30 Changing the Meaning of Emotional Encounters: Cognitive Reappraisal Success is Unrelated to Cognitive Reappraisal Tactic

Abstract

Objective:

Cognitive reappraisal is a frequently researched emotion regulation strategy. It broadly describes one's ability to alter or reinterpret the meaning of personally relevant events. Cognitive reappraisal is robustly associated with lower self-reported negative affect, lower physiological arousal, and higher positive affect, which is the reason why it is a key component of many psychotherapeutic interventions. However, little research to date has investigated different types of cognitive reappraisal tactics and their association with cognitive reappraisal success. Given that there are an arguably indefinite number of ways to reappraise personally relevant events, it would be clinically informative to identify those tactics that are associated with the greatest decline in negative emotionality. The current study investigated whether one's predominant use of a specific reappraisal strategy is associated with divergent cognitive reappraisal success.

Participants and Methods:

A total of 42 participants (67% women; M = 23.33 years, SD = 6.05 years) took part in this cross-sectional study. Cognitive reappraisal was administered via a computerized task modeled after McRae et al. (2012). A total of 45 previously normed pictures were shown in the cognitive reappraisal task (Lang et al., 2001). Participants were asked to either decrease how they felt or look at negatively evocative images. The dependent measure was success of downregulating negative emotion after the “decrease” versus “look” instruction (i.e., cognitive reappraisal success). A mood manipulation check, a questionnaire asking about participants' reappraisal strategies, and frequency of each reappraisal tactic was conducted after the task was completed to ensure that participants implemented the task as intended. Reappraisal tactics were rated by 3 independent raters individually according to a previously established rating tactic coding system (McRae et al., 2012). An analysis of variance was conducted comparing reappraisal success across groups of the reappraisal tactic most frequently used for each participant. Additionally, total number of reappraisal strategies used was included as a covariate.

Results:

Participants endorsed significantly higher negative mood after looking at negative versus neutral pictures, t(41) = 22.70, p < .05). Ratings further indicated that participants were able to significantly decrease how negative they felt when reappraising versus looking at negative pictures, t(41) = 11.95, p < .05. On average, participants' most frequently used reappraisal tactic was used 50.54% (SD = 16.32) of the time. Descriptive statistics on frequency of reappraisal tactics across participants is shown. Regarding the analysis of variance of divergent reappraisal success based on tactic, no significant relationship was found (p > .05). The inclusion of number of reappraisal strategies per participant did not impact the results (p > .05).

Conclusions:

The present study did not show a significant difference between reappraisal tactics regarding their cognitive reappraisal success. This replicates past findings and indicates that type of reappraisal tactic used may be not as impactful as using cognitive reappraisal in some fashion. However, reappraisal tactics were not distributed equally across participants. Future studies should include larger samples to attain adequate sample sizes for each reappraisal tactic. Furthermore, participants should be instructed to use a specific reappraisal tactic alongside their self-selected reappraisal preferences to gain insight into the relative success of different reappraisal tactics. Clinical relevance of present findings is discussed.