Concepts
Health psychology/Cognitive distortions · CBT distortion
Emotional reasoning
What it means
Taking one’s emotions as evidence for the truth ("I feel it, therefore it is so").
Worked example
"I feel guilty, so I must have done something wrong."
In the exam
A woman feels intensely guilty and concludes from the feeling alone that she must have done something terrible, despite no actual wrongdoing.
What settles it
Emotional reasoning treats a feeling as proof of fact. Catastrophising is about exaggerating the consequence, not inferring truth from emotion.
Classically confused with
Catastrophising
Source: Burns; CBT