Can you change a feeling by changing how you think about it?

Can you change a feeling by changing how you think about it? Researchers call this emotion regulation, which can be defined as the processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating and modifying emotional reactions. It starts early. Infants have difficulties regulating fear, and they often find ways to express it that attract the comfort and attention of caregivers. And inappropriate, extreme or unchecked reactions could impede functioning in society, so people must engage in some form of emotion regulation almost all of the time.

One framework, the process model, says regulation can step in at five points in the life of an emotion: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change and response modulation. The first four occur before an emotional response is fully generated. The last one occurs after.

Two strategies are studied most. Distraction diverts attention away from an emotional stimulus, and it has been shown to reduce the intensity of painful and emotional experiences. People show a relative preference for it over reappraisal when the stimulus is highly negative. Reappraisal changes the meaning of an event to alter its emotional impact, for example by telling yourself that something frightening is just a movie. It has been shown to reduce physiological, subjective and neural emotional responding.

Suppression, hiding the expression, looks different. It reduces facial expressivity, positive feelings and heart rate, but findings are mixed on whether it reduces negative emotion. Compared with suppression, reappraisal can be associated with better interpersonal outcomes and with well-being.

The picture is not settled. Some researchers argue that context matters, so that in some contexts reappraisal may be maladaptive, and lab studies that judge reappraisal by amygdala activity use artificial settings that do not reflect real life.