Cognitive reappraisal is among the most effective and well-studied emotion regulation strategies humans have at their disposal. Here, in 250 healthy adults across two preregistered studies, we examined whether reappraisal capacity (the ability to reappraise) and tendency (the propensity to reappraise) differentially relate to perceived stress. We also investigated whether cognitive flexibility, a skill thought to support reappraisal, accounted for associations between reappraisal capacity and tendency, and perceived stress but found no evidence for this hypothesis. Both Studies 1 and 2 robustly showed that reappraisal tendency was associated with perceived stress, whereas a significant relationship between reappraisal capacity and perceived stress was only observed in Study 2. Further, Study 2 suggested that self-reported beliefs about one's emotion regulation capacity and tendency were predictive of wellbeing, whereas no such associations were observed with performance-based assessments of capacity and tendency. These data suggest that self-reported perceptions of reappraisal skills may be more predictive of wellbeing than actual reappraisal ability.

Decades of research has pointed to emotion regulation (ER) as a critical ingredient for health, well-being, and social functioning. However, the vast majority of this research has examined ER in a social vacuum, despite the fact that in everyday life individuals frequently regulate their emotions with help from other people. The present collection of preregistered studies examined whether social help increases the efficacy of reappraisal, a widely studied ER strategy that involves changing how one thinks about emotional stimuli. In Study 1 (N ϭ 40 friend pairs), we compared the efficacy of reinterpreting the content of negative stimuli alone (solo ER) to listening to a friend reinterpret the stimuli (social ER). We found that social ER was more effective than solo ER, and that the efficacy of these strategies was correlated within individuals. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicated effects from Study 1, and additionally tested alternate explanations for our findings. In Study 2 (N ϭ 40 individuals), we failed to find evidence that social ER was more effective than solo ER due to a difference in the quality of reinterpretations, and in Study 3 (N ϭ 40 friend pairs), we found that social help did not significantly attenuate negative affect in the absence of reappraisal. In sum, we found that social help selectively potentiates the efficacy of reappraisal, and that this effect was not merely the outcome of social buffering. Together, these results provide insight into how social relationships can directly lend a hand in implementing ER strategies.

Typologies serve to organize knowledge and advance theory for many scientific disciplines, including more recently in the social and behavioral sciences. To date, however, no typology exists to categorize an individual’s use of emotion regulation strategies. This is surprising given that emotion regulation skills are used daily and that deficits in this area are robustly linked with mental health symptoms. Here we attempted to identify and validate a working typology of emotion regulation across six samples (collectively comprised of 1492 participants from multiple populations) by using a combination of computational techniques, psychometric models, and growth curve modeling. We uncovered evidence for three types of regulators: a type (Lo) that infrequently uses emotion regulation strategies, a type (Hi) that uses them frequently but indiscriminately, and a third type (Mix) that selectively uses some (cognitive reappraisal and situation selection), but not other (expressive suppression), emotion regulation strategies frequently. Results showed that membership in the Hi and Mix types is associated with better mental health, with the Mix type being the most adaptive of the three. These differences were stable over time and across different samples. These results carry important implications for both our basic understanding of emotion regulation behavior and for informing future interventions aimed at improving mental health.

Exposure to early adversity, defined as negative experiences during childhood that deviate from the expected environment (e.g., absence of a primary caregiver) and require significant psychological, social, or neurological adaptation for a typical child (McLaughlin, 2016), significantly increases the risk of psychopathology, including mood and anxiety disorders (McLaughlin et al., 2010). This is true even for individuals for whom adversity exposure ceased in early childhood: for example, previously institutionalized (PI) youth who experienced orphanage care as infants and were adopted as young children remain at elevated risk for internalizing symptoms (Hawk & McCall, 2010;Humphreys et al., 2015;Tottenham, 2012). Despite this fact, many PI youth do not develop psychopathology, underscoring how a combination of risk and resilience factors after exposure to early adversity impact mental health (Bimmel et al., 2003;. Emotion regulation ability is thought to be a potent source of resilience to internalizing disorders (and psychopathology in general) following early adversity (Jenness et al., 2020;Weissman et al., 2019), and variability in emotion regulation strategy use may, therefore, contribute to individual differences in internalizing symptoms present in PI youth. The current study sought to examine the differential use of emotion regulation strategies as factors that confer risk or resilience for internalizing symptomatology (anxiety, depression, somatic complaints, and withdrawal) among PI youth.

Understanding adolescent decision-making is significant for informing basic models of neurodevelopment as well as for the domains of public health and criminal justice. System-based theories posit that adolescent decision-making is guided by activity related to reward and control processes. While successful at explaining behavior, system-based theories have received inconsistent support at the neural level, perhaps because of methodological limitations. Here, we used two complementary approaches to overcome said limitations and rigorously evaluate system-based models. Using decision-level modeling of fMRI data from a risk-taking task in a sample of 20001 decisions across 51 human adolescents (25 females, mean age = 15.00 years), we find support for system-based theories of decision-making. Neural activity in lateral PFC and a multivariate pattern of cognitive control both predicted a reduced likelihood of risk-taking, whereas increased activity in the NAcc predicted a greater likelihood of risk-taking. Interactions between decision-level brain activity and age were not observed. These results garner support for system-based accounts of adolescent decision-making behavior.