Emotional reappraisal

Emotional reappraisal (often called cognitive reappraisal) involves reassessing your initial emotional interpretation of a situation. This could involve reassessing your own emotional responses to a situation or reassessing your interpretation of the emotional states of other people (see also VITAE) .

Appraisal theory of emotions proposes that our emotional responses to a situation represent a process of assessing the perceived characteristics of that situation in relation to our desire to satisfy our concerns (needs, attachments, values, current goals and beliefs).

Our appraisal of a situation (and our emotional response to it) will  depend on a number of factors or dimensions (scales).

• Goal relevance — To what extent do you perceive it as being related to something you want or value? (Irrelevant to essential)

• Goal congruence — To what extent do you perceive it as furthering or obstructing you in obtaining or retaining your concerns? (Helping to hindering)

• Certainty — How confident are you about what's going on and what is likely to happen? (Unambiguous to totally ambiguous)

• Accountability — How do you perceive responsibility for the situation to be distributed between you and others? (My responsibility to their responsibility)

• Control — To what extent do you believe you have power to change things? (Powerful to powerless)

Reappraisal involves shifting our evaluation of these dimension to a different part of the scale (answering the questions differently). As a result, we may generate a different emotional response to the situation.

The reAppraisal framework

Reappraisal can operate in two directions:

• Reconstrual involves changing our interpretation of the situation — looking for alternative explanations of what happened (descriptive function)

• Repurposing involves changing how we think about our goals — looking for alternative evaluations and predictions of the consequences of what happened (directive function)

In these two directions, there are two operations that facilitate reappraisal (whilst they often go together they can work independently):

• Decommitment involves letting go of an existing construal or goal (reframing the past/present)

• Commitment involves giving room to an alternative construal or goal (reprioritising the future)

Reappraisal can operate on different types of representations (meaning schemas):

• Object-level representations (world-view schemas) are models of how the world works and external events (or models of other people's behaviours)

• Meta-level representations (self-view schemas) are models of ourselves and our internal states and processes

This gives eight possible techniques for reappraisal of a situation (or of a person)

• Object-level decommitment reconstrual — Are things really that bad? (Did I misread their feelings/reactions?)

• Object-level commitment reconstrual — Are there ways that I can fix this? (Could I take a different approach with them?)

• Meta-level decommitment reconstrual — Is feeling this way really that bad? (Is it helpful for me to feel this way about them?)

• Meta-level commitment reconstrual — Can I change how I feel about it? (Could I try to think about them differently?)

• Object-level decommitment repurposing — Did I really want this anyway? (How important is my relationship with them?)

• Object-level commitment repurposing — How could I learn from this experience? (What have I learnt about this person that can inform my future relationship with them?)

• Meta-level decommitment repurposing — Is it realistic to think I can be happy all the time? (Is it helpful to expect so much from them?)

• Meta-level commitment repurposing — What does this tell me about what I really care about? (Can I change my expectations about this person?)