The role of trait reappraisal in response to emotional ambiguity: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Individuals exhibit a systematic valence bias – a specific form of interpretation bias – in response to emotional ambiguity. Accumulating evidence suggests most people initially respond to emotional ambiguity negatively and differ only in subsequent responses. We hypothesized that trait-level cognitive reappraisal – an emotion regulation strategy involving the reinterpretation of affective meaning of stimuli – might explain individual differences in valence bias. To answer this question, we conducted a random-effects meta-analysis of fourteen effect sizes from thirteen prior studies (n = 2,086), identified via Google Scholar searches. We excluded studies (1) in languages other than English, (2) from non-peer-reviewed sources, or (3) non-empirical sources. We included studies with (1) the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, (2) a putative measure of valence bias prior to any study-specific manipulations, and (3) adult human participants (i.e., 17+). Supporting our prediction, we found individuals with higher trait reappraisal exhibited a less negative bias (r = -0.18, z = -4.04, p < .001), whereas there was a smaller, opposite effect for trait expressive suppression (r = 0.10, z = 2.14, p = .03). The effects did, however, vary across tasks with stronger effects observed among studies using the scrambled sentences task compared to the valence bias task. Although trait reappraisal accounted for only a small amount of variance, reappraisal may be one mechanism contributing to variability in response to ambiguity.