This measure, developed to study carers' emotional response to people with schizophrenia, stimulated the crafting of interventions to ameliorate the emotional environment in which these people lived. The success of these interventions in reducing relapse rates in the UK and the USA has been replicated in China and Japan, and influenced NICE guidelines for the care of schizophrenia. Related family interventions have proved successful in bipolar disorder, major depression, eating disorders and alcoholism. Carers' expressed emotion has been shown to predict the course of diabetes, childhood epilepsy, and myocardial infarction. Could family interventions improve the outcome of these physical disorders?