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Cognitive Reappraisal
Cognitive reappraisal is a strategy for everyday living in which a person deliberately aims to modify their emotional response to experience by changing their thoughts. It involves evaluating an emotionally charged situation from a different perspective than what comes automatically to mind. Cognitive reappraisal is used to counter habitual—and often negative—interpretations of events that can lead to getting stuck in emotional turmoil or interfere with goal pursuits. Cognitive reappraisal reflects a core fact of psychological life—individuals can play a significant role in shaping their own emotional experience.
Cognitive reappraisal—generating a positive, even absurdly incongruous, reinterpretation of a negative event— often underlies benign humor. And in fact, researchers find that the use of benign humor—pointing out the bright side of adversities—is good at both down-regulating negative emotion and amplifying positive emotion. People may differ in their fluency in generating different appraisals of a situation, but it is a skill that can be deliberately cultivated, at first likely requiring considerable cognitive effort but, with practice, becoming more automatic.
Cognitive reappraisal is free, available at any time, and useful in many daily life situations that provoke an intense emotional reaction. However, researchers find that people use the strategy far less frequently than needed.
Life doesn’t always go the way we want. Experts identify several questions you can ask yourself to stimulate a positive reappraisal for negative situations.
• Are you engaging in some form of cognitive distortion, such as catastrophizing?
• What is the evidence supporting your automatic appraisal of the situation?
• Are any positive outcomes possible from the situation?
• Are you grateful for any aspect of the situation?
• In what ways are you better off than before the situation occurred?
• What did you learn from the experience?
Say you learn that a neighbor you loved while growing up has suddenly died. There are many possible responses. You could fully unleash your grief. Or you could distract yourself with work. Or you could choose to suppress your grief. Or you could acknowledge the loss but not get stuck in rumination or sadness about it by reframing the situation—by focusing on the wonderful life the person lived, the good they did in the world, and the many ways you benefitted from knowing the person.
Cognitive reappraisal calls on three basic psychological skills—perspective-taking, challenging interpretations, and reframing the meaning of situations. Perspective-taking involves looking at difficulties or other situations from various points of view, including another person’s. It doesn’t just underlie empathy; it opens the door to expanding a person’s vision of reality and to problem-solving by expanding options.
Challenging interpretations is a way of recognizing the thought distortions—such as catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking—that usually underlie problematic automatic responses to experience. Simple questions—such as, what is the evidence for this belief?—are helpful, plus they have wide applicability, not just leading to relief of psychological problems but providing an analytic skill applicable in all domains of experience. Reframing entails looking at an experience from another possible angle.
First and foremost, cognitive reappraisal actively modifies emotional responses to upsetting experiences to provide relief. As a strategy useful for emotional regulation, cognitive reappraisal has a double-barreled effect: It both lowers negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety and increases positive emotions associated with well-being. And because it alters activity patterns in emotion-processing circuits in the brain, over time it dampens excessive activation of brain centers such as the amygdala, which sends out emotional alarm signals in response to incoming information.
Strong emotions limit thinking processes essential for analyzing problems and generating possible solutions. Cognitive reappraisal restores access to rational thinking. For example, in a set of studies of students with intense math anxiety, those who were exposed to a reappraisal strategy during a math test performed more accurately and had less anxiety than fellow worriers who used their natural strategies to get through the same math problems. Brain imaging studies showed that among the students exposed to cognitive reappraisal, there was increased activity in brain regions linked to arithmetic performance.
Cognitive reappraisal reduces negative emotions not by avoiding them or suppressing them but by deliberately bringing to mind and refocusing attention on aspects of a situation that stimulate positive emotions. In addition, by lowering emotional arousal, cognitive reappraisal restores access to rational thinking, which opens the door to problem solving difficulties and forward movement toward one’s goals, both sources of satisfaction.
Cognitive reappraisal generally involves shifting attention to interpretations of experiences that generate positive emotions and open a path to problem-solving. Feeling better and doing better are pillars of well-being. Cognitive reappraisal is a process that can be applied across many types of situations. Becoming adept at cognitive reappraisal equips people to handle stress, see difficulties more as challenges than stumbling blocks, and maintain a balanced outlook. Studies show that people who engage in cognitive reappraisal experience greater satisfaction and higher levels of psychological well-being.
Resilience is the ability to withstand and even thrive in the face of life’s difficulties. Cognitive reappraisal gives people a skill for shaping responses to experience. It’s a mental resource available to draw on to release the stranglehold of intense negative emotions generated by unpleasant situations. It adds a perspective that not only relieves emotional negativity but enables people to think in ways that lead to adaptive solutions to life’s challenges.
The strategy involves reinterpreting (also called reframing or restructuring) an emotionally unpleasant situation in a way that shifts its meaning and reduces its emotional impact. Cognitive reappraisal is one of the core strategies of psychological resilience taught in cognitive behavioral therapy, and it has proven benefits for individuals, including enhanced problem-solving, reduced emotional volatility, and better interpersonal functioning.
Thinking differently about situations not only leads to feeling differently about them, but the act of doing so changes neural processes, some of which can be detected on brain scans. Exerting cognitive control of emotional response shows up in brain imaging studies as lowered arousal in brain centers such as the amygdala, which sparks emotional reactivity in response to incoming information.
At the same time, there is increased activation of areas of the prefrontal cortex linked to executive control and rational thinking. In short, imaging studies show that cognitive reappraisal restores more functional emotional processing in brain circuits that modulate emotions.
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