The role of fear of emotion in distress, arousal, and cognitive interference following an emotional stimulus.

Diverse theories of psychopathology suggest that reactions to internal experiences, such as emotion, are important in the development and maintenance of psychological distress and symptomatology. This study examines the relationships between one type of reaction to emotion, fear of emotion, and reactivity to, recovery from, and interference of emotional material. As predicted, fear of emotion was related to greater increases in distress, negative affect, and skin conductance in reaction to an emotional film clip, and to greater interference of film-related material in a modified emotional Stroop task. These relationships remained when variance contributed by general negative affect was removed. Findings provide preliminary evidence that fear of emotion may be related to emotional distress and physiological arousal, and that this relationship may exist beyond shared variance due to self-report response style and general negative affectivity.