Imagining a Safe Place: Emotion Regulation with Detachment Intervention

Abstract

Although the induction of a safe place led to changes on physiological level with impact for emotional processing, the effect on emotion regulation is still unclear. This study examined the effects of a self-distant reflecting strategy (safe place induction) on positive and negative affect compared to a self-immersed way of reflecting (rumination task) on a negative autobiographic event. In a student population, 54 healthy participants underwent recalled a sad autobiographic memory before they were randomly assigned 1:1 to either the safe place induction or the rumination task. We could demonstrate that after negative mood induction the participants in the safe place condition showed a significantly stronger improvement in positive, but not negative affect in contrast to the rumination condition. Detachment training via safe place induction could serve as an emotion regulation strategy for positive affect when dealing with sad memories.