ABSTRACT

This chapter summarizes what the authors have learned to date: They begin by reviewing their early research, which was conducted in relatively healthy, unselected samples of individuals. The authors examine the implications of self-distancing for social anxiety in the context of their work on linguistic distancing. In the self-distancing group, participants were taught the visual and linguistic self-distancing strategies as in the previous training study. In the temporal distancing condition, participants were taught a new self-distancing technique the authors have recently shown to predict adaptive emotional processing. In addition, because self-distanced perspective facilitates reconstrual and meaning making, those who process their emotions from this perspective should remain protected against emotional reactivity on subsequent exposures to the same eliciting event. The authors show that the effect of self-distancing on emotional reactivity surrounding anger-related experiences extends to physiological reactivity. More specifically, following an anger-related memory recall, analyzing one’s emotions from a self-distanced perspective led to significantly lower increases in blood pressure.