RESUMEN

The beliefs people hold about emotions are implicated in a variety of outcomes including emotion regulation success and overall well-being. However, research on the dimensions of such beliefs is limited, typically addressing broad beliefs about all emotions and focusing only on their controllability. This study investigated emotion usefulness beliefs, specifically, and further parsed dimensions of personal reference (general vs. personal emotions) and valence (positive vs. negative). Study 1 (N = 343), applying a 2 × 2 factorial ANOVA, revealed that participants believed negative emotions in general to be more useful than their own negative emotions, with no such difference emerging for positive emotions. Multiple regression analyses indicated that personal beliefs about emotions better predicted affective distress than general beliefs. Study 2 (N = 531) replicated these findings and employed confirmatory factor analyses to psychometrically assess the distinctiveness of these emotion belief dimensions. Evaluating a two-factor model, four-factor model, and three-factor bifactor model, results showed that both the four-factor and bifactor models fit the data well, whereas the two-factor model did not. These findings suggest that beliefs about emotion in general and beliefs about one's own emotions may not be fundamentally distinct, but rather different dimensions of the same underlying emotion usefulness belief.

RESUMEN

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.

Asunto(s)

Resiliencia Psicológica , Humanos , Cognición/fisiología , Adaptación Psicológica/fisiología , Regulación Emocional/fisiología , Estrés Psicológico/psicología

RESUMEN

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.