Think again: the role of reappraisal in reducing negative valence bias

ABSTRACT

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 three other forms of emotion regulation (Study 1a-d; n = 120), increased positive evaluations of ambiguous faces. In a sign of robustness, we also found that the effect of reappraisal generalised from ambiguous faces to ambiguous scenes (Study 2; n = 34). Collectively, these findings suggest that reappraisal may play a key role in determining responses to ambiguous stimuli. We discuss these findings in the context of affective flexibility, and suggest that valence bias (i.e. the tendency to evaluate ambiguity more positively or negatively) represents a novel approach to measuring implicit emotion regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambiguity
• individual differences
• emotion regulation
• reappraisal
• valence bias

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability

Unfortunately, we did not receive participant consent to upload individual-level data, but all group-level datasets generated and/or analysed in these studies are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

1 Note that normative data (Lang et al., 2008) indicated that the negative images (M(SD) = 2.40(0.28) were more negative than the ambiguous images (M(SD) = 5.19(1.29), t(34) = 7.38, p < .001), which were more negative than the positive images (M(SD) = 7.93(0.24), t(34) = -7.27, p < .001). However, there was not a significant difference between the arousal of ambiguous images (M(SD) = 4.99(0.88)) from negative (M(SD) = 5.36(0.68), t(34) = -1.26, p = .22) and positive images (M(SD) = 4.96(0.63), t(34) = 0.10, p = .92), which also did not differ from one another (t(22) = 1.47, p = .16).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIMH111640; PI: Neta), by the National Science Foundation (CAREER 1752848; PI: Neta and RAPID 2031101; PI: Neta), by the Estonian Research Agency (PSG525; PI: Uusberg), and by Nebraska Tobacco Settlement Biomedical Research Enhancement Funds.