You changed my mind: Immediate and enduring impacts of social emotion regulation.

Abstract

As social creatures, our relationships with other people have tremendous downstream impacts on health and well-being. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our social interactions regulate how we think and feel through life's challenges. Getting help from other people to change how one thinks about emotional events-known as "social reappraisal"-can be more effective in downregulating negative affect than reappraising on one's own, but it is unknown whether this regulatory boost from social support persists when people face the same events alone in the future. In a preregistered study of 120 young adults (N = 60 same-gender dyads, gender-split sample) involving in-lab emotion regulation tasks and a follow-up task online approximately 1 day later, we found that participants responded less negatively to aversive images that were socially regulated (i.e., reappraised with the help of a friend) both immediately and over time, as compared to images that had been solo regulated (i.e., reappraised on one's own) or not regulated (i.e., passively viewed). Interestingly, the regulatory boost from social support observed both in the lab and at follow-up was driven by women dyads. This work highlights one important mechanism explaining how support from others can facilitate emotional well-being: By changing peoples' lasting impressions of distressing events, interactions with others can help prepare them to cope with future exposure to those events on their own, underscoring how valuable others' perspectives can be when navigating ongoing emotional stressors.

The Need for a Unified Language Framework in Extrinsic Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Research

“…When looking across disciplines (not only psychology), key terms being used include (but are not limited to), extrinsic emotion regulation Kunst, 2024;Nozaki & Mikolajczak, 2020;Walker et al, 2023), social emotion regulation (Grecucci et al, 2015;Sahi et al, 2023a;2023b ), interpersonal affect regulation (Niven et al, 2009;Parkinson & Totterdell, 1999), interpersonal emotion regulation (Dixon-Gordon et al, 2015;Marroquín, 2011;Niven, 2017;Reeck et al, 2016;Rimé, 2007;Zaki, 2020) extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (Zaki & Williams, 2013), other-oriented emotion regulation (Segal et al, 2024;Yaari & Tamir, 2023), other-based emotion regulation (Petrova & Gross, 2023), and interpersonal co-regulation (Butler & Randall, 2013a;2013b;Saxbe & Repetti, 2010. For a more detailed discussion of extrinsic emotion regulation in the workplace see Troth et al, 2018).…”

Skill but not Effort Drive GPT Overperformance over Humans in Cognitive Reframing of Negative Scenarios

“…Other attempts try to zoom in on more specific aspects to mental health care such as empathy [13][14][15] , and reflection 16 , to isolate their unique contributions and better understand the specific active ingredients of care.One type of specific mental health skill that received primary attention, both in clinical research as well as in the domain of LLM and mental health, is in the ability to reframe negative situations in a way that can contribute to the reduction of negative emotions, a skill often called cognitive reappraisal [17][18][19] . Cognitive reappraisal is one of the most researched emotion regulation strategies and is an effective way to reduce negative emotion in a variety of contexts: clinical 20,21 , interpersonal 22,23 , and intergroup relations [24][25][26] . Reappraisal skills can be learned and improved, and it can be taught with relative ease and success 21,27 .…”