One of the most mature and “rational” ways of regulating one’s emotion is that of cognitive reappraisal. This is an effort to rethink one’s emotion by changing the meaning of the situation by conceiving of new information or interpretations of that situation. This is clearly a rational or rationalizing way of controlling the emotion one experiences, and therefore it seems to be a good one by the standards of those who admire reason. Of course, I agree that to seek to understand something in more depth or with more perspective is a good thing, especially if it can change emotions in a positive way. But as we look further into reappraisal, we will understand that this rational way of regulating emotions deserves a more nuanced way of using it.
It is easy to think of think of cognitive reappraisal as an unmistakably instrumental method of controlling emotions. If I have an uncomfortable emotion, such as anger or frustration with someone that I am close to, it is often very helpful to reconsider what assumptions I am making that are leading to this emotion. Although I may learn something and resolve the emotion, this strategy may actually not always adaptive. What if I were justified in my frustration, and there is an action I could take that would benefit it? Just like the other strategies for emotion regulation, cognitive reappraisal is not a panacea to be applied for all emotion, it requires a delicate balance.
Taking a closer look into the mechanism in which cognitive reappraisal works can help us to understand that the person and the situation is very important in determining how cognitive reappraisal is adaptive and how it rejects some important elements of an emotion, making it maladaptive.
Flexible Information Can Change Emotion
The first premise of cognitive reappraisal is that changing one’s perception or the information available can change the emotion. Emotion is not, as some may experience it, an objective or causal occurrence—an event alone does not cause the emotion. We require a framework in order to interpret a situation so that we may experience the emotion.
When you find out that someone harmed you out of neglect or on purpose, rather than by some random accident, you may become angry not because something happened, but because you reconceptualized your situation. This is a retrospective change in perception, but we can also change how we see things in the future via abstracting the instances where you’ve applied this rule. From then on you may assume that any harm done to you by another is preventable and you must express your frustration to prevent it. This then creates a habit of emotion regulation that upregulated one’s anger towards others.
Perhaps you wanted to down-regulate this habit of anger because it is causing problems in your life. The anger has become so overwhelming that you need to let it go. You may decide that you were wrong to feel the anger because you now take up a philosophy that people are all acting with good intentions and trying their best. This new interpretation may prevent that uncomfortable feeling of anger before or after it arises. However, all these are interpretations that you can see are potentially good or bad depending on the situation.
The meanings of things and situations are also not stable or innate. They, in turn, are dependent on the goals that we pursue. Even something that tastes good is only pleasurable if your goal at the moment is pleasure and not health. Very easily, one’s striving for health can overcome a hedonic desire for food if one has set their intention fully on their health. How we build the world and our system of meanings and understanding is built upon our goals and objectives. One can change his or her goal and, by doing so, change the emotion and perception of the emotion.
Therefore, by learning or thinking about what one wants or reframing the situation, you can diminish or grow that emotion.
Changing Information for Emotional Regulation
What emotion regulation brings to the table is the idea that another goal beside the one implicit in the emotion can come and influence the emotion. The goal is often to do with the self, and how one wishes to be seen or how one enacts their role in a group. This is a goal that is implicit in how we are perceived by others. That goal is responsible for reshaping the emotions that we feel.
When we want to downregulate an emotion, it is either uncomfortable hedonically or it negatively effects our self-goals. When we want to upregulate an emotion, it is either pleasurable hedonically or positively effects our self-goals. If we want to feel good, we can ask of any situation how we can reframe it in order to feel pleasure or remove pain. But we can easily discover how this is not always a very good idea.
The motivation for emotion regulation is not come from an unbiased, rational place. This regulation style is not the origin of that, but we can come closer to where that might be as we look into this method. So it is not that we necessarily see the emotion in a more accurate light, we may be seeing it according to how we want to see it according to our comfort level or our self-goals, which may not lead to an adaptive emotion regulation strategy.
However, it would be a shame to approach this strategy with too much caution. This is such an adaptive strategy when it is done right, as learning more about a situation can help us feel and act more accurately towards it. How do we sort out when we are accurately reappraising or when we are rationalizing emotions?
Depth of Reappraisal and Perception of Control
One major variable in how cognitive reappraisal can be adaptive or maladaptive is the controllability of the emotional situation. If the situation is controllable, then to reframe the situation to diminish the emotion will cause a person to not act on a situation they are capable of making better. And if the situation is uncontrollable, there is no point in acting and one must change the only thing one can: oneself and one’s attitude. For it can actually be maladaptive to attempt to act on something that is out of one’s control.
Emotion implies the ability to control it and act on it, but that can either be deceptive, or true. One ought to think of emotions as telling them something that they can control. Make the assumption that when you are emotional, your body is telling you that you need to act on something and you can make it better. If you cannot find out what that is, perhaps you need to change yourself. For this, contemplation on your situation is surely necessary because your actions will have echoing consequences whether build on habit or by the rationalizing and abstracting rules for emotion regulation.
But this can be taken further. What if in each emotion is an element that is controllable and an uncontrollable element that ought to be down-regulated. In a situation where you are frustrated at a loved one. You may not have the right to lash out at them for that action will not improve the frustration except for momentarily. With cognitive reappraisal, you must seek out what is controllable and change that. It might be something like expressing your frustration in words to your loved one and having a conversation. In this case, you set up your goal to improve your situation in the long term by down regulating the anger and upregulating the urgency for conversation, both elements were implicit in the emotion and therefore to diminish the entire emotion is to diminish its element of desiring repair.
