Cognitive control plays a key role in both adaptive emotion regulation, such as positive reappraisal, and maladaptive emotion regulation, such as rumination, with both strategies playing a major role in resilience and well-being. As a result, cognitive control training targeting working memory functioning (CCT) may have the potential to reduce maladaptive emotion regulation and increase adaptive emotion regulation. The current study explored the effects of CCT on positive reappraisal ability in a lab context, and deployment and efficacy of positive appraisal and rumination in daily life. A sample of undergraduates (n = 83) was allocated to CCT or an active control condition, performing 10 online training sessions over a period of 14 days. Effects on regulation of affective states in daily life were assessed using experience sampling over a seven-day post-training period. Results revealed a positive association between baseline cognitive control and self-reported use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies, whereas maladaptive emotion regulation strategies showed a negative association. CCT showed transfer to working memory functioning on the dual n-back task.Overall, effects of CCT on emotion regulation were limited to reducing deployment of rumination in low positive affective states. However, we did not find beneficial effects on indicators of adaptive emotion regulation. These findings are in line with previous studies targeting maladaptive emotion regulation, but suggest limited use in enhancing adaptive emotion regulation in a healthy sample.Keywords: positive reappraisal, rumination, resilience, cognitive control, training COGNITIVE CONTROL AND EMOTION REGULATION 3 How people respond to stressful events and negative emotions has important consequences for their mental health. For instance, responding with negative and repetitive moody pondering (i.e., brooding, a subtype of rumination; Treynor, Gonzalez, & NolenHoeksema, 2003) to negative affect following a stressful event such as loss of job is known to be an important risk factor for developing mood disorders (D'Avanzato, Joormann, Siemer, & Gotlib, 2013; Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008). In contrast, applying a strategy such as cognitive (re-)appraisal in which the emotion-eliciting value of a stressful situation is reduced through cognitive strategies (Gross, 2002) is known to have beneficial effects on well-being and mental health (Gross & John, 2003; Haga, Kraft, & Corby, 2009; Hu et al., 2014). This process of influencing which emotions one has, when one experiences these emotions, and how these emotions are experienced and expressed is known as emotion regulation (p. 275; Gross, 1998) and plays an important role in maintaining and ameliorating mental health (Gross & Jazaieri, 2014). Given their differential effects on mental health, rumination (among strategies such as catastrophizing, self-blame, etc.) has been conceptualized as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy, whereas cognitive reappraisal (among strategies su...
