In plain language
“Think positively” is one of the most common pieces of psychological advice, and cognitive reappraisal — deliberately reinterpreting a situation to feel better — is often treated as a universally healthy skill. This study asked a contextual question instead: does reappraisal help everyone equally, or does its value depend on whether your basic psychological needs — for connection with others, competence, and autonomy — are already being met in daily life?
The researchers had 186 university students complete daily diaries every night for around 21 days (3,852 days of data in total), reporting how much they used three emotion regulation strategies — cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness, and expressive suppression — along with their daily positive and negative emotions. Participants also completed a measure of how satisfied their needs for connection, competence, and autonomy generally were. Multilevel models then tested whether need satisfaction changed how well each strategy worked.
The clearest result: positive reappraisal worked best for people whose connection needs were not being met. For these socially disconnected people, days with more reappraisal brought substantially more positive emotion and less negative emotion. For people with satisfying relationships, reappraisal offered little or no benefit — though it did no harm. The authors suggest that people who lack supportive “external voices” may compensate by building a supportive internal voice through positive self-talk, and that no emotion regulation strategy is inherently adaptive; effectiveness depends on the person and their life context. For practitioners, teaching reappraisal may be most useful for clients who lack social support, ideally as a stepping stone toward building genuine connection.
Key findings
- On average, days with more cognitive reappraisal and mindfulness brought more positive and less negative affect, while days with more expressive suppression brought more negative and less positive affect.
- Cognitive reappraisal was most effective for people low in connection need satisfaction — for them it significantly reduced negative affect (B = −0.96) and strongly boosted positive affect (B = 2.36); for people whose connection needs were met, reappraisal had no significant effect on negative affect.
- The reappraisal-by-connection interaction was the only moderation effect replicated across both positive and negative affect.
- Reappraisal also boosted positive affect for people low in autonomy satisfaction (B = 2.4) but not significantly for those high in autonomy — consistent with the idea that non-integrative strategies matter most when needs go unmet.
- Mindfulness showed mixed moderation: it was more strongly linked to lower negative affect among people low in competence satisfaction, but among people high (not low) in connection satisfaction, suggesting mindfulness may amplify the benefits of positive connection.
- Reappraisal showed no downsides for anyone — for people with satisfied needs it was simply unnecessary rather than harmful; data and analysis scripts are openly available at OSF.
How to cite
APA
Brockman, R., Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P., & Kashdan, T. B. (2023). Behaving versus thinking positively: When the benefits of cognitive reappraisal are contingent on satisfying basic psychological needs. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 27, 120–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2023.01.005
BibTeX
@article{brockman2023behaving,
title = {Behaving versus thinking positively: When the benefits of cognitive reappraisal are contingent on satisfying basic psychological needs},
author = {Brockman, Robert and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip and Kashdan, Todd B.},
journal = {Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science},
year = {2023},
volume = {27},
pages = {120--125},
doi = {10.1016/j.jcbs.2023.01.005}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.