DOI: 10.1177/1754073915575406

Several decades ago, the cognitive revolution provided the impe-tus to integrate the theoretical and empirical developments in the cognitive sciences into the fields of clinical psychology and psy-chiatry. Although this led to impressive advances with respect to new theoretical models, new studies, and new therapy tech-niques, further progress can be made by integrating cognitive approaches to emotion (Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, 2013) into the landscape of psychopathology. So far emotion and cognition have been considered separate entities, and most cog-nitive models of psychopathology focus exclusively on cogni-tive reactions to emotional phenomena. In contrast, the approach advocated here fully integrates cognition with the emotional pro-cesses that lead to affective disorders. Emphasizing the rele-vance of appraisal theories of emotion (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Roseman & Smith, 2001) for psychopathology, we argue that cognition plays a central role not only in the regulation of emotional processes (e.g., Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010; Gross & Muñoz, 1995), but also in the generation of the affective states that fail to be regulated. Although this article focuses on the analysis of a relatively specific diagnostic cate-gory (depression) such an approach is compatible with the growing interest in transdiagnostic approaches to further the understanding of the mechanisms underlying psychopathology including the frequent occurrence of comorbidity (Sanislow et al., 2010; see also Watkins, 2015), as cognitive appraisal is at the root of emotion processes in general. This article builds on previous theoretical work on the rela-tionship between appraisal bias and affective disorders (se