Reappraising Reappraisal

What psychological mechanisms enable people to reappraise a situation to change its emotional impact? We propose that reappraisal works by shifting appraisal outcomes—abstract representations of how a situational construal compares to goals—either by changing the construal ( reconstrual ) or by changing the goal set ( repurposing ). Instances of reappraisal can therefore be characterized as change vectors in appraisal dimensional space. Affordances for reappraisal arise from the range of mental models that could explain a situation ( construal malleability ) and the range of goals that the situation could serve ( goal set malleability ). This framework helps to expand our conception of reappraisal, assess and classify different instances of reappraisal, predict their relative effectiveness, understand their brain mechanisms, and relate them to individual differences.