Re-appraising stressors from a distance: effects of linguistic distancing on cognitive appraisals and emotional responses to interpersonal conflict

Abstract

Reflecting on stressors from a detached perspective–a strategy known as distancing–can facilitate emotional recovery. Researchers have theorised that distancing works by enabling reappraisals of negative events, yet few studies have investigated specifically how distancing impacts stressor appraisals. In this experiment, we investigated how participants’ (N = 355) emotional experience and appraisals of an interpersonal conflict differed depending on whether they wrote event-reflections from a linguistically immersed (first-person) or distanced (second/third-person) perspective. Partly replicating previous findings, distanced reflection predicted increases in positive affect, but not reductio..