A meta-analysis of cognitive reappraisal and personal resilience.

Cognitive reappraisal, an adaptive emotion regulation strategy that involves subjectively reinterpreting stressful and adverse experiences in a more positive manner, can enhance personal resilience. Personal resilience is a constellation of attributes that facilitate successful coping and an expeditious return to adaptive functioning after exposure to stress or adversity. This meta-analysis evaluated the association between cognitive reappraisal and personal resilience. A systematic and exhaustive search identified 64 independent samples from 55 studies (N = 29,824) that examined the correlation between cognitive reappraisal and personal resilience. A random-effects model revealed a positive summary effect (r = 0.47, p < .001), indicating that higher cognitive reappraisal was associated with higher personal resilience. Six potential meta-moderators were tested: culture, age, name of the cognitive reappraisal measure, name of the personal resilience measure, study design, and publication period. After two extreme effect size outliers were omitted, tests of publication bias did not reveal any publication bias in this line of research. This quantitative synthesis offers compelling evidence showing that cognitive reappraisal skills operate as a protective strategy against stress and adversity and, therefore, enhance personal resilience. The protective benefits of cognitive reappraisal in relation to personal resilience are relatively robust, as the correlations were statistically significant for all subgroups in the meta-moderation analyses.

Emotion beliefs: conceptual review and compendium.

Laypeople hold richly divergent beliefs about emotion, and these beliefs are consequential. Specific forms of belief that have been investigated include the usefulness, contagiousness, duration, dependence upon intersubjective experience, cognitively mediated properties, malleability, and hindering properties of emotion, just to name a few. Progress in this emerging sub-field of research has been hampered by the lack of a widely accepted definition of emotion belief able to capture all of these dimensions. Correspondingly, there has been a proliferation of different terminologies, constructs, and measures. The present review aims to address these obstacles by defining emotion belief, and subsequently re-considering existing constructs and measures that align with this definition. The latter is presented in the form of a comprehensive compendium of 21 different constructs and associated self-report measures that assess varying components of one's beliefs about emotions in general and/or about their own emotions, and an additional 5 scales that were designed to measure one's beliefs about another's emotions. From the more unified conceptualization of emotion belief presented here, critical areas of future research are highlighted.