The role of emotion beliefs in depression, anxiety, and stress

Objective Beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions may influence successful emotion regulation across multiple emotional disorders and could thus be influential mechanisms in long-term mental health outcomes. However, to date there has been little empirical work in this area. Our aim was to fill this gap, by examining the links between emotion beliefs and common emotional disorder symptoms. Specifically, we examined whether emotion beliefs can account for significant variance in depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, and explored which profiles of emotion beliefs might characterise each of these symptom categories.