Reconsidering reappraisal: in emotionally intense contexts, people choose distraction or minimizing over reconstrual to regulate others’ emotions

Abstract

Prior research has established that people use reappraisal to regulate others’ emotions in higher-emotional intensities but use distraction in lower-emotional intensities. However, research has not compared different reappraisal subtypes, such as reconstrual versus minimizing. In three pre-registered studies, participants completed a novel advice-giving task where they selected regulation strategies (distraction, reconstrual, or minimizing) to help a ‘partner’ who was ostensibly experiencing stimuli of differing emotional intensities and types (the partner was, in fact, non-existent). In Experiment 1, participants selected reconstrual over distraction significantly more for low versus high intensity stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants showed no significant preference for minimizing over distraction on low versus high intensity stimuli. In Experiment 3, participants selected reconstrual over minimizing significantly more on low versus high intensity stimuli. Results indicate that previous findings regarding the effect of emotional intensity on ‘reappraisal’ preference are limited to reconstrual and may not generalize to other reappraisal subtypes (i.e., minimizing) which require lower cognitive costs and emotional engagement with the stimuli.