Einat Levy-Gigi
Einat Levy-Gigi is an Israeli researcher at Bar-Ilan University working on emotion regulation, stress and trauma resilience. She is first author of a 2022 study which found that the effect of naming a feeling depends on how strong the feeling is. In plain words: naming a big feeling made it smaller, and naming a mild one made it bigger. That is arguably the most practically useful finding in the whole literature on putting feelings into words.
Who they are
She sits in the Faculty of Education and at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan. Her co-author on the 2022 paper, Simone Shamay-Tsoory, is at the University of Haifa.
Affect labelling is the technical name for the thing being tested: putting a feeling into words, which a body of research suggests can dampen it. Her paper asked two questions about that. Does it matter when you do the naming, and does it matter how intense the feeling is to begin with.
Key papers
Levy-Gigi, E., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2022). "Affect labeling: The role of timing and intensity", PLOS ONE, 17(12), e0279303. First author. Experiment 1, 63 participants across three labelling-timing conditions. Experiment 2, 79 participants, comparing high-intensity and low-intensity material.
Key ideas
Timing barely mattered. Intensity did. Whether people named the feeling before, during or after seeing the material made little difference. Whether the feeling was strong or mild changed the direction of the result.
Naming a strong feeling brought distress down. Naming a mild feeling pushed it up. One plain reading is that putting words to something mild makes you attend to what you would otherwise have let pass.
This is one of two findings that remove the word "immediately" from the popular version of the advice. The other is Erik Nook's, on what naming does to reframing. Between them, "name it and it shrinks" stops being a rule and becomes a condition.
The practical version is unusually clean for this literature. If you are overwhelmed, naming it is likely to help. If you are mildly irritated, naming it may simply hand the irritation a larger share of your attention.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Levy-Gigi, E., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2022). PLOS ONE, 17(12), e0279303.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11 against Bar-Ilan University records.