News Release
September 30, 2002
For Immediate Release
Contact: Brian Weaver
(202) 783.2077 ext. 3022
bweaver@psychologicalscience.org
Attentional Focus Can Cool the Anger of Rejection
"Um, not interested."
"I don't think I could lend you the money."
"You didn't get it."
"DENIED."
The sting of rejection from personal relationships or on the job, evokes "hot" reactions such as anger, hostility, and even dejection. Research shows that the by adopting a "cooling" strategy, we can regulate our "hot" impulsive reactions such as anger and hostility. When faced with a negative event, adopting a psychologically distant perspective on one's emotions (e.g., "watching" yourself and your emotional experience as if you were an observer), focusing on aspects of the event that do not elicit negative arousal (e.g., thinking of the physical setting in which the event took place instead of your emotions) or engaging in a completely unrelated, distracting activity can all be used to cool negative arousal and hot impulses.
Results of research appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, show a decrease in hostile feelings when study participants adopted a psychologically distant, "cool'" perspective by focusing on the physical setting of the rejection rather than the physiological and emotions reactions that the event elicited in them. The researchers next want to explore whether "cooling" strategies can be taught to "empower" individuals in situations that activate fear and anger.
The article "Attentional Mechanisms Linking Rejection to Hostile Reactivity: The Role of 'Hot' Versus 'Cool' Focus," was written by Ozlem Ayduk, Walter Mischel, and Geraldine Downey of Columbia University.
"Hot" emotional reactions are unmediated, reflexive fight-or-flight responses to a threatening stimulus or situation. A "cooling" strategy minimizes the automatic "hot" response by shifting attention away from arousing aspects of the situation. We are better able to handle a threatening situation by flexible and strategic attention deployment on features that attenuate negative arousal, as study participants were able to do by focusing on features of the physical context in which a rejection experience had happened.
The study involved 273 Columbia University undergraduate students who participated individually in two waves of data collection, one year apart. The experiment was framed as a study on imagery and verbal processing. Participants were asked to recall an experience from their own past that made them feel intensely rejected and were then given either hot-focus, or cool-focus instructions, or no instructions. Then they completed measures that assessed automatic, implicit activation of anger as well as subjective, and explicit experiences of anger.
A complete copy of this article and other reports from the journal Psychological Science, is available at www.psychologicalscience.org/media. For more information, contact Ayduk at ayduk@socrates.berkeley.edu or Mischel at wm@psych.columbia.edu.
Psychological Science was ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact on the field by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society's mission focuses on the advancement of research and science-based psychology in the public's interest.