Emotion, Vol 24(4), Jun 2024, 935-946; doi:10.1037/emo0001316
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 14 effect sizes from 13 prior studies (n = 2,086), identified via Google Scholar searches. We excluded studies (a) in languages other than English, (b) from non-peer-reviewed sources, or (c) nonempirical sources. We included studies with (a) the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, (b) a putative measure of valence bias prior to any study-specific manipulations, and (c) adult human participants (i.e., 17+). Supporting our prediction, we found individuals with higher trait reappraisal exhibited a less negative bias (r = −.18, z = −4.04, p r = .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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)