Emotional Reasoning: Examples and How to Separate Feeling From Fact

About this tool

Emotional reasoning is the habit of treating how you feel as information about what is true outside you. The feeling arrives first and the conclusion is built to match it: I feel anxious, so this flight must be unsafe; I feel guilty, so I must have wronged somebody; I feel like a fraud, so I must be one. David Burns listed emotional reasoning as one of the ten cognitive distortions in Feeling Good in 1980, and the shorthand people search for is often blunter than the clinical name: I feel it, therefore it is true. The full set of distortions is on our Cognitive Distortions and Thinking Errors page.

The idea predates the label. Aaron Beck's 1963 description of thinking errors in depressed patients included the move from an emotional state to a conclusion about reality, and Albert Ellis built rational emotive behavior therapy around the gap between an event and the belief a person brings to it. What Burns added was a name a reader could use on themselves in the moment. The distinction worth holding onto is that emotions are real, accurate data about something: about your appraisal, your history, your tiredness, your needs. They are just not direct evidence about whether a room, a person or an outcome is dangerous.

There is a specific piece of research behind this one, which is unusual for the distortion list. Arnoud Arntz, Marcel Rauner and Marcel van den Hout ran a study published in 1995 under the title 'If I feel anxious, there must be danger', testing what they called ex-consequentia reasoning. Participants read scripts describing situations and were told separately how objectively safe each situation was and how anxious the character felt. People with anxiety disorders rated the situations as more dangerous when anxiety was present, even when the objective safety information said otherwise. Participants without anxiety disorders judged the danger mainly from the objective information.

Later work extended the pattern. Iris Engelhard and colleagues reported in 2001 that veterans with post-traumatic stress were more likely to reason from intrusive memories and from emotional responses to conclusions about danger, a variant sometimes called intrusion-based reasoning. There is also a wider literature in social psychology that arrives at the same place from another direction: Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore showed in 1983 that people asked about their life satisfaction gave higher ratings on sunny days than on rainy ones, unless the weather was mentioned first, in which case the effect disappeared. Mood was being read as information about life rather than about the sky.

In practical terms, emotional reasoning shows up in a handful of recognizable sentences. In anxiety it sounds like: I feel this strongly, so the risk must be real. In depression it sounds like: I feel worthless, so I must be. In guilt it sounds like: I feel bad, so I did something bad. In relationships it sounds like: I feel abandoned, so they must be pulling away. In each case a felt state is doing the work that evidence should be doing, and because the feeling is genuinely there, the conclusion feels verified from the inside. That inside verification is the whole problem, and it is why the correction has to come from written-down facts rather than reassurance.

The usual mistake in working on this is to treat the feeling as the enemy. Telling yourself not to feel anxious is both unkind and ineffective, and it tends to add a second layer of frustration about having feelings at all. The better move is to let the feeling stand and strip it of its vote on the factual question. The dialectical behavior therapy skill called check the facts, from Marsha Linehan's manual, does exactly this: it asks what the emotion is saying, what event prompted it, what interpretation sits between the two, and whether the intensity fits the facts as they are. Our Check the Facts Worksheet walks through that sequence.

An honest account of the evidence is narrower than the popularity of the idea suggests. The Arntz study and the work that followed it are well designed but small, mostly done with scripted vignettes rather than real situations, and mostly cross-sectional. They establish that anxious people weigh their own anxiety as danger information more than non-anxious people do; they do not establish that this reasoning causes anxiety disorders or that correcting it alone resolves them. Cognitive behavioral therapy as a package has strong trial support for anxiety and depression, and this kind of reasoning check is one of its components rather than a standalone treatment.

There is also a boundary to respect. Some feelings are accurate signals about the world, and dismissing them all as reasoning errors is dangerous advice. Fear in an unsafe situation, dread before a decision you already know is wrong, and the unease people describe around someone who later turns out to be untrustworthy are all worth taking seriously. The test is not whether the feeling is strong but whether it has anything behind it when written out: a fact a camera would have caught, a pattern you could describe to someone else, a specific thing that happened. If the honest answer is that the only evidence is the feeling, that is useful to know. If there is more, the feeling was pointing at it.

Emotional reasoning rarely travels alone. It sits next to catastrophizing, which turns the feeling into a chain of predictions, next to labeling, which turns it into an identity, and next to the pull to keep thinking about the feeling rather than the question, which is where Rumination work belongs. A Thought Record (CBT) is the standard place to catch the whole cluster, because its middle columns force the feeling and the evidence into separate boxes. If the pattern is mostly about the intensity of the anxiety itself rather than the reasoning, an anxiety screen asks about the symptom side instead.

A sheet will help you see the move. It will not undo years of a nervous system that has learned to treat alarm as proof. If anxiety or guilt is loud enough that it decides most of your days, or if separating feeling from fact is something you can do on paper but never in the moment, that is a reasonable point to work with a licensed therapist, and you can search the Psychology.com directory to find one. The printable below holds the examples, the key terms, the feeling vs fact steps and a sheet to work through on paper.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the description of ex-consequentia reasoning against the Arntz study, the check the facts sequence against Linehan's manual, and the boundary paragraph on feelings that are valid signals.

References

1. Burns DD. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York: William Morrow; 1980.
2. Arntz A, Rauner M, van den Hout M. 'If I feel anxious, there must be danger': ex-consequentia reasoning in inferring danger in anxiety disorders. Behav Res Ther. 1995;33(8):917-925.
3. Engelhard IM, Macklin ML, McNally RJ, van den Hout MA, Arntz A. Emotion- and intrusion-based reasoning in Vietnam veterans with and without chronic posttraumatic stress disorder. Behav Res Ther. 2001;39(11):1339-1348.
4. Schwarz N, Clore GL. Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: informative and directive functions of affective states. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1983;45:513-523.
5. Linehan MM. DBT Skills Training Manual. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press; 2014.
6. Beck AT. Thinking and depression: idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1963;9:324-333.
7. Ellis A. Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. New York: Lyle Stuart; 1962.

Emotional Reasoning FAQ