This article outlines a conceptualization of personality as a cognitive-affective processing system (CAPS) and explores its implications for understanding disorders and pursuing therapeutic change. The CAPS conception of personality was proposed in 1995 in order to resolve a long-standing paradox in personality and social psychology, namely, the apparent contradiction of, on the one hand, a core assumption about personality as stable and invariant across situations and, on the other hand, the empirical findings of behavioral variability. It was prompted by the demonstration that stable and characteristic patterns can be discerned in behavior variation, or ''behavioral signatures,'' and by a common theme from cognitive sciences that views the human mind as consisting of a stable and distinctive network of specific cognitions and affects. CAPS characterizes personality not simply by a set of thoughts and feelings highly assessible to an individual, but by the dynamic network of functional "relations" among the cognitions and affects, which guide and constrain their activation. After outlining the CAPS view of personality, this article will discuss how it relates to diverse existing models of anxiety and depression, approaches for measurement and case conceptualization as well as treatment methods, with the goal of clarifying the relationships among them by translating them into a common language provided by the CAPS framework.