Priming Cognitive Flexibility in Reappraisal

Cognitive reappraisal has long been shown to support adaptive emotion regulation, yet direct evidence about how to increase its effectiveness remains limited. We propose that increasing cognitive flexibility prior to the emotional stimulus may enhance reappraisal success. In this study, we tested whether priming participants with bistable images would increase the effectiveness of two reappraisal tactics—reconstrual (changing a situation’s meaning) and repurposing (changing the goals or values through which it is evaluated). In a 2 (prime: bistable vs. control) × 2 (reappraisal: reconstrual vs. repurposing) × 5 (repetition) within-subjects experiment, 193 undergraduates (M_age = 20.79; 75% female) viewed a prime, watched a negative video, rated their affect, generated a written reappraisal using the assigned tactic, and then re-rated their affect on each trial. Change in negative affect was analyzed using linear mixed-effects models with random intercepts for participants, primes, and videos, and maximal random slopes for fixed effects. Bistable images elicited more perceptual shifts than control images but did not improve reappraisal effectiveness overall or differentially benefit reconstrual over repurposing. Across priming conditions, however, reconstrual produced a greater reduction in negative affect than repurposing. These findings suggest that stimulus-irrelevant flexibility cues do not readily transfer to affective flexibility in emotion regulation and highlight a modest advantage of reconstrual over repurposing in reducing negative affect within the present context. Future work should examine whether flexibility cues that are semantically related to the emotional stimulus—or embedded within it—more readily transfer to affective flexibility during reappraisal, and clarify the conditions under which reconstrual yields greater benefits than repurposing.