Personalizing Reappraisal: Leveraging Prior Beliefs to Enhance Emotion Regulation Outcomes

Enthusiasm for personalized psychological interventions far outstrips our understanding of how to best tailor these interventions to individuals. The first step in bridging this gap is to identify individual characteristics that predict intervention outcomes. Across three studies (N = 444; between 2023 and 2024), we address this issue by examining the role of prior beliefs in reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy common to many types of psychological interventions. In Studies 1 and 2, we instructed participants to reappraise negative stimuli in a way that was consistent with different beliefs. We found that more belief-congruent (versus less belief-congruent) reappraisals were more believable and more effective for regulating emotions. In Study 3, we asked participants to rank sets of standardized reappraisals. We found substantial heterogeneity in which reappraisals were preferred, and this heterogeneity was partially explained by people’s prior beliefs. This work suggests that, in the context of US-based participants, beliefs may be leveraged to systematically personalize reappraisal interventions.