Step Back to Move Forward? An Examination of Self-Distancing and Negative Interpersonal Experiences

Self-distancing has been consistently found to regulate emotional reactions and attenuate the strength of automatic behavioral responses to many negative interpersonal experiences. Because self-distancing is an easily deployable emotion regulation strategy it holds great promise as a large-scale intervention to assist individuals in coping with the distress that is an inevitable part of interpersonal relationships. Despite its promise, however, there remain many unknowns regarding self-distancing. The aim of the present research was to examine these unknowns. Results of the present research suggest that individual difference and contextual factors are not associated with the use of self-distancing, that self-distancing does not help buffer associations between negative relationship schemas (attachment anxiety and rejection sensitivity) and chronic indices of adjustment, and that individual differences (attachment avoidance and public self-consciousness) do not moderate its effectiveness. In addition, results suggest that self-distancing does not broaden individual’s thought-action repertoires in response to a negative interpersonal experience and that it is not associated with linguistic psychological distancing. These questions were examined on a sample of 293 Duke Undergraduate students, through a mixture of self-report measures and random assignment to experimental condition, either self-distanced or its conceptual opposite, self-immersed.