Cognitive Change

Cognitive changes occurs when we select which of several potential emotional meanings will be attached to a situation.  Then, later this meaning gives rise to subjective feelings, and behavioral and physiological changes.  Cognitive change occurs when we alter our cognitive appraisals and changing these cognitive appraisals changes our emotional experiences.

According to Webb et al. (2012), several types of cognitive change exist:

1. reappraising the emotional stimulus: interpreting the emotional event in a more positive way.
2. reappraisal using perspective-taking: participants interpret the emotional event from a new perspective.  This new perspective could be as a neutral observer or from the viewpoint of another individual.
3. reappraising the emotional response: sometimes called accepting the emotions.  When reappraising the emotional response, people might interpret their feelings and try to accept their emotions instead of judging them (remember we talked how accepting negative emotions might cause happiness!).
4. a combination of the prior 3 cognitive change strategies.

Gross (1998) agrees that reappraisal is a type of cognitive change.  He further identifies other types of cognitive change discussed below.  Take note that many of these cognitive change strategies are derived from Sigmund and Anna Freud’s work on defense mechanisms.

1. Denial occurs when we do not accept the occurrence of the eliciting event. Typically, denial occurs when people do not acknowledge a negative event that has occurred.
2. Intellectualization occurs when we think about the rational, non-emotional parts of the eliciting event. During intellectualization, people are not thinking about or appraising their emotion responses to the eliciting event.
3. Downward social comparison occurs when we compare our situation to someone worse off, causing us to interpret our situation as more positive than before the comparison. Downward social comparison also increases our self-esteem (positive feelings toward the self) and reduces our negative emotions.

Let’s look at a study that compares the effects of several cognitive change regulation strategies.  In one study (Denson et al., 2012) participants first completed baseline emotion measures.  Then, participants recalled a time they felt anger toward another person within the last year and wrote down details of the event.  Then, participants were randomly assigned to engage in spontaneous regulation (control), rumination, reappraisal, or distraction for 20 minutes.  In the control condition, participants were told to write about their thoughts, but were not given and instructions about regulating their emotions.  Below are the instructions each group received (Denson et al., 2012, p. 357-358):

Anger was measured at four different time points (see Figure 9 below).

See Figure 10 for the findings.  Participants who ruminated did not show a change in their anger levels, but those in the other conditions reported their anger decreased from the time they recalled the anger episode to after they engaged in the regulation writing strategy.  Interestingly, people who ruminated and reappraised had more anger emotion words in their writing compared to the other conditions. Participants who ruminated used more negative emotion words than all other conditions, whereas participants who reappraised used more positive emotion words versus other conditions.  Finally, ruminating caused more past tense verbs and rumination more future tense verbs.  This finding shows that when we ruminate, we focus on our past feelings and thoughts, whereas reappraisal causes people to think about the future and how to solve the eliciting event. Taken together, these findings suggest that reappraisal includes thoughts about negative emotions that are later transferred into positive emotions.  It may be that people turn their negative emotions into positive ones when they think about the future, instead of focusing on the past event.  Rumination causes more negative emotions because participants are thinking about the emotions and thoughts of the past event, instead of focusing on ways to overcome the problem in the future.