Katharina Kircanski
Katharina Kircanski is a clinical scientist at the US National Institute of Mental Health. She is first author of the 2012 study that took the research on naming feelings out of the brain scanner and into a clinical procedure: spider-fearful participants, repeated exposure to a live spider, comparing naming, reframing, distraction and exposure on its own. The work was done at Stanford, with Matthew Lieberman and Michelle Craske.
Who they are
At NIMH she is chief of experimental and quantitative methods in the Emotion and Development Branch, and co-leads a group on adolescent depression and anxiety.
Read the result precisely, because it is routinely overstated. At a one-week follow-up, with a different spider in a different context, the group that had named their fear showed lower skin conductance than the others. Skin conductance is a measure of physical arousal taken from tiny changes in sweat at the skin, so it is the body's reaction rather than the person's report. The same group also got marginally closer to the spider than the distraction group did. The headline win is physiological. The behavioural win is marginal. Anybody reporting this as "naming your fear made people braver" has gone beyond what it shows.
Key papers
Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). "Feelings Into Words: Contributions of Language to Exposure Therapy", Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086 to 1091. First author. Spider-fearful participants, repeated exposure to a live spider, between-subjects comparison of affect labelling, reappraisal, distraction and exposure alone.
Key ideas
Her study is the best evidence for the exposure-and-habituation account of why naming works: saying the fear out loud while facing the thing keeps you in contact with it instead of edging away.
That is a fifth explanation on top of the four Jared Torre lists, and it is the only one that predicts something the others do not. If it is right, naming should help most where avoidance is the problem, and least where it is not.
It also beat an explicit distraction condition, which is a direct problem for the theory that naming works simply by taking your attention elsewhere.
A physiological win with only a marginal behavioural win is a normal and unglamorous result. It should be reported as one.
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
- Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086 to 1091.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11 against NIMH records.