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.Methods A sample of 948 Australian university students completed self-report measures of emotion beliefs and emotional disorder symptoms.Results A path analysis indicated that emotion beliefs accounted for a modest but significant 11%, 12%, and 9% of the variance in depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, respectively (ps < .001). A latent profile analysis revealed six different profiles of combinations of emotion beliefs and emotional disorder symptom levels, collectively reinforcing the transdiagnostic relevance of emotion beliefs across each symptom category.Conclusions Overall, our results indicate the importance of considering emotion beliefs in conceptualisations of depression, anxiety, and stress, and suggest that emotion beliefs may be a useful assessment and treatment target.