The generality of effects of emotional experience on emotion-regulation choice.

To understand how emotional experiences affect general strategic preferences, we assessed participants’ preferred strategies of regulating emotional responses to previewed and not-yet-encountered stimuli. For previewed stimuli, participants selected distraction more often than reappraisal for high- (vs. low-) intensity negative-valence visual images (replicating Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011), and the same intensity/choice pattern emerged for previewed auditory sounds. Most notably, participants’ recent emotional experiences also influenced their choices for regulating emotional responses to not-yet-encountered stimuli. Exposure to high- (vs. low-) intensity negative-valence visual images increased selection of distraction (vs. reappraisal) for regulating responses to upcoming (not-yet-encountered) visual images (Experiment 1), and the same intensity/choice pattern emerged whereby stimuli encountered in one modality (visual) impacted choices for regulating responses to stimuli of a different modality (auditory; Experiment 2). These results suggest that emotional experiences directly impact people's strategic inclinations.