Newer is not always better: A person-centered approach to reappraisals reveals a non-linear relationship between originality and effectiveness

The well-established efficacy of reappraisal as an emotion regulation (ER) strategy derives from reinterpreting negative situations. Research suggests that this reinterpretation process shares neuropsychological operations with standard tasks of creativity, a domain fittingly concerned with novelty and effectiveness. How individuals generate reappraisals and judge them for these features is critical, as it can provide insight into clinically-relevant judgment processes and also inform subsequent ER stages like implementation. However, prior work on reappraisal generation and judgments has several gaps by focusing primarily on healthy adults, assuming a linear correspondence whereby reappraisals perceived to be the most effective are those that are most original (clashing with trade-off theories in creativity psychology), and ignoring within-person variability in methodological and statistical procedures. We conducted two pre-registered studies addressing these gaps using a within-person modeling approach. In Study 1, 164 participants generated 5,036 reappraisals to negative scenarios and rated their reappraisals on originality and anticipated effectiveness. In Study 2, 200 new participants rated a subset of the Study 1 reappraisals. Across both studies, the relationship between within-centered ratings of originality and effectiveness was better fit by a negative quadratic curve than a linear one, and individuals with the fewest depressive symptoms demonstrated the sharpest drop-offs in effectiveness at high originality. These studies suggest that idiosyncratically-tuned judgments of reappraisal features conform to a common psychological structure displayed across participants and samples, even when reappraisals are not self-generated. However, depression’s modulating effect points to aberrant regulatory processes at a meta-cognitive level that interferes on expectation judgments.