What the 2025 Workplace Reappraisal Trial Shows

What the trial actually asked workers to do

“Brief” describes each reappraisal activity, not the full intervention. In “Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach,” employees received prompts twice a day, morning and afternoon, across three workweeks. The protocol therefore tested repeated practice embedded in workdays. It cannot answer whether one short workshop or a single prompt changes later job behavior. The researchers recruited adults in the United States who worked at least 30 hours a week on weekday day shifts. Of 183 people who completed the initial survey, 176 met the minimum response rule and were retained: 88 in the intervention group and 88 in the control group. The article describes a randomized controlled trial, with group assignment at the person level. That random assignment supports comparing the assigned intervention package with the assigned control routine for this eligible sample; it does not make every later association in the study causal. Each workday included three surveys. During the morning and afternoon surveys, participants first described an emotional situation or state from the past few hours and reported their current positive and negative affect. They then completed an assigned activity and rated affect again. A third, later survey asked about that day’s work outcomes. The repeated timing let the researchers examine changes close to the moments when activities occurred, rather than asking workers to reconstruct the entire three weeks at the end. Participants were asked to recall experiences from recent hours, so the source of an emotion was not necessarily a workplace event. The two reappraisal prompts asked for different mental moves. Situation reappraisal directed participants to identify positive or pleasant aspects or possible outcomes of the situation they had described. Emotion reappraisal asked them to accept negative feelings without judging them. In the control condition, participants recalled a typical recent work experience. This was an active comparison: people still completed a task, rather than simply receiving no prompt. Within the intervention group, the situation prompt was assigned on 60 percent of occasions, the emotion prompt on 30 percent, and the control activity on 10 percent. The separate control group received the recall activity on every occasion. The study calls this an ecological momentary intervention: support delivered in a person’s usual setting and near the time of a relevant experience. Here, “ecological” refers to the ordinary work environment, and “momentary” to repeated, time-linked prompts and reports. The intervention was not continuous monitoring or a general course in emotional intelligence. Participants received specific instructions at set points and reported how they felt around each activity. The design gives the result practical texture, but also sets its boundary. It tests a scheduled prompt package used repeatedly during the workday, against repeated neutral recall, with outcomes reported daily and checked again one month later. The schedule and random assignment define what the trial can establish; “brief” alone leaves out the dose that was actually studied.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach

What changed first: reported affect

In the 2025 trial, the clearest direct difference appeared in workers’ reported affect after the reappraisal activities: compared with the control group, those assigned to the intervention reported lower negative affect and higher positive affect. Affect here means a broad, momentary emotional state. The study measured these broad positive and negative states rather than asking whether one particular emotion, such as anger or worry, had changed. That makes the finding about the emotional tone workers reported around a prompt, not evidence that one named feeling disappeared. The trial by Zhu and colleagues used a randomized controlled design with 176 employees: 88 assigned to the intervention group and 88 to a control group. On workdays across three weeks, participants completed activities twice daily and reported affect around those activities. The researchers compared post-activity affect while accounting for each person’s pre-activity affect. In the study’s multilevel analysis, the intervention group had lower negative affect and higher positive affect than the control group. Random assignment makes this group contrast the study’s strongest basis for saying the intervention package changed reported affect. The many repeated responses describe changes within participants over time; they do not turn the 176 people into thousands of independent participants. Timing matters. These were proximal outcomes: feelings reported close to the activity, rather than a lasting emotional disposition measured once. In an ecological momentary intervention, support is delivered in a person’s ordinary setting near the experience it is intended to affect. Here, repeated prompts made it possible to compare affect before and after activities during workdays. The report could also reflect events from recent hours, including events beyond the workplace that influenced someone’s state when answering. A lower negative-affect report after a prompt therefore indicates a difference in the reported state at that time; it does not identify the source of every feeling or show that the underlying event changed. The distinction between a state and a trait is important for anyone reading this as an EQ result. A state is temporary and tied to a particular moment or period. A trait describes a more enduring tendency across situations. The trial assessed neither a stable emotional-intelligence trait nor a person’s general ability to understand or manage emotion. Its positive- and negative-affect measures cannot be translated into an EQ score, and the study did not test whether an EQ assessment identifies who will respond to reappraisal. It tested the assigned activities’ effect on reported affect in this study’s workday protocol. The result is useful at that scale. A pause to reconsider an event may shift what someone reports feeling in context, which gives a plausible point for reflection before choosing a response. It does not imply that every prompt works for every person, that the same change follows every difficult event, or that a person can simply think away a real workplace problem. The trial supports a group-level affect finding under repeated prompting. It leaves individual variation and the cause of any particular feeling open for the later behavior analysis.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach

How affect linked to work behavior—and what mediation means

The trial’s work outcomes followed two different statistical routes. Lower negative affect was linked to fewer reported counterproductive work behaviors; higher positive affect was linked to stronger reported overall job performance. These are indirect effects: the randomized intervention changed reported affect, and affect was then statistically associated with an outcome in the study’s model. The researchers randomized the prompt package, not each worker’s affective state. That distinction allows a causal conclusion about the assigned intervention’s effect on affect, while leaving the proposed affect-to-behavior step open to other explanations. In “Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance,” the authors estimated the paths using repeated observations nested within workers. For daily outcomes, the modeled indirect effect through negative affect was −0.010 for counterproductive work behavior, with a 95% confidence interval from −0.017 to −0.003. The path through positive affect to overall performance was 0.021, with an interval from 0.002 to 0.041. Those intervals exclude zero, so the model treats both indirect associations as statistically distinguishable from zero. They are model-scale estimates, not percentages of behavior changed, and they do not predict what a particular employee would do. The routes were selective. Negative affect was not a significant intermediary for performance: its daily indirect estimate was 0.004, with an interval from −0.004 to 0.014. Positive affect did not carry a significant indirect path to counterproductive behavior either; its estimate was effectively zero. The intervention therefore did not produce one general pathway in which “feeling better” improved every work outcome. In the paper’s model, the negative-affect route aligned with counterproductive behavior, while the positive-affect route aligned with overall performance. The direct outcome estimates make the distinction clearer. During the intervention period, assignment to the reappraisal group was not significantly associated with either daily counterproductive behavior or daily overall performance after the modeled affect variables were included. At the one-month measurement, the direct estimate for counterproductive behavior was also not significant; the performance estimate was only marginal by the paper’s threshold. The result is not a demonstrated, direct gain in work behavior attributable to assignment. The evidence instead supports a more limited pattern: assignment shifted reported affect, and the observed affect-outcome associations formed indirect statistical pathways in the fitted model. Mediation is often described as a process that explains how a treatment works. Here, that phrase needs care. A randomized comparison helps rule out many alternative explanations for why the intervention group reported different affect than the control group. It does not, by itself, rule out alternative explanations for why a worker reporting less negative affect also reported fewer counterproductive actions. A demanding day, a fairer interaction, fewer interruptions, or a change in how someone recalls the day could relate to both reports. Since the mediator was measured rather than assigned, the pathway is consistent with the proposed mechanism, but does not prove that changing affect caused the reported behavior difference. The paper’s framing draws on Affective Events Theory, which connects events at work with emotional reactions and subsequent work responses. A theory can organize a plausible sequence; it cannot settle whether that sequence is the only one operating in this dataset. The trial’s randomized element is the intervention assignment, while the theory-guided mediator remains an observed link. A separate 10-day diary study, “Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation,” also found that negative emotional reactions statistically mediated links between significant work events and daily counterproductive work behavior. It examined daily events, fairness appraisals, reactions, and reported conduct, and found reappraisal moderated some event-to-emotion relationships. That study helps show why the focal trial’s negative-affect route is plausible in everyday work. Because it was a diary study rather than a randomized intervention, it cannot verify the focal trial’s mediator or establish that prompting reappraisal caused conduct to change. For a reader deciding what the 2025 trial shows, the useful claim is about the chain of evidence. The repeated prompt assignment caused a difference in workers’ reported affect under the trial conditions. Reported affect then formed selective, supported indirect links to self-reported work outcomes. Randomization does not travel automatically from the first link to the second. The findings make an affect-based explanation worth considering; they do not establish that affect was the sole cause of reported behavior, or that a short, standalone exercise would improve objective performance.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach; Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation

What counts as daily job behavior here?

The phrase “daily job behavior” sounds broader than the measures in the 2025 trial. Each evening, workers reported whether they had performed any of 12 listed counterproductive work behaviors that day, using yes or no responses. One example was “I behaved in an unpleasant manner toward another employee.” Workers also rated their overall job performance for that day on a single five-point item. These were reports about their own workdays, not records independently checked by a supervisor or company system. The trial measured participants’ accounts of conduct and performance after the prompts, rather than objectively verified changes. (“Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach.”) Counterproductive work behavior, often shortened to CWB, is a research label for actions at work that can harm the organization or other people. A yes/no checklist records whether a listed act occurred, not its severity. The separate performance item asks for a broad judgment of the day, not a count of tasks completed, quality score, or supervisor evaluation. Although the authors call these daily work behavior and overall job performance, the measured outcomes are self-assessments. A difference in reports might reflect changed conduct, interpretation, memory, or willingness to report. The measures alone cannot distinguish among these explanations. Repeated reports offer information that a single retrospective questionnaire would miss. The same workers reported outcomes each evening across three workweeks, allowing analysis of day-level reports while accounting for observations nested within people. The authors analyzed 1,836 daily observations. Those are not 1,836 independent workers: 176 people were randomized, 88 to each group, and each contributed multiple reports. This design can show whether affect and reported behavior move together from day to day. It does not make self-report independent observation. Someone may forget an interaction, interpret an item differently after a stressful day, or present their conduct favorably. Since participants reported both feelings and outcomes, shared reporting habits may contribute to their statistical relationship. Asking about “today” narrows recall compared with asking someone months later to summarize typical behavior, but it does not remove memory or interpretation. A worker who marks “no” may have had a calm day, may not think an act fits the item, or may apply a different standard. The one-item performance rating leaves room for personal judgment: success might mean finishing urgent work, avoiding mistakes, or helping colleagues. These are plausible measurement considerations, not explanations demonstrated by the trial. The evidence establishes what respondents reported under the study’s procedures; it cannot show that an external observer would record the same pattern. A separate study, “Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation,” shows why daily reports can be useful without resolving this boundary. It followed employees over 10 days, assessing significant work events, fairness perceptions, negative emotional reactions, and daily CWB. The authors report that work events related to negative emotional reactions, which in turn related to daily CWB; reappraisal moderated some event-to-emotion relationships. This is evidence of associations in another diary study, not a randomized test of the 2025 intervention. It makes day-by-day links among events, feelings, and reported conduct worth examining, while leaving open whether prompts that shift affect change independently verified conduct. The randomized comparison supports conclusions about differences in workers’ reported outcomes after the prompts. The modeled links between reported affect and reported CWB or performance are informative, but do not establish that colleagues experienced fewer harmful acts or that objective output rose. These measures are evidence about participants’ accounts of their workdays. Claims about observed behavior or productivity require outcomes collected independently.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach; Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation

Does the effect last, and which prompt performed better?

A month after the prompts stopped, the trial still showed similar modeled links between assignment, reported affect, and reported work outcomes. That is evidence against an immediate disappearance within the month the researchers observed. It is not evidence that the effect lasts indefinitely, or that employees retained a general skill. The study measured outcomes once at that follow-up point; its authors explicitly note that effects might diminish over a longer period. “No fade-out” is therefore a description of this comparison and window, not a claim of permanence. The distinction matters because the intervention itself was a repeated routine: workers received activities during workdays across three weeks. The follow-up asks whether patterns remained after that routine ended, not whether a single brief lesson produces durable change. The outcome at one month came from participants’ reports, and the affect-to-outcome link remained a modeled indirect path. The study also compared two kinds of reappraisal. In situation reappraisal, a person revisits how they are interpreting an event and considers another plausible meaning. Emotion reappraisal directs attention to the emotional response itself, treating it as understandable and temporary. In the study’s exploratory, within-intervention analysis among the 88 intervention-group participants, situation reappraisal was associated with lower negative affect and higher positive affect after the activity. Emotion reappraisal did not show significant within-person effects on either measure. Those are immediate affect findings, not evidence that one prompt leads to better job behavior over time. There is a practical reason to resist calling situation reappraisal the winner. Its instructions contained 195 words, compared with 111 for emotion reappraisal, and the design’s randomization probabilities meant participants received situation prompts more often. Since content, length, and frequency varied together, the comparison cannot isolate which feature accounts for the difference. The authors identify these imbalances as limitations and call for future work to separate instruction content from length. The observed advantage is worth testing, but the trial does not show that situation-focused wording alone caused it. A broader review helps place the prompt result without settling it. In “Dealing with Feeling: A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Strategies Derived from the Process Model of Emotion Regulation,” researchers synthesized 306 experimental comparisons involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological emotional outcomes. They reported that effects differed by strategy: cognitive change showed a small-to-medium average effect (d+ = 0.36), while response modulation had a small average effect (d+ = 0.16) and attentional deployment showed no average effect (d+ = 0.00). These pooled estimates concern emotional outcomes across varied experiments. That body of experiments supports the general proposition that emotion-regulation approaches can alter emotional outcomes under some conditions. It does not verify a specific workplace prompt, predict work conduct, or resolve the dose imbalance in this trial. For a reader considering the practical lesson, the fairest conclusion is that repeated, in-context reappraisal prompts had similar modeled affect-to-outcome patterns at a one-month follow-up, and situation reappraisal showed clearer immediate affect results in an exploratory comparison. The evidence does not establish lasting gains beyond that month or identify a superior prompt independent of its extra words and repetitions. A useful next study would hold delivery frequency and instruction length constant, then compare the two approaches over a longer follow-up. Until then, “which prompt performed better?” has a narrow answer: situation reappraisal looked stronger on immediate reported affect in this design, while the reason for that difference remains unresolved.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach; Dealing with Feeling: A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Strategies Derived from the Process Model of Emotion Regulation

How this trial compares with other workplace evidence

Related workplace studies make the 2025 trial’s proposed pathway plausible: how a person interprets an event can accompany changes in emotion and the response that follows. They do not reproduce its result. The comparison matters because the studies observe different links. Some follow naturally occurring workdays; another changes a teammate’s appraisal in a laboratory task. They help explain why reappraisal may matter at work, while leaving the trial’s causal boundary intact: assignment was randomized, but reported emotional states and work behavior were not independently manipulated or observed.

In “Effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on daily work-related outcomes,” 141 Chinese managerial employees recorded work experiences for 15 consecutive workdays. Multilevel diary analyses found that reported cognitive reappraisal was associated with lower daily negative emotion and perceived work stress among both younger and older workers. Age moderated associations involving expressive suppression: its reported links with negative emotion, stress, and job satisfaction were more beneficial among older workers. This places reappraisal alongside daily emotional experience at work, rather than treating it as a fixed quality. But the diary records what employees did and felt; it does not randomly assign reappraisal. Differences between people or between difficult workdays could help explain the association. Its population and outcomes also differ from the newer trial’s US day-shift sample and self-reported counterproductive behavior and performance. The finding cannot show that prompting reappraisal caused a change in work outcomes.

“Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation” offers a closer view of the event-to-response sequence. Across a 10-day diary period, the study assessed significant work events, fairness appraisals, negative emotional reactions, and employees’ reported counterproductive work behavior. Its multilevel analysis linked events to negative reactions, which in turn statistically mediated links between events and daily forms of counterproductive behavior; reappraisal moderated some event-to-emotion relationships. Work events, fairness appraisals, and following emotions moved together with reported conduct. That pattern gives a credible workplace context for the pathway proposed in the 2025 trial. It remains observational: a daily event diary cannot establish that a reappraisal prompt would prevent harmful conduct. Nor should a reported act be treated as an independently verified incident. The studies converge on a useful question about the moments between an event and a response, while differing in whether researchers assigned a practice.

A randomized dyadic experiment shifts the setting again. “Reappraising stress arousal improves performance and reduces evaluation anxiety in a social evaluative context” studied 266 collaborative dyads. One teammate received stress-reappraisal instructions, and the researchers measured physiological challenge responses during a collaborative task. The PubMed record reports challenge-like responses for both the instructed teammate and partner. Random assignment gives this study a stronger basis for attributing those measured responses to the instruction in that task. Yet the outcome was physiological stress response during an evaluative collaboration, not daily conduct, counterproductive behavior, or ordinary job performance. A teammate’s response may travel through interaction in ways a solo prompt cannot capture. The experiment therefore supports the possibility that reappraisal can have social effects under specific conditions; it is not a replication of the 2025 workplace intervention.

The fair reading is cumulative but narrow. The diaries show that reappraisal, negative affect, work events, and reported responses can be connected within ordinary workdays; the dyadic experiment shows that changing an appraisal can affect measured stress responses in a structured collaboration. The 2025 trial adds a randomized, repeated in-workday prompt comparison and a one-month pattern in self-reported outcomes. Similar themes across designs make a context-sensitive emotional process credible. They do not make unlike outcomes interchangeable or turn a statistical pathway into proof of improved job performance. A reader can take the evidence as a reason to notice how an interpretation shapes a response, then judge the result by a concrete action in their own setting. Whether the work itself is fair, manageable, and safe remains part of that judgment.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach; Effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on daily work-related outcomes; Significant work events and counterproductive work behavior: The role of fairness, emotions, and emotion regulation; Reappraising stress arousal improves performance and reduces evaluation anxiety in a social evaluative context

What the result can change in an individual workday

A useful personal application is small: after a difficult work event, pause long enough to separate what happened from the meaning you first gave it, then notice what you do next. The trial tested repeated activities twice each workday over three workweeks; it found changes in reported affect and modeled links to reported work outcomes. It did not establish that one reflection after one meeting will improve performance. Start with a situation that can safely be reconsidered. Write down the observable event in plain terms: a colleague asked for a revision, a handoff arrived late, or a meeting ended without a decision. Then record the first interpretation that came to mind. Perhaps “the request means they do not trust my work.” Ask what else could reasonably explain the event,. The colleague may have spotted a requirement that changed, or may need a clearer account of the decision. A credible alternative is not forced optimism; it is a second account that the available facts do not rule out. The point is not to persuade yourself that a frustrating event was good. It is to see whether the first interpretation is the only one available before choosing a response. You might wait before replying, ask which requirement needs revision, or arrange a short repair conversation. Choose one observable action in advance. Later, note whether you took it and what happened. This modest exercise follows the study’s focus on reappraisal, or changing how an event is understood, but its usefulness here is an application rather than a tested result. The researchers assigned workers to repeated prompts or a neutral recall activity; they did not randomize each person’s interpretation of a particular event. The reported links between affect and work behavior therefore do not show that an alternative interpretation caused a better response in an individual case. Treat the note as a prompt for observation, not as a promise or a score. There are events that should not be reframed away. If a colleague repeatedly violates a boundary, a manager withholds necessary authority, workload makes a deadline impossible, or conduct feels unsafe, changing your interpretation cannot fix the condition. Keep the facts in view and raise the issue with someone able to address it,. Reappraisal may help you decide how to speak; it should not turn a concrete problem into a personal failure to regulate emotion. That distinction also keeps the trial separate from emotional-intelligence testing. It measured no EQ score and offers no evidence that a profile can predict who will benefit from reappraisal. The private 32-item Emotional Skills Profile at /assessment is an educational reflection tool about recent habits and judgments on authored scenarios. Someone curious about their own patterns can use it to identify a behavior to examine, then compare that reflection with actual situations over time. It is not a performance forecast, and the workplace trial did not validate it.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach

What to take into the next conversation

In the next difficult conversation, separate interpretation from a condition someone can change. A colleague’s short reply may feel dismissive; check whether the message was clear before deciding what it meant. If the problem is an impossible deadline, unfair treatment, or conduct that crosses a boundary, reframing cannot fix it. Name the condition and raise it with someone able to address it. The 2025 trial, “Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach,” tested brief activities repeated during workdays for three weeks. Participants reported changes in affect, and the study found indirect statistical pathways connecting affect with self-reported work outcomes, with similar modeled pathways at one month. This makes repeated reflection worth considering; it does not establish a direct or independently verified gain in job performance. Choose one response you can observe: pause before replying, ask a clarifying question, or return to repair a strained exchange. Notice what happens, then decide whether the event calls for a different interpretation, a practical request, or both. This is a personal experiment, not a promise that reappraisal improves every interaction. For structured reflection on recent emotional habits and scenario judgments, explore the private 32-item Emotional Skills Profile at [/assessment](/assessment). It is an educational tool; the trial did not test or validate it.

Sources: Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance: An ecological momentary intervention approach

Questions readers ask