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Importance of Cognitive Reappraisal in Psychotherapy and its Applications in Building Resilience

Mehak Vohra
In Psychology, there is high demand for concrete theories which have been thoroughly tested and can be applied in psychotherapy to help individuals function better. The Cognitive Reappraisal Model, hence, holds a lot of significance.Cognitive Reappraisal is a psychological strategy that is useful when the stressful situation at hand cannot be changed. It involves the lessening of the emotional impact of a stressful situation by reframing or reappraising the initial perception of it (Gross and John, 2003). Cognitive Reappraisal helps us target the faulty thought patterns we experience by learning to reevaluate a situation to change our physiological and emotional response to it. The focus of this blog is to prove the usefulness of Cognitive Reappraisal in psychotherapy to help build resilience. 

Resilience, is associated with an individual’s ability to deal with stress, threats, or adversity. Our brain is constantly assessing threats, and sending our body into flight-or-fright responses to those threats. The absence of resilience in our life is visible through increased stress and anxiety from these threats, which in turn affects our physiological and emotional well-being inversely. Resilience is important in helping us cope with stress and high velocity challenging environments, as it enables us to develop protective mechanisms. Surviving and thriving in these environments requires a high degree of adaptability on our part, and the ability to withstand extremely high levels of stress and developing effective coping mechanisms to deal with it. Research in the area of resilience indicates that this ability can be built or developed in individuals. 

Allison S. Troy (2012) conducted a study on Cognitive Reappraisal as a protective factor. The results of this study have important implications on how emotion regulation ability contributes to resilience in the face of stress. The effects of major life changes on individuals with different cognitive reappraisal abilities were studied over a long period of time, inn the form of increase in depressive symptoms shown by the individual. It was seen that individuals with high cognitive reappraisal ability and those with low cognitive reappraisal ability had a significant difference in the increase of depressive symptoms in the face of major life stressors as measured over six months, with the former showing lesser increases in depressive symptoms than the later.(Troy, 2012) Thus, showing an undeniable relation between cognitive reappraisal and better adaptability shown by individuals.
Another study conducted on adolescents and their use of cognitive reappraisal strategies showed that “emotion regulation ability may act as a helpful tool preventing adolescents from irrational risky behaviours, commonly assumed at this developmental stage.”(Mestre et al.,2017) The study approached cognitive appraisal as a protective factor, which allows individuals to be more conscientious with their decisions by not turning to substances and falling into substance dependency and other maladaptive behaviours. Cognitive reappraisal, hence, is an effective coping strategy for individuals to learn to regulate their emotions, emotional responses to situations, and face adversities better. This, in turn, helps the individual build resilience by achieving greater adaptability, which leads to better mental well-being in the long run.
Thus, the use of Cognitive Reappraisal in psychotherapy holds many advantages, the biggest one being greater individual ability to build resilience in the face of adversity. A large part of our society could benefit from utilizing in Cognitive Reappraisals to modify their thought processes to be more positive and adaptive, lowering rates of stress, anxiety and the physiological symptoms which follow. While Cognitive Reappraisal targets our thoughts, the effect of better thought patterns, it also helps us regulate our emotions better and change maladaptive behaviours. Due to the above reasons, Cognitive Reappraisal is used in Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy or REBT to resolve emotional and behavioural problems. It works through irrational thought processes to modify behaviour, by teaching individuals to reevaluate situations. REBT is also identified as one of the most effective forms of therapy. 
In conclusion, emotional regulation is crucial to us as fully-functioning beings and cognitive appraisal forms an adaptive skill which is beneficial in building resilience in individuals and in turn, extremely resourceful for clinical assessments, psychotherapy and intervention based treatments.
References:
Mestre, J. M., Núñez-Lozano, J. M., Gómez-Molinero, R., Zayas, A., & Guil, R. (2017). Emotion Regulation Ability and Resilience in a Sample of Adolescents from a Suburban Area. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01980
Troy, Alllison S. (2012). Cognitive Reappraisal Ability as a Protective Factor Resilience to Stress Across Time And Context. Electronic these and Dissertations, 659. 
Ziegler, D. (2003). A Test Of The ABC Model Underlying Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Psychological Reports, 92(1), 235. doi: 10.266/pr0.92.1.235-240
McRae, K., Gross, J. J., Weber, J., Robertson, E. R., Sokol-Hessner, P., Ray, R. D., … Ochsner, K. N. (2012). The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 7(1), 11–22. doi:10.1093/scan/nsr093
Troy, A., Wilhelm, F., Shallcross, A., & Mauss, I. (2010). Seeing the silver lining: Cognitive reappraisal ability moderates the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms. Emotion, 10(6), 783-795. doi: 10.1037/a0020262

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