Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. She feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.
Just as Gigi starts frantically looking online for new jobs, she spies the “employee of the month” plaque on her desk from last year. She thinks to herself that maybe she can get back to her old form. She has changed her initial view of the situation to a new one (let’s rise to the challenge), causing her anxiety to subside. Psychologists call this process reappraisal.
Studies show that reappraising emotional situations is a powerful way to change how you feel. When you find the silver linings in bad situations or give others and yourself the benefit of the doubt, it can help you feel better.
Gigi may feel a little less anxious in the moment, but does she truly believe that she can make up the work on time and regain her former glory? My colleagues and I set out to investigate whether it’s possible to start the process of reappraisal without going all the way through with it.
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 an alternative way to look at the situation.
But 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.
We tested this idea. 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 details. A follow-up study showed that these emotional boosts persisted.
Then we conducted a study with 52 undergraduate participants like the earlier one, but with a twist. This time, after participants generated a reappraisal, we gave them a choice to continue the reappraisal process by implementing it or to stop the process by distracting themselves.
Participants chose to continue reappraising their emotions only about half the time. Even though reappraisal made participants feel better about the emotional images, there were still many times when they stopped the process prematurely and did not enjoy its full benefits.
It’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.
Next time you’re in an unpleasant situation, don’t just cursorily think that you can rise to the challenge. Really think through the situation and let your new perspective become your only one.
Christian Waugh is a professor of psychology at Wake Forest University. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
