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Emotion Malleability Beliefs Influence the Spontaneous Regulation of Social Anxiety

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Abstract

The current study examined how manipulating individuals’ beliefs about emotion’s malleability influences the choices they make in how they spontaneously regulate their anxiety during a stressful social situation. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either an experimental manipulation that emotions are malleable or that emotions are fixed then completed an impromptu, brief speech task designed to elicit anxiety. We predicted that participants in the malleable emotion condition, compared to those in the fixed condition, would engage in more cognitive reappraisal to change the unfolding of an emotion earlier in the emotion generative process; we predicted that participants in the fixed emotion condition would engage in more expressive suppression, a late stage regulation strategy. Consistent with these predictions, participants in the malleable condition reported spontaneously engaging in more cognitive reappraisal during the stressful speech task, although this greater use of reappraisal was not significantly associated with a decrease in negative affect. These results suggest that beliefs about emotion malleability can systematically influence subsequent emotion regulatory behavior.

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Notes

  1. Decreased degrees of freedom in these analyses reflect missing data.

  2. The cognitive reappraisal analysis also remained significant when trait level emotion malleability beliefs was not included as a fixed factor, F(1, 84) = 4.06, p = 0.04.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Elizabeth T. Kneeland, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema & John F. Dovidio

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    June Gruber

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  1. Elizabeth T. Kneeland
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  2. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema
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  3. John F. Dovidio
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  4. June Gruber
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Correspondence to Elizabeth T. Kneeland.

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Elizabeth T. Kneeland, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, John F. Dovidio and June Gruber declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study.

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Kneeland, E.T., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Dovidio, J.F. et al. Emotion Malleability Beliefs Influence the Spontaneous Regulation of Social Anxiety. Cogn Ther Res 40, 496–509 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-016-9765-1

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