Psychology Commons^™

Think Again: The Role Of Reappraisal In Reducing Negative Valence Bias, Maital Neta, Nicholas R. Harp, Tien T. Tong, Claudia J. Clinchard, Catherine C. Brown, James J. Gross, Andero Uusberg

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Stimuli such as surprised faces are ambiguous in that they are associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Interestingly, people differ reliably in whether they evaluate these and other ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative, and we have argued that a positive evaluation relies in part on a biasing of the appraisal processes via reappraisal. To further test this idea, we conducted two studies to evaluate whether increasing the cognitive accessibility of reappraisal through a brief emotion regulation task would lead to an increase in positive evaluations of ambiguity. Supporting this prediction, we demonstrated that cuing reappraisal, but not in …