“Boiled Water Softens the Potato But Hardens the Egg”: Perceived Utility of Mindfulness and Reappraisal Strategies and Relations to Compliance In Situ

Abstract Objectives Individuals in laboratory settings frequently do not comply with instructed emotion regulation (ER) strategies as stressor intensity increases—sometimes not using ER at all, often switching from reappraisal to strategies like mindfulness. Though some have explored predictors of ER choice, few have done so in situ as individuals regulate responses to self-relevant, ongoing stressors, nor directly asked how individuals perceive the utility of ER strategies after instruction.

Methods: In total, 290 American undergraduates from two large, minority-serving institutions were assigned to regulate their COVID-19 pandemic-related distress using mindfulness or reappraisal. Previously, research found that participants’ compliance was imperfect, especially for reappraisal. In the present study, we qualitatively analyzed participants’ responses to an item asking why they believed their strategy was/was not useful and analyzed whether these themes predicted compliance.

Results: Most participants expressed ambivalence about their strategy. Mindfulness noncompliers were more likely to mention context and individual differences themes as important for the utility of their strategy. Controlling for mindfulness condition and pandemic-related distress, which both positively predicted compliance, mentioning individual differences predicted a 69% decrease in the likelihood of compliance (OR 0.31, 95% CI [0.13, 0.75], p = 0.009).

Conclusions: Though mindfulness had higher compliance when compared to reappraisal, their compliance narratives tended to focus on utility limits: elucidating under which contexts and for whom mindfulness would be further useful. We underscore the importance of research on ER choice in situ, including continued investigation of reasoners’ perceptions of and compliance to their real-life emotion regulatory opportunities. Preregistration The analyses reported here were not preregistered. However, they use previously unanalyzed and unreported data from Mesghina et al. (2021; Study 2), which was pre-registered (osf.io/kq9gp).