This worksheet helps clients reflect on their emotions and how they influence their behavior.
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.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
Many clients find it helpful to recognize the range of actions that are motivated by different emotional states. This worksheet encourages clients to reflect upon their emotional world and the behaviors that emotional states motivate them to engage in.
Understanding how emotions influence behavior is important in many forms of therapy. This resource helps clients:
Explains how fear motivates avoidance.
Discusses the impact of sadness and shame.
Considers the relationship between anger and aggressive behavior.
Use the handout to explore how emotions guide actions.
Explore the links between clients' emotions and behaviors.
Discuss ways to overcome problematic emotion-driven actions such as avoidance.
There is a survival advantage in being able to recognise and act on physiological states such as hunger, thirst, or pain. Damasio and Carvalho (2013) argue that feelings are "mental experiences of body states"and the actions or drives that they (helpfully) motivate promote homeostasis. For example, if we are too warm we are motivated to 'correct' this by moving to somewhere shady. Or we can 'correct' hunger by eating food.
Psychological therapists commonly encounter clients whose actions to 'correct' feelings inadvertently lead to the maintenance of the client's difficulties. Common examples include: phobic patients whose avoidance means they miss opportunities to learn that the phobic stimulus is benign; clients with OCD whose use of neutralizing strategies distracts from assumptions regarding the harmfulness of obsessions; or clients whose withdrawal from aversive activity inadvertently prolongs their depression. The problems that arise from emotion-driven activity are recognized in the DBT technique of opposite action / acting opposite to emotion (Linehan, 2004).
This Psychology Tools information handout was designed to increase clients' emotional literacy, recognize the range of actions that are motivated by different emotions, and highlight that actions guided by emotions are not always in our long-term interests.
