About this passageSummarised for this collection from the emotion-regulation literature, which distinguishes between changing how you interpret a situation and changing what you show of your response to it. The meta-analysis is the more useful citation of the two, because it pools many studies and reports effect sizes that are real but modest — which is worth knowing before treating any of this as a technique that works on demand.
There are two obvious things to do with a feeling you do not want. You can hold your face still and carry on — suppression. Or you can go back to what you made of the situation and see whether another reading fits — reappraisal.
Measured against each other, these come out differently. Suppression reduces the outward signs and tends to leave the physiological arousal in place, or raise it; people doing it also report feeling less connected to whoever they are with. Reappraisal, done before the response has fully built, is associated with lower distress and no such cost.
The sizes are worth stating plainly. Pooled across many studies, reappraisal comes out with a small-to-moderate advantage. It is not a switch. It is more like a habit that pays a little, often, and mostly when there is time to use it — which is precisely when a person is least likely to remember to.
The finding is about what has been measured, not about what anyone should conclude from it.