New Scale Captures How Flexibly People Reappraise Their Emotions

For decades, cognitive reappraisal has been the star of emotion regulation research. The strategy, which involves reinterpreting the meaning of a stressful situation to change its emotional impact, has been linked to better mood, stronger relationships, and improved mental health. But psychologists have increasingly recognized that reappraisal is not a single, monolithic tool. It is a family of substrategies, and their effectiveness shifts depending on the circumstances a person faces. Now, a pair of Japanese researchers has taken a crucial step toward measuring something that has long eluded the field: not whether people reappraise, but how flexibly they do it. Megumi Oikawa of Tokyo Gakugei University and Ryota Kobayashi of Fukuoka Prefectural University have developed and validated the first scale specifically designed to assess flexibility in reappraisal, publishing their work in the journal Current Psychology.

The theoretical backdrop for the study is a significant shift in how scientists think about adaptive emotion regulation. Earlier research treated strategies such as reappraisal and suppression as broadly good or bad, with reappraisal almost universally cast as the adaptive choice. Meta-analyses, including a widely cited 2012 review by Webb, Miles, and Sheeran, supported the general effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation, and Gross’s influential 2015 framework cemented reappraisal’s reputation. Yet a growing body of evidence complicated this picture. Ford and Troy argued in 2019 that reappraisal carries real costs and can even backfire, while Troy, Shallcross, and Mauss had already shown in 2013 that cognitive reappraisal can either help or hurt depending on the context in which it is deployed. Studies of daily life using ecological momentary assessment, such as a 2022 meta-analysis by Boemo and colleagues, further revealed that the relations between regulation strategies and affect vary considerably from moment to moment.

These findings converge on a single insight: what matters is not merely the use of a strategy, but the ability to match strategies to situations and to adjust them when they are not working. Bonanno and Burton formalized this idea in their 2013 regulatory flexibility framework, which describes a sequence of sensitivity to context, availability of a repertoire of strategies, monitoring of feedback, and modification of behavior. Researchers have since built instruments to capture pieces of this sequence, including the Context Sensitivity Index developed by Bonanno and colleagues in 2020 and the Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression Scale introduced by Burton and Bonanno in 2016. Coping flexibility has also been measured, notably by Cheng in 2001 and through the revised Coping Flexibility Scale examined by Kato in 2020. But no existing instrument zeroed in on flexibility within reappraisal itself, leaving a gap for a strategy that dominates the emotion regulation literature.

Oikawa and Kobayashi set out to close that gap. Drawing on previous emotion regulation models and on their own earlier work, including a 2021 study linking specific reappraisal substrategies to affective outcomes and the development of a multifaceted reappraisal questionnaire, they conceptualized reappraisal flexibility as comprising four distinct components. The first is context sensitivity, the capacity to detect cues in a stressful situation that signal which kind of reappraisal might work. The second is repertoire, the breadth of reappraisal options a person has available. The third is monitoring, the ongoing tracking of whether the chosen reappraisal is actually improving one’s emotional state. The fourth is modification, the willingness and ability to switch to a different reappraisal when the current one falls short. Together, these four facets translate the general regulatory flexibility sequence into the specific domain of cognitive reappraisal.

To build the scale, the researchers conducted two online surveys, each with 300 Japanese adults. In the first study, participants had an average age of 41.54 years with a standard deviation of 8.66, and 47 percent were male. The team generated an initial pool of items targeting the four proposed components and subjected the responses to both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the standard statistical machinery for discovering and testing the underlying structure of a questionnaire. The results were telling. A two-factor solution fit the data poorly, with a root mean square error of approximation of 0.096 and a comparative fit index of 0.884. A three-factor model improved matters, reaching an RMSEA of 0.081 and a CFI of 0.929. But the four-factor model, matching the researchers’ theoretical predictions, fit best of all, with an RMSEA of 0.060 and a CFI of 0.967, values that fall comfortably within conventional thresholds for good model fit.

Beyond establishing the factor structure, Study 1 examined how the new scale relates to existing psychological traits, an essential step in building convergent and discriminant validity. The researchers found that the repertoire subscale correlated with the individual reappraisal substrategies at values ranging from 0.144 to 0.655, all statistically significant. This pattern makes conceptual sense: a person’s breadth of reappraisal options should relate to their use of specific reappraisal tactics, but not so strongly as to be redundant with them. The correlations also support the idea that repertoire is a genuine higher-order capacity, reflecting something broader than any single substrategy. Discriminant validity was assessed using established criteria, ensuring that the four facets, while related, capture distinguishable aspects of flexibility rather than a single undifferentiated tendency.

Study 2 provided an independent test of the scale’s structure and its real-world relevance. The second sample of 300 adults was closely matched to the first, with a mean age of 41.49 years, a standard deviation of 9.53, and 38 percent male participants. Confirmatory factor analysis again supported the four-factor structure, replicating the findings from Study 1 in a fresh sample, a critical requirement for any new psychological instrument. More importantly, the researchers examined associations with mental health measures, including the K6 screening scale for psychological distress, whose Japanese version was validated in the World Mental Health Survey by Furukawa and colleagues, and the WHO-Five Well-Being Index, adapted for Japanese populations by Awata and colleagues. The expected patterns of association with these measures supported the validity of the scale, suggesting that reappraisal flexibility is meaningfully tied to psychological adjustment rather than being an abstract statistical artifact.

Across both studies, all four subscales demonstrated satisfactory reliability, meaning that respondents’ scores were internally consistent and stable enough to be interpreted meaningfully. The research was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants and approval granted by the research ethics committee of Tokyo Gakugei University. The work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP24K06495, and the authors reported no competing interests. Data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the study followed contemporary best-practice guidelines for the development and validation of measurement scales in the psychological sciences, as laid out by Stefana and colleagues in 2025.

The implications of having a validated reappraisal flexibility scale extend well beyond psychometrics. Recent research has hinted that flexibility in reappraisal matters for health outcomes: a 2024 study by Marciniak and colleagues found that positive cognitive reappraisal flexibility is associated with lower levels of perceived stress, and Chen and colleagues reported in Nature Mental Health that emotion regulation flexibility relates to momentary affect across two cultures. Work by Li and colleagues on early psychosis showed that higher emotion regulation flexibility predicts more stable negative emotions and faster affective recovery. With the new scale, researchers can finally dissect which component of reappraisal flexibility drives these benefits. Is it the ability to read a situation accurately, the possession of many interpretive options, the vigilance to notice when a strategy fails, or the courage to switch course? Interventions could then be tailored to strengthen the specific component where an individual is weakest, rather than simply encouraging more reappraisal. For a field that has spent decades celebrating one strategy, the message of this new research is refreshingly nuanced: it is not how often you reframe, but how well you adapt your reframing, that may count.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a scale measuring flexibility in cognitive reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy

Article Title: Development of a reappraisal flexibility scale and examination of its reliability and validity

Article References: Oikawa, M., & Kobayashi, R. (2026). Development of a reappraisal flexibility scale and examination of its reliability and validity. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10044-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10044-5

Keywords: reappraisal flexibility, emotion regulation, psychometrics, scale development, cognitive reappraisal, mental health, regulatory flexibility, factor analysis, psychological assessment, stress, coping, Current Psychology