The Emotional Reasoning resource helps clients and therapists understand, identify, and address this common cognitive distortion or "unhelpful thinking style".
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Emotional reasoning is a cognitive bias where individuals reach conclusions based on their feelings rather than objective evidence. This resource is part of a cognitive distortion series designed for mental health professionals to identify and address such cognitive distortions in therapy. It provides psychoeducation and practical strategies for clinicians to help clients address these thinking styles effectively.
The Emotional Reasoning resource equips clinicians with the knowledge and tools to help clients:
Believing that anxiety signals imminent danger.
Concluding life is meaninglessness based on feelings of hopelessness.
Emotional reasoning has been associated with specific phobias, bipolar disorder, and other issues.
Provide psychoeducation about automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions.
Help clients recognize when they are using emotional reasoning.
Encourage clients to become more aware of when they think in this way.
Use techniques to address emotional reasoning such as reality-testing and opposite action.
Cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, or ‘unhelpful thinking styles’ are the characteristic ways our thoughts become biased (Beck, 1963). According to Beck's cognitive model, different cognitive biases are associated with different clinical presentations. For example, catastrophizing is associated with anxiety disorders (e.g. Nöel et al, 2012), while dichotomous thinking has been linked to emotional instability (Veen & Arntz, 2000).
Emotional reasoning (also referred to as ‘ex-consequentia reasoning’ and ‘feeling-driven thinking’) is a cognitive distortion associated with selective abstraction (Drapeau et al., 2008): “forming an interpretation… when there is no factual evidence to support the conclusion, or when the conclusion is contrary to the evidence” (Beck, 1963). Specifically, it is an arbitrary interpretation in which individuals make predictions or draw conclusions based on their feelings, intuitions, and hunches (Tolin, 2016).
Emotional reasoning can be misleading because our emotional responses are influenced by cognitions which may differ from reality (Burns, 2020). Accordingly, individuals who engage in emotional reasoning are often inclined to interpretations which are “emotionally appealing rather than logically derived” (Williams et al., 2022, p.276).
