Cognitive Reappraisal in Laboratory and Everyday Life: Exploring The Role of Loneliness

Loneliness has been linked to difficulties in emotion regulation, yet this association has been examinedprimarily through self-report measures, with limited evidence from neurophysiological and real-lifeassessments. This study investigated the relationship between loneliness and cognitive reappraisal acrossmultiple measures, including event-related potentials and behavioral ratings captured in the laboratory, self-report questionnaires, and the experience sampling method.Twenty-seven lonely and twenty-two non-lonely individuals were presented with neutral and negative pictureswith social or nonsocial content and asked to either passively observe them or reappraise them to decrease theiraffective response during electroencephalography recording. Participants also completed questionnaires and afive-day ecological assessment of everyday emotion regulation strategies.Neurophysiological measures of cognitive reappraisal correlated with behavioral ratings, which in turncorrelated with self-report questionnaires. However, none were associated with the use of reappraisal in dailylife. Loneliness was associated with decreased use of cognitive reappraisal in self-report questionnaires, but noassociation between loneliness and reappraisal was found among behavioral ratings, neurophysiological indices,or ecological reports. Additionally, exploratory analyses indicated loneliness to be associated with greaterreliance on expressive suppression, in both questionnaire and ecological assessments.Overall, these findings indicate that laboratory measures of cognitive reappraisal do not generalize to the actualtendency to apply it in everyday life. Importantly, the association between loneliness and cognitive reappraisalappears limited to subjective self-reports and does not translate into actual capabilities. Thus, interventionsaddressing attributional and interpretive biases may be better suited to mitigate the negative effects of lonelinessthan emotion regulation skills training.