The Benefits of Reframing Our Challenges

In a Psychology Today article titled, “Creative Emotional Re-Interpretation and Insightful Change,” Wilma Koutstaal, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, shares how reframing challenging situations is a cognitively similar process to creative processes such as insight.

Research has found that individuals who are presented with an unpleasant scenario and are most adept and successful at finding different versions of the negative emotion-inducing situation are more likely to demonstrate other forms of creativity. This ability to flexibly generate alternative interpretations of a situation is called “reappraisal inventiveness” and can be an important factor in how we regulate our emotions. Other research has found evidence for creative restructuring using fMRI which recorded positive changes in emotional responses to negative stimuli paired with creative reinterpretations. The reappraisal effect can also be linked to humor as adding humor to a stressful situation can trigger cognitive and emotional reappraisals of the situation.

Composed by Flora Pollack, communications assistant.