Reappraising Reappraisal

A Brief History of Reappraisal Research

Attempts to reinterpret a situation to change its emotional impact have long been of interest in psychology, resulting in a rich, but increasingly complex, set of findings and ideas. Systematic study of reappraisal can be traced back to the idea of ego-defenses that psychoanalysts associated with the management of negative emotions (Freud, 1926/1959). Lists of identified ego-defenses included reappraisal-like constructs such as intellectualization and rationalization. Even as clinical psychology has witnessed major paradigm shifts, constructs related to interpretation of situations have remained important for understanding as well as alleviating mental ailments. For instance, etiologies of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety implicate amplified negative interpretation biases (Everaert, Podina, & Koster, 2017) and/or attenuated positive interpretation biases (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, & Hankin, 2004; Snyder, 1989). Interventions designed to alleviate mental illness therefore often target interpretation biases. For instance, cognitive therapists teach patients how to identify and challenge specific kinds of interpretation patterns such as overgeneralization or exaggeration (Williams & Garland, 2002). Improved reappraisal skills are among the desired outcomes of many effective therapeutic systems such as rational emotive behavior therapy (Ellis, 1957; Ellis & MacLaren, 1998) and cognitive behavioral therapy (Beck, 1963, 1964; Beck & Dozois, 2011).

A second major source of inspiration for modern reappraisal research is the study of psychological stress and coping, spearheaded by Richard Lazarus (Lazarus, 1966; Smith & Kirby, 2011). Seminal experiments in the 1960s suggested that stress responses depend on the way people cognitively construe, or appraise (Arnold, 1960), stressful situations (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964; Speisman, Lazarus, Mordkoff, & Davison, 1964). The term “reappraisal” was introduced to denote updates to the initial appraisal that could occur as the situation and its interpretation continually unfold (Lazarus, 1968). This early meaning of “reappraisal” was broader than the meaning of this term in the context of emotion regulation and this article. For Lazarus, reappraisal could be intentional as well as unintentional, and could reflect overt changes to the situation as well as covert changes to the interpretation. By contrast, as an emotion regulation strategy, reappraisal usually encompasses only intentional changes to the covert interpretation, falling within the subspace of reappraisal that Lazarus called emotion-focused coping (intentional changes to overt situations would meanwhile fall within problem-focused coping). A key contribution of the stress and coping literature to reappraisal research is the realization that reappraisal works through appraisal change. However, beyond this broad insight, the literatures on appraisal and reappraisal have drifted apart over the years, creating a chasm that we hope to help bridge (Smith & Kirby, 2011; Yih, Uusberg, Taxer, & Gross, 2019).

Reappraisal in Modern Emotion Regulation Research

Much of modern reappraisal research has been conducted in the context of the broader project of understanding the many ways people attempt to regulate their emotions. Emotion regulation encompasses all overt or covert behaviors that change one or more aspects of emotion (Gross, 1998, 1999, 2015; Koole, 2009; Larsen, 2000; Webb, Schweiger Gallo, Miles, Gollwitzer, & Sheeran, 2012). According to the process model (Gross, 1998, 2015), emotion regulation follows when an emotion, either experienced or imagined, is identified to be helpful or harmful to some end, such as to experience pleasure or to perform well on a task (Gross et al., 2011; Tamir, 2015). Identification activates an emotion goal to experience a certain emotion, which can in turn trigger selecting, implementing, and monitoring different strategies to accomplish this goal (Gross, 2015). These emotion regulation strategies bias the unfolding of emotion by intervening at different stages in emotion generation (Gross, 1998). A strategy can seek to change the situation that triggers the emotion; the way attention is deployed within the situation; the appraisal of the situation; or the emotional response to the situation. For instance, to avoid being saddened by a movie, a person could pick (or switch to) a comedy instead of a drama (using strategies from the situation selection and modification family); fiddle with a smartphone during intense portions of the drama (attentional deployment); construe the drama as irrelevant because it is fictional (reappraisal); or hold back tears (response modulation).

The process model of emotion regulation, and the systematic research it has inspired, has made significant conceptual as well as empirical contributions to our understanding of reappraisal. Conceptually, the process model distinguishes reappraisal from two related but distinct forms of emotion regulation. On the one hand, it suggests that although attentional deployment and reappraisal strategies are similarly cognitive, they target different components of emotion generation (Ochsner & Gross, 2005). Whereas reappraisal biases emotion by changing appraisals, attentional deployment biases emotion by interfering with the stream of information that appraisals rely on. On the other hand, the process model also distinguishes reappraisal from situation selection and modification strategies. Both sets of strategies end up changing appraisals, but situation selection and modification do so by changing the overt situation while reappraisal does so by changing the covert interpretation of the situation (Yih et al., 2019).

Empirical emotion regulation research has complemented this conceptual picture with insights about the antecedents and consequences of reappraisal. Studies of reappraisal antecedents have highlighted the role of motives that make different emotions desirable (Tamir, 2015), the role of beliefs about the effects and controllability of emotions (Ford & Gross, 2018), and the role of decisions to use different regulation strategies (Sheppes, 2014). Studies of emotion regulation consequences suggest that reappraisal is often an effective means for achieving emotion goals without significant side effects. In laboratory studies, reappraisal has been found to change the experiential, expressive, and physiological components of emotion, often with only moderate mental effort, and in a sustained manner (Buhle et al., 2013; Morawetz, Bode, Derntl, & Heekeren, 2017; Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). Day-to-day reappraisal use meanwhile has been found to correlate with higher levels of well-being (Gross & John, 2003; John & Eng, 2014) and fewer mental health issues (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010; Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001; Troy, Wilhelm, Shallcross, & Mauss, 2010).

The Need for a Novel Integrative Framework

The existing body of research paints an informative picture of reappraisal as a strategy that involves intentional changes to appraisal and that can alter the course of thinking, feeling, and behaving in generally desirable directions. However, this picture also contains blurred areas, some of which could be brought to focus by further clarifying the psychological mechanisms that reappraisal relies on. To illustrate some of the blurred areas, we briefly consider three open questions in the current reappraisal literature. What kinds of regulation strategies should be considered reappraisal? How might one characterize different instances of reappraisal? How can one predict when reappraisal will be more or less effective?

One unresolved question concerns the range of emotion regulation strategies that should be identified as reappraisal. Prototypical examples of reappraisal include reinterpreting the meaning of a situation and reconsidering one’s ability to cope with it (Gross, 2015). However, several other regulation strategies are sometimes considered reappraisal and sometimes not. Examples include arousal reappraisal, which involves reconstruing emotional arousal as helpful for performance (Jamieson, Hangen, Lee, & Yeager, 2017; cf. Tamir, 2017), and mindful acceptance, which involves attending nonjudgmentally to one’s emotional reactions (Naragon-Gainey, McMahon, & Chacko, 2017; cf. Chambers, Gullone, & Allen, 2009). There may also be phenomena that have yet to be called reappraisal even though they should be. For instance, the link between achievement goals and achievement emotions (Pekrun, Elliot, & Maier, 2009) suggests that replacing performance goals with mastery goals in order to feel better may be a form of reappraisal. The framework proposed here helps resolve debates about what counts as reappraisal by identifying the psychological mechanisms of reappraisal which can be used as criteria for recognizing different versions of reappraisal.

A second and related open question concerns the best ways to classify individual emotion regulation instances that fall within the broad class of reappraisal. People are known to implement reappraisal in many different ways. For instance, participants reappraising their responses to unpleasant photographs were found to normalize and reinterpret the depicted events; to imagine different future outcomes and interfering agents; to rationally analyze the events; to challenge their reality; and to distance themselves from the photographs (McRae, Ciesielski, & Gross, 2012). Other taxonomies of reappraisal can be found within the factor structures of relevant questionnaires. For instance, the Ways of Coping Checklist identifies three emotion-focused coping strategies: wishful thinking, self-blame, and avoidance (Vitaliano, Russo, Carr, Maiuro, & Becker, 1985). The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire identifies nine strategies: self-blame, other-blame, acceptance, rumination, positive refocusing, positive reappraisal, refocus on planning, putting things into perspective, and catastrophizing (Garnefski et al., 2001). However, the limited overlap and scope of these and other taxonomies suggests that a universal map of the full territory of reappraisal has yet to be drawn. The framework proposed here can be a step towards such a map by providing a theory-driven way to characterize different instances of reappraisal.

A third open question concerns moderating mechanisms that determine how effective reappraisal is in the short and long term. For instance, the short-term effectiveness of reappraisal is reduced by less abstract content of a threatening stimulus (McRae, Misra, Prasad, Pereira, & Gross, 2012; Suri et al., 2018) and high intensity of concurrent affective state (Raio, Orederu, Palazzolo, Shurick, & Phelps, 2013). Though these findings have feasible individual explanations, they have not yet been explained within a single framework. The same holds for moderators that influence the long-term effects of reappraisal. For instance, reappraisal has been found to be adaptive over the long run only when used in uncontrollable situations but not in controllable situations (Haines et al., 2016; Troy, Shallcross, & Mauss, 2013). Both short-term and long-term moderating effects need to be considered when drawing prescriptive conclusions from reappraisal research. The framework presented here can aid these efforts by providing an account that predicts these as well as other, as yet unknown, moderating effects.

A Working Model of Appraisal

The process model of emotion regulation holds that a good way to understand a regulatory phenomenon, such as emotion regulation, is to use a simplified model of the phenomenon that is being regulated, in this case emotion (Gross, 1998). Translating this insight into the present context suggests that a good way to understand reappraisal is to use a simplified model of appraisal, which we lay out in the next few paragraphs. Our appraisal model integrates major themes from different appraisal theories while remaining agnostic about many specific issues such as the kinds of representations (e.g., associations vs. propositions) and processes (e.g., automatic vs. controlled) that are involved in appraisal as well as their neural implementations (Scherer et al., 2001).

According to appraisal theory, emotions are caused not by a situation per se, but by what the situation means with respect to various motivational concerns. We therefore view appraisal as a comparison process that takes two inputs and produces an output that represents the relationship between the inputs (see Figure 1a; Chang & Jolly, 2018; Moors, 2010; Reisenzein, 2009). Consider for instance how a driver who is stuck behind a slow vehicle may become angry. One input to his appraisal process is the goal set, that is, currently active representations of how he desires the world to be. We define goals broadly to include any representation, conscious or otherwise, of a desired end state, including needs, motives, values, and norms (Elliot & Fryer, 2008). In the example, the angry driver may be motivated by a goal to arrive on time to an important meeting. However, an active goal in itself is not sufficient for either appraisal or emotion. The goal needs to be related to another input to the appraisal process—the construal of a situation, that is, a representation of how the world is. We define situational construal as a set of mental models that are activated to stand in for the current situation (Clark, 2013). For instance, the angry driver may construe the slow speed of the vehicle in front of him as a deliberate norm violation by another driver. Given a goal set and a construal, the appraisal process produces an appraisal outcome, that is, a summary representation of the relationship between the construed situation and the goal set. It is this appraisal outcome that goes on to shape emotion. Given the goal to arrive at a meeting and the construal of a deliberately slow driver impeding one’s progress, the person in our example appraises the situation as an external obstruction of an important goal and is likely to experience anger.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

From a working model of appraisal (a) to a framework of reappraisal (b).

Another central tenet of appraisal theory reflected in our working model is the idea that appraisal outcomes can be thought of as values on a relatively small number of abstract appraisal dimensions. Appraisal functions as a data reduction procedure that extracts a lower dimensional meaning representation from higher dimensional input representations of the situation and goals. Each appraisal dimension captures some relatively abstract aspect of the motivational essence of a situation, such as the desirability of the situation, accountability for its origins, and expectancies for its future. The sets of dimensions proposed by different appraisal models largely overlap (Moors et al., 2013), suggesting that different models may parse the same phenomenon using somewhat different clustering rules and labeling conventions. In our working model, relatively concrete appraisal dimensions are clustered hierarchically into increasingly abstract dimensions up to three metadimensions of desirability, attribution, and expectancy on top. The desirability metadimension asks, “How good or bad is this situation?” It integrates the more specific dimensions of goal congruence (“Does the situation help or hurt me. . .”) and goal relevance (“. . . and by how much?”). The second metadimension of attribution asks, “How did I get here?” It integrates the internal accountability dimension (“How much responsibility for this situation belongs to me. . .”) with external accountability (“. . . and how much to someone or something else?”). The third metadimension of expectancy asks, “What should I do about it?” It integrates the outcome expectancy dimension (“How will this situation evolve. . .”) with the coping potential dimension (“. . . and what could I do about it?”). Responses to these questions can have variable degrees of certainty depending on how clear the person is about the desirability, attribution, and expectancies of the situation.

Finally, our working model of appraisal includes two broad antecedents of appraisal: situations and knowledge (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). Situations refer to particular configurations of the internal and external environment, such as being hungry at a restaurant (cf. Yang, Read, & Miller, 2009). Situations therefore encompass the state outside of the body, such as a restaurant, as well as the state inside of the body, such as being low on blood glucose and feeling hungry. Situations can be currently ongoing, giving rise to direct experiences. Situations can also be simulated versions of past or future events, giving rise to recollections and expectations, respectively (Hesslow, 2012). Knowledge refers to the mental models that people construct or draw from memory to make sense of ongoing situations as well as to simulate recalled or expected situations (Binder, 2016; Radvansky & Zacks, 2011). Knowledge can encompass relatively simple mental models such as the concept of being hungry as well as relatively complex mental models such as the scenario of dining at a restaurant. Even though the material nature of what we mean by situation is very different for experienced events (conditions in physical environments) and simulated events (conditions in simulated environments), in both cases there is a similar relationship between a situation as the thing being signified and knowledge as the signifier.

Situations and knowledge are relevant for appraisal because they combine to influence both how a situation is construed and which goals belong to the goal set. Situational construal involves selecting a mental model to make sense of the information available about the situation (Clark, 2013). For instance, arrival of one’s meal at a restaurant can be construed as “on time” or “late” based on the time it took (element of the situation) and the time it should take according to the restaurant scenario (element of knowledge). The goal set is similarly sensitive to both actual threats and opportunities as well as the knowledge needed to perceive and evaluate them. For instance, the goal of having Chinese food is more likely to enter the goal set when someone is hungry and at a restaurant (elements of the situation) and is also aware that the restaurant offers Chinese food (element of knowledge).

From Appraisal to Reappraisal

Armed with a working model of appraisal (Figure 1a), we can now turn to the psychological mechanisms that enable reappraisal (Figure 1b). We define reappraisal as an intentional attempt to shift the appraisal outcome along appraisal dimensions with the aim of changing emotion. A key insight of our framework is that shifting the appraisal outcome generally involves changing the goal set, the construal, or both. This is because appraisal outcomes are an output of a comparison process, and are therefore difficult to change directly. For instance, someone feeling disappointed by running late for a movie may find it difficult to simply convince herself that being late is actually congruent with the goal of being on time. It is less difficult, however, to change one of the inputs to the appraisal process. She could, for instance, reconstrue the situation from a personal failure to arrive on time to a misfortune caused by unexpectedly slow traffic. This change in construal is likely to reduce the internal accountability appraisal and thereby alleviate disappointment. Alternatively, she could repurpose the situation by demoting her original goal of being on time and promoting the alternative goal of seeing the whole movie. Because the screening will begin with commercials, arriving a little late can be perfectly congruent with the goal of seeing the whole movie, even if it is incongruent with the initial goal to arrive on time. This change in the goal set is likely to improve the goal congruence appraisal and thereby again alleviate the negative emotion.

We propose that appraisal outcome shifts produced by changing situational construal and goal set are the core psychological mechanisms of reappraisal, and that these mechanisms can be recognized across many different instances of reappraisal. Consider, for example, instances of reappraisal that begin at different times relative to emotion generation. During emotion generation, appraisals become elaborated and updated in iterative cycles, both as more information is processed and as the situation changes (Clore & Ortony, 2008; Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007; Gross, 2015; Kuppens, 2013; Moors, 2017; Yih et al., 2019). Depending on when they are launched, we can place instances of reappraisal on a continuum from proactive to reactive reappraisal. Proactive reappraisal occurs when the goal to change an emotion is activated prior to, or during early cycles of, emotion generation. For instance, a student anxious about an upcoming test may engage in proactive reappraisal while preparing for the test or as soon as the test begins. Reactive reappraisal, by contrast, occurs when the goal to change emotion is formed during late cycles of emotion generation, or even only once the emotion has already subsided (Nørby, 2018). For instance, a student may engage in reappraisal when encountering intense anxiety during a test, or when thinking back to the test. We suggest that even though there are important differences between proactive and reactive reappraisal (Sheppes & Meiran, 2007), both flavors rely on the same mechanisms of shifting appraisal outcomes through goal and construal change to bias or update the appraisals involved in emotion generation.

The vignette about a person rushing to see a movie also illustrates three propositions that our framework makes about the psychological mechanisms of reappraisal. First, the vignette demonstrates that in order to bring about downstream changes in appraisal outcomes, people can alter how they view the situation as well as what goals they consider when evaluating it. We therefore propose that reappraisal incorporates two co-occurring but distinct strategies: changing the situational construal (i.e., reconstrual) and changing the goal set (i.e., repurposing). Second, the vignette demonstrates that reappraisal can shift the appraisal outcome along distinct appraisal dimensions such as accountability or congruence. We therefore propose that different instances of reappraisal can be characterized as shifts along specific appraisal dimensions (i.e., appraisal change vectors). Third, the vignette demonstrates that changes to appraisal are made possible by the availability of different construals that could explain the same situation as well as the availability of different goals that the same situation could serve. We therefore propose that reappraisal affordances are a function of how malleable the initial goal set and the initial situational construal are. We will elaborate each of these propositions in the next three sections.

Expanding the Focus of Reappraisal Research

Our framework calls for direct empirical comparisons of the reconstrual and repurposing strategies. As this distinction hasn’t been made in past studies, it is hard to assess the extent to which available findings involve one or the other strategy (or both). We suspect, however, that existing work is biased towards the reconstrual strategy. For instance, most laboratory studies have operationalized reappraisal with instructions such as “change the meaning of the situation or your emotional response” (Webb, Miles, et al., 2012), which resembles reconstrual more than repurposing. Such instructions may fail to elicit reappraisal via repurposing that, anecdotally, seems to be very common. For instance, people think of failures as learning experiences, search for silver linings in dark clouds, and tell themselves that they did not really want the things they cannot have. Future research is therefore needed to map the prevalence of repurposing and reconstrual as well as to document their similarities and differences.

Interestingly, while repurposing has been underrepresented in emotion regulation research, some of the effects of this strategy may have been inadvertently documented elsewhere. For instance, research on motivation has revealed how changes in goals can lead to changes in emotion. The goals people set in achievement contexts differ in terms of their orientation towards positive or negative outcomes defined in relation to the task, to competitors, or to an internal standard (Elliot, Murayama, & Pekrun, 2011). Such differences in goal orientations have been associated with different emotional responses (Higgins, 1997; Pekrun, 2006). These findings support the idea that emotions are sensitive not only to variance in situational construal but also to variance in goals. Furthermore, interventions designed to change goal orientations (Pekrun et al., 2009) as well as goal values (Hulleman, Godes, Hendricks, & Harackiewicz, 2010) have been shown to change emotions. Even though emotion regulation has not been the objective of these interventions, they demonstrate that goal change can lead to emotion change, and thereby amount to preliminary evidence for the efficacy of reappraisal via repurposing. Emotion regulation research on repurposing could derive valuable insights from the existing literature on the relationship between goals and emotion.

Once reconstrual and repurposing can be studied on an equal footing, it will become possible to directly compare their antecedents as well as their consequences. Regarding antecedents, one hypothesis suggested by our framework is that reconstrual should be preferred when construal malleability is high, whereas repurposing should be preferred when goal set malleability is high. Regarding consequences of reconstrual and repurposing, it will be important to chart the effects these strategies have on appraisal change vectors, on emotional experiences, as well as on long-term coping and striving. Understanding the antecedents and consequences of reconstrual and repurposing can pave the way for understanding when each strategy is most adaptive. For instance, reconstrual may be mandated when an unwanted emotion arises from biased interpretation of a situation. However, when an unwanted emotion arises from quite veridical interpretation of a situation, it might be more adaptive to reappraise via repurposing.

Reappraisal of External and Internal Situations

The present framework points to similarities between regulation strategies targeting appraisals of the external situation (e.g., situational reappraisal) and strategies targeting appraisals of the internal situation (e.g., arousal reappraisal). On the level of emotion generation, the external and internal aspects of a situation appear to be processed in largely similar ways (Barrett, 2017; Dixon, Thiruchselvam, Todd, & Christoff, 2017). On the level of emotion regulation, however, researchers disagree whether the reappraisal construct is helpful for characterizing strategies such as arousal reappraisal (Jamieson et al., 2017; cf. Tamir, 2017) and mindful acceptance (Naragon-Gainey et al., 2017; cf. Chambers et al., 2009) that focus primarily on the internal aspects of situations such as feelings and bodily sensations.

It should be noted that complex regulation strategies can have many underlying mechanisms and therefore need not fall neatly into a single class. With this mind, however, our framework suggests that many strategies that target internal situations exhibit the core psychological mechanisms of reappraisal—goal-directed changes in appraisal outcomes produced through reconstrual or repurposing. For instance, arousal reappraisal can be initiated by an emotion goal (e.g., feel less anxious during a stressful event) and involve shifts in appraisal outcomes (e.g., telling onself that bodily arousal is actually congruent with a performance goal).

Likewise, we argue that mindful acceptance involves intentional shifts in appraisals of internal states. This may seem odd as the stated aim of most mindful acceptance techniques is to refrain from changing emotion (Chambers et al., 2009; Farb, Anderson, Irving, & Segal, 2014). However, a goal of absence should not be equated with an absence of a goal. The mindful imperative to let emotions unfold without interference is a desired end state, that is, a goal. The mindful goal tends to differ from spontaneous emotion goals that people activate, often implicitly, to reduce unpleasant and increase pleasant emotions (Koole, Webb, & Sheeran, 2015; Mauss, Bunge, & Gross, 2007). Pursuing the mindful goal of unchanged emotion is thus often an active process that requires changing the way emotion would otherwise unfold, similar to how other forms of reappraisal interfere with emotion generation. Mindful acceptance further resembles reappraisal insofar as it produces shifts in how the internal aspects of situations are appraised. For instance, a mindful person may appraise bodily sensations of anxiety as nonthreatening, not one’s fault, and temporary. We therefore conclude that on the level of psychological mechanisms, strategies such as arousal reappraisal and mindful acceptance are highly similar to more prototypical forms of reappraisal.

An interesting implication of this conclusion is that the three propositions of our framework may be applicable to strategies that target internal situations. For instance, the effects of mindful acceptance may be analyzed through the lens of reconstrual and repurposing. As an example of mindful reconstrual, viewing one’s feelings as clouds passing in the sky can be thought of as applying a particular mental model to make sense of interoceptive information. As an example of mindful repurposing, mindfulness often involves promoting nonspontaneous goals such as understanding emotions and using them for personal growth. Following the second proposition of our framework, reappraisal of internal situations could be characterized using appraisal change vectors. For instance, viewing feelings as clouds in the sky will probably lower the self-accountability appraisal of these feelings. Finally, it may be helpful to consider the malleability of construals and goals that relate to internal situations. For instance, low malleability of internal situational construal may lead someone to consider dizziness as a harbinger of fainting, whereas high malleability of internal situational construal helps the person to reconsider dizziness as a normal sign of anxiety.

Mapping Brain Mechanisms

Our framework can be used to better link the observed neural correlates of reappraisal to the mechanisms and computations they reflect. Reappraisal in service of the goal to down-regulate emotion tends to reduce emotional responses in sensory cortices and affective areas such as the amygdala and anterior insula and increase activity in several control regions in the prefrontal, cingulate, parietal, and temporal cortices (Buhle et al., 2013; Hajcak, MacNamara, & Olvet, 2010; Kalisch, 2009; Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Our framework suggests that this pattern may encompass two overlapping but distinct brain networks supporting reconstrual and repurposing. Assuming that both strategies require some executive control, the shared portion of these two networks may contain the executive control areas consistently implicated in neuroimaging studies of reappraisal such as the dorsal prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex (Buhle et al., 2013; Ochsner & Gross, 2008). The nonshared portion of the brain substrate of reconstrual may include frontal and temporal regions associated with top-down influences on perception (Chanes & Barrett, 2016; Lamme & Roelfsema, 2000). In contrast, the nonshared portion of the brain substrate of repurposing may involve regions in the orbital and lateral prefrontal cortex associated with setting and pursuing goals (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009) and a broader parieto-frontal network associated with adjudicating between different goals (Rueter, Abram, MacDonald, Rustichini, & DeYoung, 2018).

Preliminary support for this dual network account can be found in differences observed in neuroimaging studies that have induced reappraisal through reinterpretation or perspective-taking. Reinterpretation, induced by instructions such as “change the meaning of the situation or your emotional response,” resembles reconstrual more than repurposing. Perspective-taking, induced by instructions such as “analyze the situation objectively, from a detached observer’s perspective,” is a complex strategy with some resemblance to repurposing. Specifically, by invoking a third-person perspective (Kross & Ayduk, 2011), it should demote the egocentric goals to purse the action tendencies inherent in the emotional response and promote different goals such as understanding the broader causes and consequences of the situation. In the brain, reinterpretation-related processes are distributed across medial as well as lateral prefrontal regions, whereas perspective-taking is relatively more constrained to lateral regions (Ochsner & Gross, 2008). The distribution of reinterpretation and perspective-taking across the lateral-medial axis of the prefrontal cortex aligns with a recent suggestion that lateral prefrontal regions process more abstract goals than medial regions (Dixon et al., 2017). This may be consistent with the role of shifting abstract goals, such as the goal to analyze the situation, in repurposing via perspective-taking. More research using novel manipulations is needed to test the neural predictions of our framework.

Understanding Individual Differences

Our framework has implications for understanding individual differences in appraisal and reappraisal. In particular, it illustrates how stable knowledge structures such as beliefs can influence the dynamic processes of appraisal as well as reappraisal. For instance, a person who believes human abilities to be mostly innate and fixed rather than learned and malleable is likely to construe a failure at a task as an instance of a mismatch between talent and task (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). Given this knowledge and this construal, this person is likely to not only appraise the failure as low on goal congruence but also himself as low on coping potential. After all, if ability level is fixed, there is little that could improve in similar future situations. The same belief constrains this person’s affordances to use reappraisal to change these appraisals (Ford & Gross, 2018). Our framework thus explains how a stable knowledge structure such as a belief can bias dynamic behavior so that it obtains the trait-like property of exhibiting similar characteristics across many different situations. This is in line with theorizing in the fields of appraisal styles (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003), development (Dweck, 2017), and personality (Baumert et al., 2017).

More broadly, the role of knowledge in reappraisal suggests a pathway through which culture, as a major source of mental models (Tulviste, 1991), can impact emotion regulation. This pathway could be used in future research to consider how different cultures impact reappraisal by constraining or facilitating construal as well as goal set malleability. For instance, people from cultures characterized by high uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1980) may experience situations on average as having lower construal malleability, because they are motivated to find a single mental model to explain situations and have had extensive practice in doing this. Culturally informed reappraisal research is also needed as a counterweight to the current overrepresentation of work conducted within the Western hemisphere (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). We hope that the general nature of the present framework makes it a useful scaffold for future cross-cultural reappraisal research.

In addition to analyzing how knowledge structures influence reappraisal, our framework can also be used to consider the causal pathway running in the opposite direction—how repeated patterns of reappraisal can contribute to durable change in knowledge structures such as beliefs, goals, and identity. Many emotions that people seek to regulate are recurring, elicited by similar triggers repeatedly over weeks, months, and years (Voelkle, Ebner, Lindenberger, & Riediger, 2013). A potent source of recurrent emotion are major life events such as chronic illness or loss of a loved one (Stroebe & Schut, 2001). When faced with strong recurrent emotions, the process of emotion regulation, which operates on the level of a single emotional episode, relates to the process of coping with the underlying change, which operates across many emotional episodes. Coping with major life events takes time and involves relatively permanent changes to knowledge structures such as beliefs, personal goals, and identity. Among the different psychological mechanisms involved in coping may be the cumulative impact of reconstrual as well as repurposing. Intentional changes to construals and goals within a single emotional episode that are effective in changing emotion can lead, through mechanisms such as reinforcement learning, to sustained shifts in the construals and goals that are activated spontaneously, without intentional reappraisal. Therefore, the cumulative effects of the psychological mechanisms identified in the current framework can also help explain longer term coping processes.

Assessment and Intervention

The idea that instances of reappraisal can be characterized as change vectors in appraisal dimensional space could spur the development of reappraisal assessment tools. Relying on existing appraisal research, self-report items can be constructed to assess a suitable selection of appraisal dimensions. These items could then be used to measure the appraisal profile before and after participants engage in various reappraisal tasks, or to ask people to directly rate which appraisal dimensions they changed as they engaged in reappraisal. Once the reliability and validity of these measures are established, this approach could become an important part of a standardized toolkit of reappraisal research. Developing more standardized measures could catalyze research efforts by allowing us to quantitatively integrate findings from different studies and research groups as well as across different situations, emotions, and populations.

Appraisal change vectors may also be useful for identifying reappraisal tactics. An emotion regulation tactic is simply a context-specific implementation of a broader regulation strategy. In terms of our framework, tactics operate on a level of description that lies between the broad distinction between reconstrual and repurposing and the detailed mapping of appraisal change vectors. One way to derive reappraisal tactics would be to use unsupervised statistical learning algorithms to identify clusters among observed appraisal change vectors. This approach relies on the assumption that the appraisal change vectors that people employ are unlikely to be distributed randomly across the appraisal dimensional space owing to the clustering of emotions in that space (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). Alternatively, theory-driven taxonomies of reappraisal tactics could be devised based on the present framework. For instance, it might be useful to distinguish six reappraisal tactics: repurposing for desirability change, reconstrual for desirability change, repurposing for attribution change, reconstrual for attribution change, repurposing for expectancy change, and reconstrual for expectancy change. Each tactic may be further divided into a version operating primarily on external versus internal situations.

Finally, the present framework could aid in the design of intervention programs targeting children as well as adults, and those with mental illnesses as well as those without. Key learning objectives in many interventions include improved emotional awareness and reappraisal skill development. Both objectives may benefit from teaching participants how to analyze and influence their own appraisals using appraisal dimensions. Learning appraisal dimensions can be a useful tool for increasing emotional awareness. Appraisal dimensions may also provide a simple and powerful “checklist” for exploring reappraisal affordances in challenging situations. People might practice going through a list of appraisal dimensions, identifying which ones are open for change, and coming up with alternative construals and goal set modifications. A suitably selected appraisal dimension nomenclature would be concise enough to remember and flexible enough to be applicable in a wide range of situations. This method may help lower the executive function demands of reappraisal. It can also compensate for appraisal biases by making it less likely that people overlook useful reappraisal affordances. Over the long run, such intervention techniques could produce sustained increases in goal set and construal malleability.