scheme," synthesizes
cognition, motivation, and affect to provide our sense of ourselves and how
we feel about things (Greenberg, Rice, & Elliott, 1993). We regard this
internal organizing process as the primary target of therapeutic change in
emotionally focused intervention.
Emotion schemes are thus complex processing organizations that en-
code and integrate propositional and sensory information related to emo-
tionally relevant experience. They then govern our automatic processing
and result in our complex feelings and emotional being-in-the-world. Emo-
tion in adults is thus the experienced gestalt of different tacit, unconscious
aspects or levels of information processing. Finally, it is important to reit-
erate that while emotions organize us for action, they do not lead directly
to action. Human action is mediated by conscious planning and goal setting
(Greenberg & Safran, 1987; Safran & Greenberg, 1991).

MEASURING EMOTION EPISODES

Given this theoretical perspective and the growing consensus on the

importance of emotion in psychotherapy, we believed it would be important
to develop a measure of emotion that could be used in psychotherapy re-
search. Recent advances in the field of process research have demonstrated
the value of developing measures of in-session manifestations of phenom-
ena of theoretical importance by isolating episodes containing the phe-
nomenon (e.g., Perry, Luborsky, Silberschatz, & Popp, 1989; Rice &
Greenberg, 1984). We therefore hypothesized that a measure of emotion
episodes, reported or experienced in therapy, could help shed light on how
clients change. It would accomplish this by assessing changes in clients' re-
ports of encounters that they experienced as emotionally significant. We
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 253

specifically sought to assess people's appraisals of self and situations, and

to match these appraisals with their concerns and needs.

Definition of Emotion Episodes

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In order to develop a definition of an emotion episode (EE), we em-

ployed a rational-empirical exploration of clients' in-session performance
(Greenberg, 1991; Rice & Greenberg, 1984). This circular process involved
first building a model of an EE. Then, guided by this model, we observed
actual emotion episodes from therapy, revised and refined the model, and
again observed actual performances until the model was sufficiently refined
to capture all examples. In this analysis, clients' reports of their emotional
reactions were used as markers for identifying these episodes. An in-ther-
apy emotion episode or EE was defined as a segment of in-session per-
formance in which a client speaks about having experienced an emotion
in response to a specific situation, real or imagined, that occurred. In this
report the client must be the agent of the feeling, and the response must
involve an emotion rather than a thought.
Once the emotional response is identified, the beginning of the epi-
sode is demarcated by following the transcript back to the commencement
of thematic content related to the emotional response. The EE is consid-
ered to continue until either the theme of the narrative changes or a new
emotional response is expressed.
We identified four observable components of EEs: (1) the emotional
response and its accompanying action tendency, (2) the situation itself, (3)
the appraisal of self and/or situation, and (4) the concern. The action ten-
dency is a part of a "couplet" with the emotional reaction, in that it is the
meaningfully directed behavior or tendency that is associated with the sub-
jective experience of the emotional response.
Once an emotional response or action tendency has been identified,
and the boundaries of the EE have been located, the next step is to identify
the "situation," context, or event with which it is associated. The "appraisal"
of self and/or situation, representing the idiosyncratic meaning that the situ-
ation holds for the self, is then identified. Describing the appraisal requires
addressing the question, "How does the individual construe the situation in
relation to him or herself?" Finally, the concern is identified by isolating
explicit statements of concerns, needs or goals, or in their absence, inferring
those implicit in the client's statements. As a rule, as low a level of inference
as possible is used. Frijda (1986) defines "concern" as "a disposition to de-
sire [the] occurrence or nonoccurrence of a given kind of situation" (p. 335).
 254 Greenberg and Korman

Though we have tended to use the terms "concern," "need," and "goal"
interchangeably, we adopt the first because of its more general connotation.
To be considered an EE, therapy segments needed to contain at least
both a situation and an emotional response or action tendency. The ab-
sence of appraisals or concerns therefore did not preclude a segment's in-
clusion as an EE.
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For the purposes of the present study, emotional reactions and ap-
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praisals were assessed qualitatively, but it was decided to take advantage

of the existing literature to develop a category system for measuring con-
cerns. After some consideration, the lists of needs delineated by Murray
(1938) and Maslow (1987) were incorporated separately into the measure.
These lists were chosen, respectively, for their exhaustive and succinct
qualities. Thus, concerns expressed by clients in therapy were described by
selecting the corresponding need from both Murray's and Maslow's lists.
An example of an emotion episode segment, taken from a therapy session
in which a client is talking about her difficulty in answering letters and
messages, is presented below. The emotional response (ER) and action ten-
dency (AT) are identified first and are found in C3 below:
Cl: I guess now I feel like I've already sort of failed her once (T: Yes). Even
though in another conversation we had I apologized, and you know, it was, uh,
very . . . and it was much less bad than I had expected (uh-huh), but I guess I still
haven't recovered from that, and . . .
T l : Yeah, yeah, "I failed her and . . .
C2: I keep slipping into doing it again.
T2: Yeah, yeah. What's the "doing it again?" "I'm not going to, I'm not answering
her back in time?" In a time frame that's sort of normal or concrete or something?
And then there's the sense of, what is it like? Like, "I'm not answering her back
and . . .
C3: I, I, I can't even, like, I think about if I put myself in the place of the person,
I might be able to do it, but for me, when I got the message, I felt terrified. (ER).
The image I have is myself hiding (AT) under the bed [This refers to a childhood
incident in which the client hid under her bed to get away from adults who then
came and tried to get her out.]. (T: I see) It's that. I cannot do it. I have to hide.
And hiding . . . I am, I am hiding and I know that they're going to, she becomes
a "them . . .
T3: Yes, yes, and they're going to come after you . . .
C4: . . . And they're going to come after me.
T4: Yes, I see, right. So there's this terror, right? This looming kind of, "They're
going to come after me and get me," or somehow there is a kind of a terror of
something out there. (C: Uh-huh) A feeling of kind of being vulnerable? What is
it? Let's go into that.
C5: I don't know. I guess when I retreat (T: Uh-huh), I am protecting myself for
whatever reason, and even though I'm not happy, I'm safer.
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 255

Once the components of a given EE segment are identified and de-

scribed, they are organized into a standard protocol, an example of which
is presented in Fig. 1. The protocol in Fig. 1 is derived from the emotion
episode example above.
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Initial Tests of the EE Measure

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In an initial test to assess the validity of the EE instrument, three

trained judges rated 30 psychotherapy transcript segments to see if they
could discriminate expert-judged EEs from non-EEs. These segments were
drawn from a mixed sample of experiential, dynamic and cognitive thera-
pies. Fifteen criterion segments, like the one above, were identified by the
authors as constituting EES—i.e., they contained an emotional reaction
and/or action tendency expressed in response to a specific situation that
occurred in the past. The EE segments were demarcated by following the
transcripts back from the emotional reaction to where the theme com-
menced. These segments typically began with clients describing the situ-
ation to which they responded emotionally. The segments were considered
to have ended when the theme changed, or when another emotional re-
sponse occurred. The other 15 segments were controls matched on length
and theme, but were judged not to be EEs. On a 6-point scale of certainty,
the judges rated the degree to which each segment constituted an EE.
A Pearson coefficient statistic yielded interrater correlations on the
certainty scores that were significant beyond the .01 level. A one-factor
repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted between
ratings on the 15 EE segments and the 15 controls. Differences between
the two groups were found to significant beyond the .01 level. Thus, the
I. SITUATION Phone message from correspondent
11 II. EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
a> Emotional Reaction: Terrified, afraid C3
b> Action Tendency: Avoiding, hiding C3
III. APPRAISAL
a> Appraisal of Self: I failed her. C1
b> Appraisal of Situation: They're going to come after me.C4
I IV. CONCERN
a> Murray: Infavoidance C5
b> Maslow: Safety C5
Fig. 1. Example of an EE protocol.
 256 Greenberg and Korman

raters were able to discriminate reliably segments identified as EEs from

controls.
In a test of rater reliability (Korman, 1991), we examined if raters
could successfully match descriptions of EE components produced by two
different judges from the same EE transcript segment. The procedure was
modified from a test conducted by Luborsky and Crits-Christoph in their
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research on the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (1990). A trained

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judge rated 15 different "target" transcript segments, identifying the com-

ponents and organizing these into standard "protocols" as illustrated
above in Fig. 1. A second judge performed the same task on the identical
15 segments, plus an additional 30 different EE segments. The protocols
from these EEs were then divided into 15 sets. Each of these sets con-
tained a "matched" pair of protocols described by the different judges of
the identical EE segment, plus an additional two comparison protocols
derived from different EE segments that were described by the second
judge.
Next, three raters were asked to assess, along a 6-point scale, how
similar or dissimilar the target protocol was to the other three protocols
for each of the 15 sets. Thus, the raters were each given a total of 15 sets
containing four protocols each, and were called upon to make three com-
parisons per set. For each set, the two unmatched comparisons served as
the controls, and the comparison of target vs. matched protocol was used
to test the experimental hypothesis. The configuration for each set of pro-
tocols comparisons is illustrated in Fig. 2.
The "situation" components of the protocols were not presented to
the similarity raters, since the idiosyncratic and easily identifiable nature
of the component probably would have biased the results.

Fig. 2. The configuration for each set of protocol comparisons.

 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 257

A two-way ANOVA yielded significant main effects for rater and

comparison type. Orthogonal post hoc comparisons of control comparisons
A and B revealed no significant differences. The orthogonal comparison
of the matched comparisons and the collapsed control comparisons yielded
differences significant at the .01 level. This indicated that the correctly
matched protocols were rated as significantly more similar than the un-
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matched control protocols.

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Results from the two tests indicate that raters can discriminate seg-
ments previously identified as EEs, and that trained judges can employ
the measure with some reliability. This study also serves to demonstrate
the presence of appraisals and concerns in the processing of emotional
episodes, and demonstrates that they are measurable. It appears therefore
that emotion episodes in sessions can be identified reliably. This helps
ground some of the theoretical ideas about emotion in the process of ther-
apy, and holds promise for clinical, methodological, and research appli-
cations.
For example, we intend to test if EEs can serve as a measure of
therapeutic change. Specifically, we are interested in whether an individ-
ual's EES exhibit qualitative changes over the course of successful thera-
pies, and w h e t h e r these c h a n g e s occur equally across different
therapeutic approaches. We are also interested in seeing whether indi-
viduals have characteristic core EEs and whether these may reflect key
aspects of self-functioning, thereby serving as a measure of self-organi-
zation. At the clinical level, EEs might serve a process diagnostic role in
therapy. "Process diagnosis" refers to the practice in which the therapist
responds differentially to different classes of markers expressed by clients
(Greenberg, 1991). Such markers signal therapists that clients are ready
at particular moments for specific interventions designed to deal with par-
ticular types of problems. In the case of the EE, this would involve cli-
ents' appraisals of self and situation in relation to their concerns. As a
process diagnostic tool, EEs might alert therapists that particular forms
of self-schematic processing are currently operating, and that clients are
optimally amenable to interventions that help unpack their processing at
this time.
For example, the marker of an emotional reaction of anger might
signal that a concern is at risk, that a client is feeling violated, or that
advancement to a goal is being obstructed. The marker would indicate that
at that moment it would be facilitative for the therapist to attend to or
evoke appraisals of self and situation, and the relevant concerns, goals, or
needs related to the experience of anger. Thus, the experience of emotion
as signaled by EEs indicates the occurrence of schematic processing rele-
vant to the self's well-being and constitutes a valuable target for interven-
 258 Greenberg and Korman

tion. In the next section we will further explicate, in our view, why attending
to emotion in psychotherapy is so important.

WHY IS EMOTION IMPORTANT IN PSYCHOTHERAPY?

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Emotion is important in therapy for a number of reasons:

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Emotion Provides Information About Motivation and Cognition

Emotions provide an important means of accessing both clients' pri-

mary concerns and their core beliefs. Emotion is thus the "royal road" to
motivation and cognition. In therapy, clients' affective responses tell us
about what is important to a person and thereby provide a focus for ac-
cessing clients' central needs, concerns, and goals. In addition, emotion pro-
vides access to core beliefs and appraisals of self and world. It is important
to focus on clients' currently aroused emotions because they provide infor-
mation that is highly subjective and relevant.

Emotion Is an Orienting and Meaning-Producing System

Emotion provides information about ourselves and our reactions to

situations, signifies what is of concern to us, and is fundamentally an adap-
tive orienting system. Emotion informs us of the significance of events to
us. Thus, if we avoid our feelings, we rob ourselves of information that
helps orient us in our environments to meet our needs and problem solve.
Dysfunction in accessing information from our primary appraisal/response
system means that we are in trouble. When emotional systems are dysfunc-
tional, therapy needs to help people become aware of and access the in-
formation provided by their emotions in order to meet their organismic
needs.

Emotion Controls Relational Action

Frijda (1986) argues that emotion controls action, a quality that he

has termed "control precedence." Emotion also tells us of the relational
action toward which a person is inclined. Also, because of its control prece-
dence, emotion leads to changes in behavior. Indeed, a frequent clinical
observation is that cognitions that govern behavior seem to change most
when a cognition is accompanied by a congruent emotion. Therapists there-
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 259

fore need to facilitate a living congruence between thought and emotion,

in order to create behavioral change.

Awareness of Emotion Elicitors Provides Personal Clarity and Control

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If our emotional reactions occur without any awareness of the elici-

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tors, we may be left feeling puzzled by our emotional state. When there
is an automatic cueing of an idiosyncratic emotion scheme, the cue scheme
may be more relevant to features of a person's subjective construal than
to the features of the situation, and the person's response may seem inap-
propriate (Greenberg et al, 1993; Rice & Greenberg, 1991). Thus, people
automatically may appraise neutral situations as rejections or as threats to
their competence, and may feel insecure, inexplicably shaky, or devalued
and unappreciated. They are likely to respond with feelings of fear or sad-
ness without knowing why.
If people can consciously symbolize their own appraisals and emo-
tional responses, they are likely to feel more in control, and can begin to
deal with their inner experience. Without such awareness, they are at the
mercy of their automatic processing, and are stuck in their reactions.

Emotion Is a Regulatory System

Regulation is an essential part of the emotion process. Emotion be-

havior and experience is not only the product of the excitation of an action
tendency, but also of the inhibition of that same tendency. Emotion de-
pends upon the balance between the two — of letting go and restraint. Po-
tential problems in the system therefore include both the presence of
unwanted emotion and the absence of desired emotion. Problems thus can
arise from suppression and overreaction. We are faced with having to find
balance in the expression of our emotions. Therapy therefore needs to ad-
dress not only enhancing self-exploration and expression, but also increas-
ing self-control and balance. In addition, therapy needs to help raise
people's awareness of how they interrupt their emotional experience and
expression as well as how they overreact and lose control.

Maladaptive Emotional Structures Need To Be Restructured

Life experience leads to the development of complex cognitive-affec-

tive schemes. These structures store our experienced reactions plus the sa-
lient features of the situations that elicited the emotions. When emotion
 260 Greenberg and Korman

schemes are activated in a new context, they may generate the responses
to a previous situation. For example, people may react with fear to intimacy
if they were abused by those who were closest to them. When emotional
responses are no longer adaptive to current situations, restructuring of
emotional schemes becomes an important aim of therapy. These schemes
need to be activated in therapy in order to be restructured.
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Thus, emotion is an extremely valuable tool in therapy. The experi-

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ence of emotion signifies that schematic systems have been activated, and
informs us about a person's central appraisals, concerns, reactions, and si-
tuational elicitors. Emotion is also an important regulatory system that con-
trols action and guides us in meeting our organismic needs. Emotionally
focused intervention is therefore an important aspect of an integrative ap-
proach to therapy.

WORKING WITH EMOTION IN THERAPY

Therapeutic Intervention

Below we summarize key aspects of emotionally focused therapy into

three major classes of interventions and one core change process. These
interventions have been discussed at greater length elsewhere (Greenberg
& Safran, 1987, 1989; Safran & Greenberg, 1991). The interventions are
important for at least one of the above reasons, and we hypothesize that
all will lead to measurable changes in EEs over the course of treatment.

Acknowledging Clients' Emotions

This class of intervention involves different ways of helping clients to

attend to their feelings. As we have argued above, emotion cannot serve
its biologically adaptive function if emotionally toned experience is not at-
tended to in an immediate and accurate fashion. Directing clients to what
is being felt provides them with information about adaptive response ten-
dencies. In this respect, the therapist's recognition of EE markers may
prove particularly useful. Once identified, selective attention to the EE
components will lead to the elaboration of important cognitive, motiva-
tional, and emotional aspects of an individual's experience.
Clients can be trained or directed to attend to different levels of cur-
rent emotional experience. For example, when trained to attend to bodily
sensations, clients begin to experience actual sensations such as tension and
aches. Focusing on expressive motor action leads to awareness of idiosyn-
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 261

cratic gestures, movements, vocal quality, and facial expression. Conscious

awareness of discrete primary emotions results in feelings of sadness, anger,
fear, disgust, and joy. Attending to complex feelings and felt meanings leads
to the differentiation of an inner felt sense into complex situational mean-
ing, such as the feeling of humiliation or of being "over the hill." Similarly,
complex sensory- and expressive-motor experience can be elaborated into
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feelings like being "drained" or "hollow." It is most important to attend

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to such idiosyncratic meanings that are involved in complex relational emo-

tions. Often the symbolization of idiosyncratic meaning is facilitated by
identifying the stimuli that triggered the emotion and focusing on the felt
bodily sense of the client's reaction. Finally, in symbolizing needs, wants,
or concerns, clients should be guided to attend to the action tendency as-
sociated with the emotion, providing them with a clear directional tendency.
Empathic attunement and responding to feelings is another important
method of directing clients' attention to inner experience. When a feeling
first emerges into awareness, it is often vague, and the person feels unsure.
By empathically understanding clients, therapists confirm their clients'
highly subjective feelings as real for them. As therapy progresses, the un-
sure felt sense develops from a global state to one of increased differen-
tiation, articulation, and integration, to a statement of need. For example,
a sense of "I feel bad," may progress to "I feel afraid," to "I feel afraid
of being exposed, especially in front of you," to "I prefer you not to be
present."

Evoking Clients' Emotions

This class of interventions leads to a number of important processes

that facilitate change. First, when emotions are experienced, they lead to
the accessing of core "hot" cognitions and organizing beliefs (Greenberg
& Safran, 1987). When clients truly are experiencing their pain, they may
become fully aware that they feel like a failure or that they are unlovable.
In marital therapy, for example, it is only when the fear of being abandoned
is experienced that beliefs and appraisals about being unlovable typically
emerge.
The experience of emotion also leads to action. Emotion motivates
behavior, and its evocation or intensification can be used to change behav-
ior. When I feel angry, sad, or joyous, I am likely to act accordingly. Thus,
anger will promote its corresponding action tendency, and assertive action
may in turn help in overcoming fear.
Finally, the expression of emotion leads to further emotional proc-
essing and to completion. Following trauma, there is often incomplete proc-
 262 Greenberg and Korman

essing of emotional reactions, and an interruption of action tendencies. This

can interfere with the ability to allocate processing capacity efficiently to
other tasks, and prevents one from getting on with life. In the safety of
therapy, people need to relive, reexperience, and fully express their inter-
rupted emotions in a sequence of release, relief, and recovery (Greenberg
& Safran, 1987; Nichols & Efran, 1985).
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Emotional Restructuring

This class of interventions accounts for possibly the most important

goal of emotionally focused therapy: to change people's appraisals and re-
actions to certain classes of situations by changing emotion schemes. To
achieve this, relevant activating information must first be made available
to the emotion scheme in a manner that will evoke the internal structure.
This is achieved by paying attention to current emotion evoking experience,
like bodily sensations, expressive movement, images, and memories, rather
than to conceptualizations. Priming sufficient nodes of the network gets it
activated and running. Thus for example, by attending to an image of a
parent's face, the internal reaction this evokes, and the change in one's
breathing, a full-blown experience of one's feeling to the parent may be
evoked.
Second, once existing schemes have been evoked, new schemes and
memories are formed by making available new information that is incom-
patible with the elements in the existing emotion structures. A variety of
different interventions actually achieve emotional restructuring by making
new information available to awareness.
A good example of emotional restructuring occurs in resolving unfin-
ished business by use of the empty chair method. In this process the person
accesses and works through lingering bad feelings toward a significant other
(Greenberg et al., 1993). The self/other emotion scheme is evoked, and as
the previously interrupted emotion is expressed to completion, new emo-
tion, previously unacknowledged needs, and alternate views of the other
emerge. This new information forces reorganization of the original scheme
(Daldrup, Beutler, Engle, & Greenberg, 1988; Greenberg, 1991; Greenberg
et ai, 1993).

Core Change Process: Experiencing Disallowed Emotion

Although emotion operates in different ways at different times in the

change process, one key aspect that operates in all of the above interven-
tions involves the allowing of the experience of previously disallowed emo-
 Assimilating Emotion into Psychotherapy 263

tion. The allowing of emotional experience in therapy appears to facilitate

change by way of the following three necessary and sequentially occurring
processes.

A Change in Internal Relations

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This involves a move from avoidance and negative evaluation of in-

ternal experience to an accepting stance. Painful, bad, and hopeless feelings
are not "things as such," but products of internal relations. The very acts
of approaching, attending to, and accepting or positively evaluating one's
pain lead to its transformation.

Reowning

This is the process of identifying with feelings and associated

thoughts, memories, needs, and action tendencies that have been disowned.
Disowned experiences, while not integrated into the dominant self-organi-
zation, do exert influences on behavior. People tend to deal with the un-
acceptable by depersonalizing their feelings and not experiencing them as
their own, thus weakening their self-organization. Therapy can be under-
stood as not so much a process of bringing previously unconscious material
into consciousness as one of reclaiming disowned experience. Gestalt thera-
pists (Perls, 1973; Yontef & Simkins, 1984) use experiments of deliberate
awareness to promote experiences of "it is me who is thinking, feeling,
needing, wanting, or doing this." People can distinguish between the con-
ceptual processing of information in an intellectual way and the experiential
linking of that information to the self (Greenberg et ai, 1993).

Increased Sense of Agency

With reowning comes an increased sense of volition and the feeling

that one is the agent of one's experience. There is the feeling that one is
no longer helpless or the passive victim of one's experience. With the de-
velopment of a coherent agentic sense of self in relation to one's domain
of experience (Stern, 1985), hope develops, together with the sense that "I
can do something about this." While a sense of agency may not yet provide
a concrete plan of action, there is a feeling of confidence that action is
possible and that change can occur.
 264 Greenberg and Korman

Conclusions

Emotion is an important orienting process that aids the organism in

its relations with its environment. A therapy that does not focus on emotion
misses a major avenue of facilitating change. At a theoretical level, emotion
involves an integration of cognition, motivation, and behavior. At the level
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

of intervention, however, it is possible to focus figurally on acknowledging,

evoking, or restructuring emotion schemes, and these interventions are dif-
ferent from ones that modify cognitions and behaviors and interpret mo-
tivations. As part of a therapeutic repertoire, emotionally focused
interventions can broaden and enhance integrative practice, and are im-
portant additions to a variety of approaches to integration. Specifically,
technically eclectic, synergistic, and assimilative approaches may all benefit
by integrating emotionally focused interventions into their practice (Messer,
1992; Schacht, 1984).

ENDNOTE

1. We use the term "scheme" rather than "schema" to emphasize the

goal-directed, action-oriented character of these structures (Greenberg et
al, 1993). Schemas have been defined as complex, nonconscious structures
of knowledge that guide information processing (Bartlett, 1932). They con-
tain rules for processing information and anticipations of what to expect.
Schemas thus are akin to representations or blueprints. In contrast, Piaget
used the term scheme to characterize an organized set of reactions that
are transferred to different situations by assimilation of the new situation
(Piaget & Morf, 1958). Piagetian schemes are active intentional plans for
action that apply and produce responses (Pascual-Leone, 1991). Rather
than being purely representational, they are plans for action.

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