Beliefs about difficult feelings

Section A provides a review of the emotional and experiential avoidance literature with a focus on determining the proximal psychological factors that might lead individuals to avoid experiencing feelings. This section highlights the importance of beliefs, judgements and appraisals about the acceptability of negative emotions, as well as fears about the physical, psychological and social consequences of tolerating internal distress as potential drivers of emotional avoidance.
Section B describes the development of a new scale to identify and measure beliefs about experiencing difficult emotions. The paper gives a background and rationale for the study and outlines the methodology that was utilised to construct and psychometrically evaluate the Beliefs about Difficult Feelings Scale (BDFS). 304 participants completed the scale online along with related measures. The six clusters of beliefs that emerged from a factor analysis of 90 pilot items include Catastrophic Beliefs, Emotions are Useful, Negative Evaluation from Others, Emotions are Exhausting/Frustrating, Emotions are Transient and Emotions are Pointless. The psychometric properties of the final 29-item BDFS are promising. The new measure demonstrated good internal consistency, test-retest reliability and construct validity, however further psychometric evaluation is needed on new samples to verify these preliminary findings