Is the reexperience of painful emotion therapeutic?

Recently, a great deal of attention has been focused on the health promoting benefits that can accrue from revisiting painful emotion. The rationales for revisiting painful emotions include those that assume reexperiencing emotion per se can be health-promoting. Another view stipulates that revisiting painful emotion will only yield benefit if there is some recasting/restructuring of the emotional memory. Research pertinent to the various rationales is discussed. Then research on the impact of emotional expression and outcomes studies of therapies designed to enhance emotional experience are reviewed. Good supporting evidence is found for the effectiveness of behavioral exposure therapies where the duration of emotional exposure is carefully controlled, as well as for the salutary impact of talking or writing about trauma by normally functioning individuals. On the other hand, studies evaluating the impact of experiencing and expressing painful emotion in an unstructured fashion with clinical samples suggest that the process can be harmful. Incorporating findings from the behavioral exposure literature and from the Pennebaker writing-about-trauma studies, the case for evoking emotional memories for the purpose of developing new responses is advanced. The dangers of encouraging emotional experience in absence of acquisition of a new response to the emotion-evoking material are discussed.