Matthew Lieberman
Matthew Lieberman is a social neuroscientist at UCLA, where he directs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He is one of the founders of the field and the author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, which has not been read for this page. His most cited line of work is affect labelling: the finding that putting a feeling into words dampens the amygdala's response to emotional images while raising activity in a region at the front of the brain associated with control.
Who they are
This page exists because of a book that did not name him. A self-help title asserts that "neuroscience research shows" naming a feeling reduces anxiety "immediately", cites nobody, and has Daniel Siegel's name on the line above. The research programme that sentence is gesturing at is this one. That identification is ours, not the book's. The slogan "name it to tame it" is Siegel's and Tina Payne Bryson's. The research is Lieberman's. Neither is usually cited alongside the other.
The control condition nobody reports. In the 2007 study, the comparison task asked people to label the gender of the face rather than its emotion. That matched the verbal effort and the attentional demand exactly, with no emotional content, and produced no amygdala effect. It is the detail that stops this being a finding about distraction, and it is almost never mentioned.
Two sides, kept apart. The neural effect is consistent and has been reproduced. Against that, the behavioural and self-report effects are modest, smaller than the imaging story implies, and the surrounding literature is not uniformly supportive. Our holding is that this is a real effect of unremarkable size in a live research area, and verification confirmed that holding rather than changing it.
Key papers
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). "Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli", Psychological Science, 18(5), 421 to 428. First author. The founding study, with the gender-labelling control. Read in the vault 2026-09-11.
Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). "Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction", Emotion, 11(3), 468 to 480. Participants predicted that labelling would make them feel worse. It made them feel better. Having felt the benefit, they still predicted it would hurt next time.
Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Emotion Review, 10(2), 116 to 124. The standard synthesis. Jared Torre is first author. Credit him.
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Not read here.
Key ideas
There is no meta-analysis of what labelling does to how somebody actually feels. The neural work has been pooled. The subjective effect has not, and no pooled figure for it exists. That absence is recorded here as a finding in its own right, not as a gap to be filled with confidence.
The mechanism is disputed four ways by its own proponents. His own review offers distraction, self-reflection, symbolic conversion and uncertainty reduction, and chooses between none of them. A fifth, exposure and habituation, comes from Katharina Kircanski and Michelle Craske. The popular line about the prefrontal cortex damping the amygdala describes what the scanner shows. It does not explain why naming does it, and he does not claim that it does.
Two findings constrain him, and both are recent. Einat Levy-Gigi found that labelling reduces distress when a feeling is intense and increases it when the feeling is mild. Erik Nook and Kevin Ochsner found that naming before reframing or accepting makes both work worse, replicated inside the same paper. Between them, the word "immediately" cannot survive.
The 2011 expectation result is the most human thing in the file. People are wrong about whether this will help them, they are wrong in the same direction afterwards, and having been shown otherwise they go on being wrong.
Working rule in this publication: nothing about affect labelling travels in from a trade book. It comes from these papers.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Psychological Science, 18(5), 421 to 428.
- Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). Emotion, 11(3), 468 to 480.
- Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Emotion Review, 10(2), 116 to 124. First author Torre.
- Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086 to 1091.
- Vault verification pass, 2026-09-11. Affect labelling moved from unverified to mixed on the strength of that pass, and the absence of a pooled figure for the subjective effect is recorded on the concept page.