It is now well accepted among psychologists and clinical researchers that the official categories we use to diagnose mental disorders, those familiar labels such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, etc., are inadequate in that they do not “carve nature at the joints.” In other words, our current categories are not discrete but highly overlapping, so that many disorders share diagnostic features and symptoms.

Moreover, treatment modalities are often effective across diagnostic labels. Medications, too, tend to work for multiple diagnoses. Our current categories, finally, are not based on biological or etiological similarities but on committee consensus regarding co-occurring symptoms and clinical courses.

This fact has given rise in recent decades to an alternative, dimensional approach, which involves a search for transdiagnostic commonalities, both at the level of treatment and coping (techniques that work for multiple psychological problems) and at the diagnostic level (i.e., vulnerabilities that predispose individuals to a vast array of potential dysfunctional manifestations). We know, for example, that cognitive restructuring, psychological flexibility, and experiential engagement (exposure) are transdiagnostic coping and treatment mechanisms, useful in the treatment of multiple mood and anxiety problems. On the vulnerabilities front, we have good evidence that factors such as personality neuroticism, negative attributional style, executive function deficits, and uncertainty intolerance, as well as environmental factors such as social isolation, childhood chaos, or parental history of mental disorder predispose individuals to a host of psychological disorders.

One such transdiagnostic factor is affective dysfunction. Indeed, disturbances in emotion regulation and expression mark a host of mental disorders. Yet, these emotional disruptions differ from one disorder to the next (down mood in depression; manic mood in bipolar disorder, etc.). Thus, it is not easy to discern which aspects of dysregulated emotions are indeed transdiagnostic, appearing across discrete diagnoses. The challenge of our clinical science is to identify empirically these elusive transdiagnostic patterns of affective disturbance.

Recent research (2026) by Australian researcher Ashleigh Fulton and colleagues has addressed itself to this challenge, providing evidence that the culprit (or at least one of them) is what is known as affective reactivity, a tendency, identified in the mid-’90s, to express heightened immediate emotional reactions to emotion-eliciting stimuli (both positive and negative).

The authors set up two experiments to explore the link between symptom severity and emotional reactivity. Participants were adults aged 18 to 65 from six different countries. The final sample sizes for Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were 320 participants and 509 participants, respectively.

In the initial phase of each experiment, participants completed a demographic questionnaire and a series of self-report questionnaires assessing the severity of emotional-disorder symptoms, including anxiety, hypomania, and anhedonia.

In the second phase of each experiment, participants completed a decision-making task while periodically reporting on their affective state. The task required participants to choose between two cards, each awarding them a different number of points. Before choosing, participants could see the two possible outcomes that could occur for each card if chosen (−200, −100, 0, 100, or 200 points) and the respective probabilities of each outcome (25 percent, 50 percent, or 75 percent). Cards were presented in four blocks of 53 trials each. Every three to five trials throughout the task, participants were asked to report their current emotional valence.

After a card was chosen, participants were shown both the outcome of their choice and the outcome of the unchosen card, which allowed the researchers to measure participants’ affective reactivity to both the gain/loss outcome of their chosen card and whether the outcome of the unchosen card was better or worse.

The main results showed that participants displayed significant affective reactivity to both the outcomes of the chosen card and the difference between this outcome and the outcome of the unchosen card. Specifically, greater rewards were associated with more positive subsequent affect and greater losses were associated with more negative subsequent affect. The converse was true of the unchosen card, in which better outcomes for the unchosen card produced more negative subsequent affect and vice versa.

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As expected, more-severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, and anhedonia were all associated with a more negative average emotional valence, indicating that participants with more severe emotional symptoms experienced more negative affect during the task.

Second, across both experiments, participants who reported more severe hypomania or anxiety symptoms tended to have more positive affective reactions to winning points and more negative reactions to losing. In other words, anxiety and hypomania symptoms positively correlated with affective reactivity.

These findings join previous work to suggest that affective reactivity may indeed be one important dimension of mental health, and that individuals who are high on affective reactivity may be more vulnerable to mental health difficulties. The researchers conclude: “Our results therefore suggest that heightened affective reactivity to reward is a trait-like individual difference that is associated with increased risk for multiple different forms of psychopathology, consistent with the transdiagnostic perspective on affect disturbance in psychological disorders.”