The role of emotion theory and research in child therapy development

A burgeoning of research on emotion has identified the importance of emotionally competent functioning to children's psychosocial adaptation. As a consequence of this basic research, we argue that prevention and treatment programs for youth would benefit from direct consideration of the role of emotion when designing developmentally appropriate programs. The rationale for including a greater focus on emotion in youth prevention and treatment programs is drawn from the affective neuroscience and clinical psychology literatures. Preliminary data from prevention and treatment programs that have a strong emotion focus are promising. Future work needs to examine how emotion-related processes are related to psychopathology in youth, develop developmentally sensitive programs that are influenced by basic research on emotions, evaluate the relative effectiveness of prevention and treatment programs, and assess the potential long-term impact of emotion-focused and emotion-informed programs.