Regulating Emotion by Imagining the Reverse: Evidence for Reversal Imagery

Description

Abstract

People cope with distress not only by reinterpreting what happened or looking away from it, but also by imagining the scene reversed—becoming the rejecter rather than the rejected, or picturing a lost object safely restored. We term this process reversal imagery (RI): generating a reversed second scene alongside the original distressing one and using the affect it supplies to counter the original emotion. Across one pilot study and five main studies comprising eleven experiments, RI emerged as an effective and distinctive emotion-regulation strategy. Participants spontaneously gravitated toward RI-consistent coping, and when instructed, RI reduced negative affect more than distancing, distraction, and cognitive reappraisal, without requiring greater time or subjective effort. Mechanistically, RI worked not by changing an event’s meaning, but by generating a vivid reversed scene that produced counter-valent affect online; positive-affect gain statistically accounted for much of RI’s regulatory effect, and converging task-switching and individual-differences evidence indicated that RI was anchored more strongly in visual imagery than in semantic reinterpretation. Crucially, RI’s immediate relief was broadly context-general—emerging across interpersonal and event-based scenes and remaining intact under monetary loss—whereas its durability depended on two separable boundary conditions. Relief was more sustained when an interpersonal target allowed a symbolically satisfying reversal, but it was more likely to rebound when the original loss was concrete and unresolved: monetary deductions left in-the-moment relief largely intact yet increased negative affect after regulation stopped. RI thus identifies a scene-generating route to emotion regulation: the mind can reduce distress not only by changing reality’s meaning, but by constructing a reversed alternative that makes the original hurt less emotionally dominant.