Call for papers: Facilitating emotion change: What are therapists doing?

• Letter of intent deadline: December 1, 2026
• Submission deadline: July 15, 2027

• Katie Dixon Gordon
• Antonio Pascual-Leone

Distress features prominently across many disorders and typically serves as an impetus for people to seek out psychotherapy (Gross & Jazaieri, 2014; Muran et al., 2024). A client’s ability to work with difficult emotional experiences has emerged as a potential mechanism of change across therapeutic traditions (Gratz et al., 2015; Sønderland et al., 2024). Such mechanisms of change in psychotherapy can be considered at several levels. On the level of a client’s internal process, one can think about the ways in which emotion shifts within the person, the qualitatively distinct changes that then lead to improved functioning (Pascual-Leone, 2026). We can also think of the therapist intervention’s within a given treatment package that are used to facilitate emotional changes in client (Hill & Norcross, 2023).

How emotion changes within the client during treatment can be described in terms of five different overarching principles. These principles are observable across treatments, although with different emphases. They are:

• down-regulating emotion (e.g., calming down, habituating, coping with distress)
• increasing emotional awareness
• heightening emotional arousal and its expression
• ordering the sequence of emotions (i.e., a transformation where one discrete emotion is used to leverage change in another emotion)
• narrative reflection about one’s own emotional experience

Fuller descriptions can be found in Pascual-Leone (2026) or Pascual-Leone and Kramer (2023).

Bridging therapist actions to client process, treatment methods can be appraised in terms of how they leverage each of the five principles of emotion change. This provides an integrative lens for understanding what therapists do to help clients work with emotion.

This section aims to examine how interventions from a specific therapeutic approach relate to distinct emotional processes. Although treatment theories do not always distinguish between the five processes listed above, doing so would offer immediate clinical implications for integrative therapists because it will highlight alternative interventions that might be borrowed from across approaches.

Each contribution should focus on only one therapeutic approach or a specific set of therapeutic skills and methods, using a structured discussion of its interventions or methods. The contribution should describe how and when those interventions target one (or combination of) these five emotional processes. Papers would focus on clinical practice (i.e., therapist actions, and the resulting client processes) although submissions may include clinical practice reviews, meta-analytic/scoping review, or theoretical reviews with clinical illustrations.

Authors must organize their contribution by principles over each of the five corresponding sections: Down-regulation, awareness, expressive arousal, sequential transformations, narrative reflection. Each section should name and describe interventions that facilitate the target process. It should also summarize theoretical as well as empirical evidence (where relevant), for the link between an intervention and the target emotional change.

In line with the mission of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, it is expected that each contribution is integrative, by thinking outside a treatment’s original theory. In short, while each contribution will explore a single treatment approach (i.e., one set of therapist skills or methods), submissions will use the prescribed trans-theoretical framework of five principles for understanding emotion change. The framework places theories and techniques of specific therapeutic traditions within a general framework.

In its entirety, the special section will allow readers to compare well-known treatments on how they facilitate emotion change through a common framework of five principles. The mission of this section is to provide source material for assimilative integration (or common factors integration), where therapists whose practice is grounded in a particular orientation, are presented with the value of adding techniques drawn from other orientations.

Authors interested in contributing to this special section must first submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) for editorial review by December 1, 2026.

Letters of Intent (500 words maximum) should include:

• proposed title and author team
• brief abstract (150 words)
• description of the selected therapeutic approach
• an overview of the emotional processes targeted by interventions within that approach.

Letters of intent should be sent via email to both Guest Editors Antonio Pascual-Leoneopens in new window or Katie Dixon Gordon opens in new windowin response to this call. Please use "Special Section: Facilitating Emotion Change" in your subject line when submitting your letter of intent.

Invited, full-length submissions will be due July 15, 2027. All submissions for this special section will go through the normal peer-review process, with no guarantee of acceptance. All submissions must comply with regular journal policies as detailed on the journal website.

Gratz, K. L., Weiss, N. H., & Tull, M. T. (2015). Examining emotion regulation as an outcome, mechanism, or target of psychological treatments. In Current Opinion in Psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 85–90). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.02.010

Clinical Psychological Science, 2(4), 387–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702614536164

Hill, C. E., & Norcross, J. C. (2023). Psychotherapy Skills and Methods That Work. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197611012.003.0002

Muran, J. C., Teachman, B. A., Aldao, A., Fonagy, P., Greenberg, L. S., Gross, J. J., Magnavita, J. J., Mayo-Wilson, E., McMain, S., Soto, J. A., Bufka, L. F., Halfond, R., Kurtzman, H., & Marzalik, J. S. (2024). Proposal to Develop a Clinical Practice Guideline on Emotion Regulation: Final Report.

Pascual-Leone, A. (2026). Principles of emotion change: What works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000460-000

Pascual-Leone, A., & Kramer, U. (2023). Advancing the Assessment of Emotional Change: A Matrix of Processes by Methods. In Journal of Psychotherapy Integration (Vol. 33, Number 4, pp. 341–347). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/int0000312

Sønderland, N. M., Solbakken, O. A., Eilertsen, D. E., Nordmo, M., & Monsen, J. T. (2024). Emotional changes and outcomes in psychotherapy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 92(9), 654–670. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000814