Jared Torre
Jared Torre is a psychologist at UCLA and the first author of the 2018 review that is the standard synthesis of the research on putting feelings into words. The review is routinely cited as Matthew Lieberman's. It is Torre's, and this page credits him. The most useful thing in it is that he needed four separate explanations for the effect and chose between none of them.
Who they are
Torre works on the neural basis of emotion regulation, specifically on implicit regulation: the idea that naming a feeling calms it without the person setting out to calm anything. That is what separates this line of work from deliberate strategies such as reframing, where the person knows they are doing something.
The four mechanisms, in plain words. Distraction, which says naming works by taking attention off the feeling. Self-reflection, which says the act of turning inward is itself regulating. Symbolic conversion, which says turning a raw sensation into a symbol changes what it is. And uncertainty reduction, which says an unnamed feeling is an unresolved one, and resolving it settles you. He offers all four as candidates that could run together rather than compete.
That the field's own standard synthesis declines to choose between four accounts is the honest state of this research, and it is a long way from the confidence of the slogan.
Key papers
Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). "Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation", Emotion Review, 10(2), 116 to 124. First author. Read in full in the vault, 2026-09-11.
Key ideas
Four candidate mechanisms and no verdict. A field that cannot say why its effect happens is a field still working, and saying so is more useful than picking one explanation and sounding certain.
His own verdict on distraction is that it is the weakest of the four. The control condition in the 2007 imaging study asked people to label the gender of a face instead of the emotion, which matched the attentional demand exactly and produced no effect. Katharina Kircanski separately found labelling beating an explicit distraction condition. Between them, distraction alone does not account for it.
A fifth mechanism, exposure and habituation, comes from outside his list, from Kircanski and Michelle Craske.
He also notes the short-term distress increase that comes with expressive writing, which is the same uncomfortable pattern showing up in the neighbouring literature.
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
- Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Emotion Review, 10(2), 116 to 124. Read in full 2026-09-11.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11 against the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory record.