Cognitive Reappraisal

Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy in which a person deliberately changes the way they think about a situation that has the potential to trigger an emotional response, in order to alter the emotional impact that situation ends up having on them, for example by consciously reinterpreting a stressful or upsetting event in a more neutral, distanced, or constructive light either before it fully unfolds or while it is happening. The psychologist James Gross and his research collaborators studied cognitive reappraisal extensively as a central part of an influential process model of emotion regulation, a framework that identifies different strategies according to the point in the unfolding emotional process at which they intervene, and which contrasts reappraisal directly with expressive suppression, a separate strategy documented elsewhere in this section, as the two most extensively studied emotion regulation strategies in this research tradition. A substantial body of research conducted within this framework has generally found that habitual use of cognitive reappraisal is associated with more favorable psychological and social outcomes than habitual reliance on suppression, including experiencing lower levels of negative emotion overall and better quality social and interpersonal functioning, a pattern researchers attribute to reappraisal intervening earlier in the process by which an emotional response is generated in the first place, rather than only attempting to mask an emotional reaction after it has already fully arisen.