When does changing emotions harm authenticity? Distinct reappraisal strategies differentially impact subjective and observer-rated authenticity

ABSTRACT

We compared the effect of two commonly-studied reappraisal techniques on authenticity during a lab-based social interaction: emotion-focused reappraisal, which explicitly instructs people to change their emotions, and perspective-based reappraisal, which focuses on changing people’s viewpoint of an event. Study 1 showed that people who used perspective-based reappraisal were more authentic than people who used emotion-focused reappraisal. In Study 2 we replicated this effect, demonstrating that perspective-based (vs. emotion-focused) reappraisal leads to more authenticity and that this effect is statistically mediated by greater emotion regulation awareness in the emotion-focused reappraisal condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that emotion regulation techniques that do not make people aware they are changing their natural emotional response may leave authenticity intact.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticity
• emotion regulation
• reappraisal
• emotion regulation awareness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The distinction that the Gross (1998a) process model of emotion regulation makes between response-focused and antecedent focused strategies is analogous to that made in the occupational literature by Hochschild (1979) differentiating between “surface” and “deep” acting in emotional labor.

2. Although the three-way interaction between time, film valence, and condition was not significant we examined simple slopes to characterize how affect changed in each condition. Descriptively, across emotion regulation trials the largest change in affect occurred in the perspective-based reappraisal condition in trials with negative film clips, F(1,227.35) = 23.95, p < .001, η_p² = .10; and the smallest change was found with perspective-based reappraisal in trials with positive film clips, F(1,227.35) = 2.97, p = .086, η_p² = .01. In control trials there was evidence that affect changed in trials with negative film clips, F(1, 250.32) = 22.29, p < .001, η_p² = .09, but not trials with positive film clips, F(1, 230.39) = .35, p = .55, η_p² = .001, which is consistent with findings that people tend to downregulate negative but not positive emotions.

3. Unlike Study 1, in Study 2 subjective and observer-rated authenticity was not significantly correlated. However, this null funding seemed to be caused by three outliers with high subjective authenticity and low observer-rated authenticity that were found to be exerting high influence. The relationship between subjective and observer-rated authenticity is significant when omitting these cases, r = 21, p = .017.

4. Another feature that emotion regulation techniques may share is the degree that they lead people to decenter, that is, view their thoughts and feelings as transient events. Decentering has been described as a key component of mindfulness (Bishop et al., 2006). Initial trait-level evidence supports that decentering may in part explain why the use of both mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal is associated with lower social anxiety (Hayes-Skelton & Graham, 2013). Mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal have very infrequently been directly compared using experimental approaches (but see Lalot, Delplanque, & Sander, 2014), and so this is a promising open area of inquiry in terms of finding common substrate among emotion regulation strategies.