Abstract
Reappraisal has attracted attention as one of the effective emotion regulation strategies. In recent years, it has been suggested that reappraisal has some subtypes. However, the effects of the subtypes on affect have not yet been investigated in detail. In the current study, we focused on “positive reappraisal” and “putting into perspective” as reappraisal subtypes. The purpose of this study was to experimentally investigate the effects of the two subtypes on affect. Participants were 107 undergraduate and graduate students (57 males and 50 females) from a Japanese university. They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (positive reappraisal or putting into perspective). They completed a questionnaire to evaluate three types of affect at baseline, after a stress induction task, and after a reappraisal task. A t-test was conducted of the change score of each type of affect during the reappraisal task. The positive reappraisal group showed more of an increase in active positive affect and more of a decrease in depression and anxiety compared with the putting into perspective group. The result for non-active positive affect was not significant. In conclusion, positive reappraisal was a more effective strategy for emotion regulation than putting into perspective. The findings also indicate that putting into perspective was as effective for increasing non-active positive affect as positive reappraisal.
Highlights
Emotion regulation plays a very important role in maintaining and improving mental health
We focused on positive reappraisal and putting into perspective from the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) as the reappraisal subtypes, because the two strategies might especially relate to changing the appraisal of the situation
Positive reappraisal is an active type of strategy in terms of the perspective taken, and it focuses on the positive sides of a negative situation, which might be useful for finding the benefits and learning from an event, even though people may not notice these by just thinking about the event
Summary
Emotion regulation plays a very important role in maintaining and improving mental health. When we experience an unpleasant event and feel negative emotion, thinking about the event might be important for problem solving and emotion regulation. Merely thinking about the negative event or emotion repeatedly is likely to lead to the inhibition of emotion recovery and problem solving (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008). Reappraisal has attracted attention as one of the effective emotion regulation strategies. Reappraisal involves cognitively transforming the situation in order to alter its emotional impact (Gross, 1998a). The effects of reappraisal have been compared with suppression, which involves inhibiting emotion-expressive behavior, and many studies have suggested that reappraisal is a more adaptive strategy than suppression (e.g., Gross, 1998b; Hofmann, Heering, Sawyer, & Asnaani, 2009)
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