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Personality / Capacities

Capacity for Affect Regulation and Expression

Feelings are how we know what matters to us. This capacity is about living well with them: noticing what you feel, giving it a name, letting it rise and fall without being swept away or shutting it down, and showing it to others in ways that fit the moment. The PDM-3 defines it as the ability to identify, experience, modulate, comprehend, reflect on, express, and respond to feelings in ways that suit the situation and are consistent with one’s cultural milieu (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, p. 715).

Regulation here does not mean control or calm. The manual includes the ability to experience a wide range of emotions, pleasant as well as painful, at varying intensities, and it describes people as differing in how much feeling they can tolerate and keep in awareness. Expression is the other half: communicating feelings in ways that promote connection, pursue one’s goals, and support self-respect. Clinicians are asked to notice whether a feeling is expressed intentionally or acted out without awareness, and whether its intensity fits the situation (p. 715).

Because feelings are shared and shaped between people, this capacity is influenced by temperament, by cultural norms, and by the earliest exchanges between infants and caregivers (pp. 715–716). Everyone’s range has its edges. Some feelings come easily to a given person and others hardly at all, and that pattern is part of personality rather than a flaw in it.

Across the Range

The PDM-3 offers three anchor points on its five-point scale (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 716). Ratings of 4 and 2 fall between them.

5: Healthy
The person can identify, modulate, express, and understand a wide range of feelings, subtle and obvious, positive and negative. They can hold mixed feelings together and stay aware of upsetting or painful emotions while tolerating them. They read emotional signals such as acceptance or rejection flexibly and accurately, even under stress, and their expression fits the situation in quality and intensity.
3: Mild to moderate difficulties
The emotional range is narrower, or certain feelings, such as anger, guilt, shame, or envy, are hard to identify, feel, or manage. Some feelings cannot be acknowledged consciously. Under challenge or strong emotion, the person may lose sight of other people’s perspectives, respond out of sync, or express a feeling in ways out of proportion to the situation.
1: Major to severe difficulties
Emotional expression may be fragmented, overwhelming, or chaotic. Alternatively, the person may show very little emotion at all, with a flat face, voice, or posture. Feelings are hard to identify, tell apart, and communicate, and hard to distinguish from bodily sensations. Thinking may be concrete and outward-focused, with little imaginative life, the pattern known as alexithymia. Others’ emotional signals may be misread, leaving the person feeling mistreated, unloved, or suspicious.

The scale runs in two directions at once: severe difficulty can look like too much feeling or too little.

How It Develops

Infants feel intensely and depend on caregivers to help them come down from overarousal and come up from underarousal. Babies whose caregivers try to grasp, scaffold, and give meaning to their emotional experience grow into toddlers who can tell apart and express more nuanced feelings (Speranza & Steele, 2026, p. 58). McWilliams describes part of growing up as the slow mastery of language for experiences first felt as raw bodily arousal; without help making that transition, automatic physical responses may be the only language a person has for strong emotion (McWilliams, 2011, p. 118).

In adolescence, feelings intensify and can seem erratic, while the capacity to recognize layered emotions also grows. The amygdala expands and connects with regulatory regions while the prefrontal cortex is still maturing, and sensitivity to peers raises the stakes of self-conscious emotions such as pride and shame (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, pp. 417–418). By late adolescence, many young people can use strategies such as reappraisal, giving a feeling a new meaning (p. 420). The manual notes that both over- and underregulation of emotion are risk factors for later difficulties (p. 419).

Unlike some capacities, this one does not simply decline with age. Older adults are more rather than less likely to report positive feelings, and some show greater gratitude, compassion, and tolerance, although earlier painful experience can narrow emotional range (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, p. 908). Across generations, parents with better affect regulation tend to parent more warmly, and the capacity can be passed on to children through daily interaction (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 746).

How It Shows Up in Personality

Each personality style has a characteristic emotional climate, and this capacity describes how well a person manages it. At the healthy level, people can experience and understand a fairly full range of developmentally expectable feelings (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 654). The PDC-3 describes the neurotic level as involving fair affect tolerance and regulation, and the borderline level as involving real difficulty with both (Gordon & Bornstein, 2025).

For people with an emotionally dysregulated style, this capacity is at the center. Their emotions can spiral out of control, they may be unable to soothe themselves, and they may need another person’s presence to steady a feeling (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 697). McWilliams (2004, p. 246) adds people with histrionic and hypomanic tendencies to the group whose therapy often involves learning to modulate emotion and see the links between one state of mind and another.

At the other pole are the overcontrolled. People with an obsessive style prefer to operate as if emotions were irrelevant or weak, defending against emotional life through rigidity and intellectualization (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 678); McWilliams (2011, p. 293) calls isolation of affect their organizing defense. In therapy they may covertly resist efforts to explore their emotional life (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 680). People with a somatizing style are often notable for alexithymia, an inability to express emotions in words, so that the body conveys what the mind cannot (p. 684). McWilliams (2004, p. 247) also notes that many very self-controlled people arrive in therapy regarding their negative feelings as evidence of their own depravity, not yet appreciating the difference between a feeling and an action.

Specific feelings also matter. Silvan Tomkins regarded the paranoid stance as a combination of fear and shame (McWilliams, 2011, p. 217), and shame is central to narcissistic vulnerability.

How Different Thinkers See It

Silvan Tomkins

Tomkins was among the theorists who argued for the primacy of affect, and McWilliams, who chose her graduate program partly because he taught there, built affect into her own framework for understanding personality (McWilliams, 2004, pp. 20, 39; McWilliams, 2011, p. 152). His idea of “nuclear scenes,” recurrent emotionally organized templates of experience, is one of the precursors the PDM-3 cites for its personality prototypes (Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2026a, p. 7).

Schore and affect neuroscience

Schore connects affect regulation to the developing brain. His work is cited in the PDM-3 for the idea that infants who feel their caregivers’ efforts to understand and give meaning to their feelings develop more differentiated emotions (Speranza & Steele, 2026, p. 58). McWilliams draws on his description of right-brain-to-right-brain communication between infant and caregiver to explain why emotionally intense patients communicate so much through unspoken affect (McWilliams, 2011, p. 93).

James Gross

Gross’s process model, from academic emotion research, sorts regulation strategies by when they act. Antecedent-focused strategies, such as choosing or changing a situation, shifting attention, or reappraising, act before an emotion is fully underway. Response-focused strategies, such as suppression, act afterward. In his research, reappraisal often worked better than suppression: suppression reduced outward expression but not the inner feeling, and it impaired memory and raised physiological arousal. Gross also stresses that regulation can be conscious or automatic, can increase feelings as well as decrease them, and is neither good nor bad in itself (Gross, 2002, pp. 281–283).

Henry Krystal

Krystal is one of the analysts associated with the concept of alexithymia, a lack of words for feelings, often observed in people who somatize (McWilliams, 2011, p. 118). He also belongs to a psychoanalytic literature on how people learn to bear and contain their feelings, which long predates cognitive-behavioral anger management (McWilliams, 2004, p. 246). Clinical observers and researchers, Krystal among them, have stressed the centrality of affect tolerance to mental health (p. 68).

Mentalized affectivity

Elliot Jurist’s concept of “mentalized affectivity,” the capacity to reflect on one’s feelings in ways that inform understanding and help anticipate the future, is the PDM-3’s bridge between this capacity and mentalization (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 716).

Examples

Holding a feeling without acting on it

Nancy McWilliams describes a patient she calls Donna, whose intense emotional states had driven her into a range of dangerous ways of acting feelings out. A turning point came when Donna could tolerate feeling her emotions and reflect on them reliably enough to talk about them at her next appointment. Her discovery that she could hold a powerful idea in her head without acting on it was, McWilliams writes, pivotal to her slow recovery.

Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004), pp. 246–247

Martin’s unspoken feelings

In a PDM-3 case illustration, Martin, a man with severe obsessional anxiety, described a long-standing tendency not to express the emotional side of his experiences but to relive them in his mind, ruminating. Fear of losing control held back his emotional investments. His therapist felt helpless at times in the face of Martin’s intellectualizing, and found his inner world hard to reach. He was rated 2 on this capacity. Later in treatment he was described as actively experimenting with his own emotional reactions.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 30–36

Grace’s grief

Another case illustration describes Grace, a 48-year-old woman who came to therapy devastated after a breakup and cried throughout her first sessions. She grieved intensely for months for a man she saw as perfect, and within weeks she could also begin to question that idealization and feel anger and disappointment. She was rated 5 on affect regulation. Her case is a reminder that a high rating does not mean feeling little: it means being able to feel fully, including sorrow, and to let feelings change.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 47–49, 53

History

The first PDM (2006) called this domain “affective experience, expression, and communication” (Stern, 2009). The PDM-2 renamed it the capacity for affective range, communication, and understanding, and placed it in the domain of cognitive and affective processes (Gori et al., 2025). In a study of therapists rating patients with Cluster B personality disorders, it was one of four capacities that emerged as especially central (Gori et al., 2025). The PDM-3 renamed it again, putting regulation first (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 715).

The renaming reflects a broader shift. Because Freud subsumed emotion under drive, psychoanalysis was slow to theorize affect directly (McWilliams, 2011, p. 152). More recently, affect has moved toward the center: through Tomkins’s affect theory, through infant research and neuroscience such as Schore’s, through the clinical literature on alexithymia, and through the mentalization tradition’s work on affect regulation (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target’s 2002 book on affect regulation and mentalization is cited in the PDM-3’s infancy, personality, and mental-functioning chapters). In parallel, academic psychology built the field of emotion regulation, with Gross’s process model as a central framework (Gross, 2002). The PDM-3 definition blends these traditions.

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