You changed my mind: Immediate and enduring impacts of social emotion regulation.

As social creatures, our relationships with other people have tremendous downstream impacts on health and wellbeing. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our social interactions regulate how we think and feel through life’s challenges. Getting help from other people to change how one thinks about emotional events – known as “social reappraisal” – can be more effective in down-regulating negative affect than reappraising on one’s own, but it is unknown whether this regulatory boost from social support persists when people face the same events alone in the future. In a pre-registered study of 120 young adults (N = 60 same-gender dyads, gender split sample) involving in-lab emotion regulation tasks and a follow-up task online approximately 1 day later, we found that participants responded less negatively to aversive images that were socially regulated (i.e., reappraised with the help of a friend) both immediately and over time, as compared to images that had been previously solo regulated (i.e., reappraised on one’s own) or not regulated (i.e., passively viewed). Interestingly, the regulatory boost from social support observed both in the lab and at follow-up was driven by women dyads. This work highlights one important mechanism explaining how support from others can facilitate emotional wellbeing: by changing peoples’ lasting impressions of distressing events, interactions with others can help prepare them to cope with future exposure to those events on their own, underscoring how valuable others’ perspectives can be when navigating ongoing emotional stressors.