This story is from the category Embodiment Date posted:
17/11/2011 If you tell yourself that someone who's being mean is
just having a bad day -- it's not about you -- you may actually
be able to stave off bad feelings, according to a new study
which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological
Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Having someone angry at you isn't pleasant. A strategy commonly
suggested in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is to find
another way to look at the angry person. For example, you might
tell yourself that they've probably just lost their dog or
gotten a cancer diagnosis and are taking it out on you. Stanford
researchers Jens Blechert, Gal Sheppes, Carolina Di Tella, Hants
Williams, and James J. Gross wanted to study the efficiency and
the speed of the process of reappraising emotions. "You can see
this as a kind of race between the emotional information and the
reappraisal information in the brain: emotional processing
proceeds from the back t