The benefits of social reappraisal can linger to facilitate regulation even when we're alone.“This is such a bummer.” Everyone has been there before. It’s part of life to have challenging experiences that get you down. At times like this, you might try to change your mindset, reminding yourself that it won’t last forever or to focus on the bright side. Changing how you think about emotional events in this way can change how you feel about them. But sometimes this is easier said than done.
Imagine you lost a dream opportunity. You may wonder whether you’ll ever get another chance like that again. It can be difficult to break out of your mindset when having negative experiences. Luckily, you don’t always have to go it alone. Getting a good friend’s perspective can help.
This work shows that friends’ perspectives can change how people think and feel about things in the moment, but it’s important to remember that friends aren't always around to help. Do the perspectives they offer “stick,” potentially making it easier to confront similar emotional events in the future when friends aren’t around? To explore this question, we conductedWe used the same reappraisal tasks described earlier, but this time we added a follow-up task one day later.
This allowed us to test whether support from friends lingered to shape how people responded to the images later when they were alone.was lowest in response to images previously reappraised with help from a friend. This was true both in the moment when actively receiving support and the next day when they were alone. When thinking about their experience, participants said: “Some images were not as bad to see again because I heard my friend's voice reinterpreting a lot of them in my head.