The Hidden Cost of Control: Reappraisal Promotes Action but Preserves Distress Over Time

Cognitive reappraisal is widely viewed as adaptive. Yet this control-based emotion regulation may carry hidden costs when individuals encounter personally meaningful reminders of past adversity. The present study examined these tradeoffs in a naturally occurring subsample of undergraduates with a history of parental divorce. Within a larger experiment, participants viewed sad film clips, including an unexpected divorce-relevant reminder, completed a movement-based Stroop task, and later reported the extent to which the reminder reactivated negative feelings from their own experience. As predicted, instructed reappraisal conferred short-term functional benefits on the Stroop task. However, at a longer timescale, individuals who reported habitually relying more heavily on reappraisal showed evidence of preserved reminder-evoked distress. In contrast, individuals higher in habitual acceptance showed a more normative pattern, such that those with divorces further in the past reported faint to no distress in response to the reminders. Together, these findings point to a central tradeoff in emotion regulation: reappraisal helps people maintain composure in the moment, yet repeated reliance on it keeps emotional echoes of past adversity alive. The divergent effects of these two emotion regulation strategies—reappraisal and acceptance—are discussed through cybernetic and comparator-based models of emotion regulation, where cognitive appraisal acts as a feedback process involving reference signals, error monitoring, and corrective adjustments while acceptance involves release of control.