Emotion Regulation is Associated with Increases in Linguistic Measures of Both Psychological Distancing and Abstractness

Emerging research shows that distancing one’s language by reducing the use of “I” and present-tense verbs is associated with more successful emotion regulation. However, construal level theory posits that increasing psychological distance should also shift mental representations to be more abstract. Here, we test whether successful emotion regulation is related to linguistic measures of both abstractness and psychological distance in two emotion regulation experiments reported previously (N₁ = 217, N₂ = 464). As hypothesized, we found that (i) linguistic measures of psychological distancing and abstractness were highly correlated, (ii) linguistic abstractness increased when people used cognitive reappraisal strategies to regulate their responses to negative images, (iii) instructing participants to distance their language by not using the word “I” increased linguistic abstractness, and (iv) the extent to which people made their language more abstract while regulating correlated with regulation success. These results extend theoretical arguments that psychological distance and abstract construals are strongly connected in the mind. Furthermore, they provide novel evidence that successful cognitive reappraisal is associated with more abstract representations of stimuli and that this cognitive shift can be achieved merely by shifting one’s language.