Effects of the Simultaneous Use of Acceptance and Cognitive Reappraisal on Anger, Positive and Negative Affect after Experimental Anger Elicitation
Effects of the Simultaneous Use of Acceptance and Cognitive Reappraisal on Anger, Positive and Negative Affect after Experimental Anger Elicitation

Summary/Abstract: A significant body of research has focused on the effectiveness of a single primary emotion regulation strategy on subjective experience. However, in everyday life people often use more than one strategy to regulate the aroused emotions. The present study used a mixed-design to explore the effects of two emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and acceptance) and of two co activated emotion regulation strategies (acceptance and reappraisal, and reappraisal and acceptance) on the subjective experience of anger, positive and negative affect after experimental anger elicitation. After participants (N = 99; Xage = 25.41 years; SD = 8.81 years) recalled a recent anger unsolved event, they were instructed to either (1) reappraise the event, (2) accept the emotions elicited by the event, (3) accept the emotions and reappraise the event; (4) reappraise the event and accept their elicited emotions, or (5) to deal with their emotions as usual (control group). The results show that all emotion regulation instructions lead to a lower level of post-instructions anger intensity and negative affect. In terms of positive affect, only the instruction of simultaneous use of acceptance and reappraisal leads to a higher level of post-instructions positive emotions. The results showed no significant differences between cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, simultaneous use of acceptance and cognitive reappraisal, simultaneous use of reappraisal and acceptance, and control group on post-instruction anger level, post-instruction positive affect, post instruction negative affect.

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