Something to think about before sleep—
“You can change your emotions – but it’s a 2‑step process that takes some effort” [The Conversation]:
When my colleague Kateri McRae and I first started thinking about what it means to fully reappraise emotional experiences, we were struck by something we saw in the emotion regulation research. Almost all of the studies treated reappraisal as a one-step process. Researchers would ask participants to “reappraise this to make yourself feel better” and then measure the effects.
However, theories about how people regulate their emotions suggest that, like any effortful psychological process, reappraisal involves multiple steps.
When you want to change how you’re feeling, you first generate a reappraisal. You bend and stretch your mind to come up with some alternative way to look at the situation.
After you generate a reappraisal, it might seem like you’re done, but you’re not. That alternative interpretation is fragile and must compete with your original take that’s driving your emotion. Somehow you need to strengthen that reappraisal so it can stick.
We call this implementation – when you focus and elaborate on that reappraisal to really change your mind about the situation.
We tested this idea in a study. We showed 89 undergraduate participants images of negative situations and asked them to first just generate a reappraisal of the image that could help them feel better about it. For example, they might see a picture of a frail man in a hospital bed and tell themselves that the man is getting good treatment and will be better soon. Then, we showed them the image again and asked them to focus and elaborate in their mind on their reappraisal.
Participants felt a little better after generating a reappraisal, but they felt much better after implementing it by focusing and fleshing out the details1. In a follow-up study, we showed that these emotional boosts persisted when viewing the images later.
[I]t’s hard to intentionally change how you think about something, and people tend to dislike continuing to do hard things. Indeed, in our choice study, people opted to give up on reappraising when they weren’t feeling its benefits early on. Knowing this human tendency might give you the best chance of continuing reappraisal even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working or is hard.
NOTE
1 Presumbly in their own words, and not by (say) asking ChatGPT to “flesh out the details.”