Too Much Praise for Reappraisal? Examining Reappraisal's Impact on Threat Mitigation Depending on its Implementation: A Registered Report

Reappraisal, the act of reframing a situation differently, is associated with affective benefits. Preliminary correlational evidence suggests that successfully down-regulating negative affect is associated with lower motivation to engage in political action, although experimental studies could not find such negative impact. We hypothesized that reappraisal may impact threat mitigation behavior differently, depending on its implementation: If individuals implement reappraisal to down-regulate their negative affect in response to a threatening situation, they neutralize the mobilizing effect of negative affect in threat mitigation, resulting in less engagement in threat mitigation behavior. However, if individuals reframe one's barriers to act, they should engage more strongly in such behavior. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an online experiment (N = 693) where participants read about threats to biodiversity before being instructed to reappraise these threats with a focus on either emotions or barriers and then engaged in a consequential biodiversity conservation task. This manipulation did not significantly impact threat mitigation intentions nor actual behavior. However, we found correlational evidence for differential associations: Reappraising one's negative affect more successfully was significantly associated with less engagement in threat mitigation behavior, while reappraising one's barriers more successfully was associated with more engagement in threat mitigation behavior.