Social good reappraisal as a novel and effective emotion regulation strategy

Abstract

Society asks individuals, such as front-line medical and emergency personnel or social media moderators, to help others under highly negative emotional circumstances, and those individuals need to regulate their emotions for their own well being. A well-studied form of emotion regulation is reappraisal, the use of cognitive processes used to reinterpret initial emotional responses to negative events. Distancing (pretending that a situation is distant in time or space) is well documented to be an effective form of emotion regulation, but it may not be applicable in social contexts where individuals must engage with distressing events to help others. Here, for the first time, we asked whether a novel reappraisal strategy focused on Social Good–imagining that an aversive event is also an opportunity to prevent harm to others–can be an effective form of reappraisal. In a pre-registered experiment, participants were randomly assigned to Distancing or Social Good conditions as they viewed neutral or highly aversive images and then reported their subjective emotional states with or without reappraisal. Both Distancing and Social Good reappraisals led to significantly less negative affect. Distancing yielded a stronger effect, but importantly, participants reported both Distancing and Social Good as equally easy to employ and both were effective across multiple demographic and personality characteristics, indicating the broad value of both as effective forms of reappraisal. Across both reappraisal conditions, effective reappraisal increased with age and positive affect. These findings indicate that Social Good is an effective reappraisal strategy and raise the possibility that it could be particularly valuable in contexts in which emotionally demanding tasks are completed on behalf of the good for other people.