Creative ways to well-being

The research project is based on the realization that emotion regulation, in particular a strategy named cognitive reappraisal, involves processes that are known as important constituents of creativity. Cognitive reappraisal refers to a more positive re-interpretation of negative emotional events and is regarded as a particularly effective strategy in coping with adverse events, which helps to maintain and improve psychological health and well-being. Encouraging patients to use cognitive reappraisal more often in their daily lives constitutes the core of modern psychotherapeutic approaches. Yet, effective therapeutic interventions aiming at increasing the patients` use of cognitive reappraisal require that patients are suffciently capable to use this strategy. This may implicate the capability to be creative in an affective context. One aim of the project is to identify brain activation patterns supporting the capability to generate reappraisals of negative events, and to study overlapping as well as specific processes involved in the generation of reappraisals compared to conventional creative idea generation. To this end, neuroimaging methods (electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging) are used to analyze the temporal as well as the spatial dynamics of brain processes implicated in reappraisal ability and conventional creativity in detail. A second aim is to test if improvements in the capability to generate reappraisals through cognitive reappraisal training are mirrored in respective changes in the brain. This helps to determine if certain brain processes are causally linked to reappraisal ability. The thorough scientific foundation of the capability for cognitive reappraisal and its measurement will help to develop tools for matching patients to the most effective treatments and to treatments targeting their individual deficits, thus increasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Moreover, the relevance of the research of this project is tested in people with a specific anxiety. Statistics anxiety is a common problem among students of psychology and related fields, which can be a major burden and can have drastic consequences on students` educational development. By evaluating cognitive reppraisal training in affected individuals the project opens up new perspectives in fields at the intersection of clinical and educational psychology, which have received little attention in psychotherapy research so far.

Cognitive reappraisal is considered a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy in dealing with aversive events, and therefore, has become an integral part of modern psychotherapy. Derived from creativity research, one recent approach to cognitive reappraisal is to investigate an individuals' inventiveness to generate many different cognitive re-interpretations for negative situations (reappraisal inventiveness). In the sense of creative ways to well-being, higher inventiveness in generating cognitive re-interpretations may increase the likelihood of selecting the most appropriate and helpful reappraisal in a specific context, and may thus be linked to greater well-being and mental health. This project shows that both left and right frontal brain regions play a seminal role in reappraisal inventiveness, but likely target different aspects of cognitive reappraisal. While left frontal activation seems to facilitate simpler, short-term reappraisals that focus on emotional distancing, right frontal activation seems to be involved in more complex, positivizing reappraisals that may yield more long-term benefits. These neuronal findings also converge with behavioral project results that next to quantity and diversity of reappraisals, their quality may reveal important relationships with well-being. Accordingly, it is not only the ability to generate many different reappraisals, but also the ability to generate high quality reappraisals that matters. As another crucial finding of this project, it was established that the ability to generate inventive reappraisals for negative emotional events can be trained. Significant improvements in the generation of inventive, positive reappraisals were shown after only a few short training sessions. This training success was accompanied by a change in frontal brain activation indicative of a more adaptive cognitive reappraisal process. These effects were particularly prominent in individuals with a less adaptive brain activation pattern prior to the training session(s). These results corroborate the idea that specific exercises on reappraisal inventiveness may have a significant positive impact on cognition and behavior in daily life, and due to their brevity and low effort, may constitute a worthwhile addition to classic psychotherapeutic measures.