This time it’s personal: reappraisal after acquired brain injury

ABSTRACT

Reappraisal is a widely investigated emotion regulation strategy, often impaired in those with acquired brain injury (ABI). Little is known, however, about the tools to measure this capacity in patients, who may find traditional reappraisal tasks difficult. Fifty-five participants with ABI, and thirty-five healthy controls (HCs), completed reappraisal tasks with personal and impersonal emotion elicitation components, questionnaires measuring reappraisal (the ERQ-CA), and neuropsychological assessment. The main findings demonstrated that both groups produced more reappraisals, and rated their reappraisal ideas as more effective for personal stimuli. The ABI group were significantly faster to generate reappraisals for personal, compared to impersonal, stimuli. Yet, participants with ABI performed worse than HCs on the majority of reappraisal components, across both reappraisal tasks. Results of regression analyses revealed significant relationships between certain measures of cognitive control and certain reappraisal components, which varied for the personal and impersonal reappraisal task. Notably, while inhibition predicted aspects of reappraisal in both the ABI and HC group, working memory was only related to reappraisal in participants with ABI. The study suggests that personal context plays a key role in reappraisal, and proposes a model to better understand the role of cognitive control across the reappraisal process.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• reappraisal
• cognitive control
• brain injury
• neurorehabilitation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants for contributing to this work, and the research assistants involved in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 51 of these participants (57%) were included in Rowlands et al. (2019), however this previous study investigated reappraisal in ABI across discrete emotions, and thus included different, non-overlapping research questions.

2 A series of partial Pearson correlations were carried (with initial emotional intensity as a covariate) to investigate the relationships between reappraisal effectiveness, and productivity and difficulty. The only correlations of note were between reappraisal effectiveness and productivity on the personal task for the ABI group (r = .47, p <.001), and the healthy control group (r = .33, p = .055), suggesting that a greater number of reappraisals is associated with greater change in emotional intensity for stimuli with personal relevance.

3 We acknowledge that the Digits Backwards dimension of the Digit Span (WAIS IV) is a true proxy of working memory. However, as previously mentioned, scaled scores (which correct for age effects) cannot be calculated from this dimension alone. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that with a re-analysis with the Digits Backwards dimension as a cognitive predictor variable, these effects were lost (Impersonal task: reappraisal productivity β = 0.28, p = 141); Personal task: reappraisal difficulty (β = −0.18, p = .166).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by EU Social Fund, project code (BUK2109).