Examining the effectiveness of positive reappraisal in the context of discrimination.

Abstract

Positive reappraisal has been shown to be a generally effective emotion regulation strategy associated with multiple indices of greater psychological functioning. There are, however, some emotion-eliciting events, such as discrimination, that may not lend themselves to favorable alternative interpretations or which have relatively fewer affordances. In such instances, a reappraisal strategy could lose its effectiveness. We conducted an experimental test of this hypothesized ineffectiveness of positive reappraisal within a discriminatory context. Participants were 404 Black and Latine college students randomly assigned to imagine being the recipient of a rude or discriminatory comment and immediately afterward were asked to either ruminate about or positively reappraise the event. Overall, positive reappraisal was more effective than rumination in downregulating anxiety and anger. However, a single-df contrast test revealed that positive reappraisal in response to the rude comment was significantly more effective in reducing anxiety relative to the other three conditions (average of positive reappraisal of the discriminatory comment or rumination to either the rude or discriminatory comment). Additional analyses also showed that oppressed minority ideology (OMI) moderated the utility of anger regulation such that, for those lower on OMI, positive reappraisal was most effective in regulating anger in response to discrimination (compared to all other conditions), but among those higher on OMI, rumination and reappraisal to discrimination were equally effective. Results suggest that the effectiveness of positive reappraisal is lessened in a discrimination context and that more robust strategies may be needed to deal with the emotional fallout from this unique stressor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).