With a Little Help From My Friends: Selective Social Potentiation of Emotion Regulation

Decades of research has pointed to emotion regulation (ER) as a critical ingredient for health, well-being, and social functioning. However, the vast majority of this research has examined ER in a social vacuum, despite the fact that in everyday life individuals frequently regulate their emotions with help from other people. The present collection of preregistered studies examined whether social help increases the efficacy of reappraisal, a widely studied ER strategy that involves changing how one thinks about emotional stimuli. In Study 1 (N = 40 friend pairs), we compared the efficacy of reinterpreting the content of negative stimuli alone (solo ER) to listening to a friend reinterpret the stimuli (social ER). We found that social ER was more effective than solo ER, and that the efficacy of these strategies was correlated within individuals. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicated effects from Study 1, and additionally tested alternate explanations for our findings. In Study 2 (N = 40 individuals), we failed to find evidence that social ER was more effective than solo ER due to a difference in the quality of reinterpretations, and in Study 3 (N = 40 friend pairs), we found that social help did not significantly attenuate negative affect in the absence of reappraisal. In sum, we found that social help selectively potentiates the efficacy of reappraisal, and that this effect was not merely the outcome of social buffering. Together, these results provide insight into how social relationships can directly lend a hand in implementing ER strategies.