Final answer:
Therapy has helped Lauren minimize her anger through the use of cognitive reappraisal, an emotion-focused coping strategy, to change her emotional appraisals of frustrating situations. This allows for a controlled emotional response rather than an automatic reaction of anger.
Step-by-step explanation:
In therapy, Lauren has learned to laugh at another driver's childish behavior rather than become very angry. This indicates that therapy has helped minimize her anger by teaching her to change her emotional appraisals. Lauren has been utilizing an emotion-focused coping strategy, specifically cognitive reappraisal, to reassess the situation and alter her emotional response. Cognitive reappraisal is a form of emotion regulation where an individual changes the way they think about a situation to modify their emotional response to it. Instead of reacting with instant anger, which could be automatic and uncontrolled, Lauren has learned to reinterpret the behavior of other drivers in a more humorous light, thereby reducing her anger and emotional arousal. This strategy aligns with research by Troy, Shallcross, & Mauss (2013), who showed that emotion regulation strategies like cognitive reappraisal can be effective depending on the context.
Emotion-focused coping contrasts with problem-focused coping which aims to address the cause of the stress directly. Emotion-focused coping strategies often involve managing or alleviating the emotional distress associated with the situation. Cognitive reappraisal, a part of emotion-focused coping, functions by altering one's emotional outlook on stressful events, thereby enabling a person to encounter potentially frustrating or anger-inducing situations with a different, less negative, and more controlled emotional response.
An important aspect of emotion regulation is automatic emotion regulation (AER), which refers to the non-deliberate control of emotions, as studied by Mauss and colleagues. However, AER differs from cognitive reappraisal in that it is more about the suppression of the immediate emotional reaction, rather than the conscious effort to reframe the situation mentally. Lauren's response to the driver's behavior suggests a deliberate and conscious strategy of altering her interpretive framework surrounding the event.