The role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances

Emotion regulation is essential for psychological well-being. One strategy that is commonly researched is reappraisal. Individual differences regarding the tendency to use reappraisal, as well as its implications for affective experience, were extensively studied. In recent years, interest has emerged in the choice to use reappraisal, based on stimuli properties. Recently, we suggested that reappraisal is related to emotion recognition processes. Emotion recognition (and affective labeling, as an explicit form of emotion recognition) is regarded as a form of emotion regulation, however, the relations between emotion recognition and reappraisal have not been previously investigated. The aim of the current study was to explore the relationship between reappraisal affordances (the opportunities of re-interpretation that are inherent in a stimulus) and emotion recognition.

For this purpose, we used the Categorized Affective Picture Database, a database that provides data regarding the emotional category of each picture, agreement levels for each category, and intensity ratings. Agreement levels were used to assess the certainty regarding the emotion evoked by the pictures.

Findings suggest that reappraisal affordance is predicted by both agreement levels and intensity, in negative pictures alone. In negative pictures, intensity was negatively correlated with the difficulty to reappraise.

These findings strengthen the hypothesis regarding the relationship between emotion recognition and reappraisal, and provide evidence for the role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances.