New Approaches to Diagnosis and Treatment in Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorders: A Focus on Temperament

For decades, psychology has emphasised salient dimensions of traits or temperaments as the most satisfactory method of organizing conceptions of personality and psychopathology. But the classification of psychopathology continues to gravitate to narrowly defined categorical approaches that influence diagnosis and assessment, as well as treatment development, selection, and administration. Now it seems we are in the midst of a paradigm shift at least for disorders of emotion, where our science has matured to the point that a focus on temperament to support both classification and treatment is emerging. In this article, we review identified commonalities and a putative mechanism of action underlying all disorders of emotion characterised by negative reactions to intense emotional experience. Implications for dimensional assessment and transdiagnostic treatment are presented.