The process of affect labeling
Givon and colleagues take a step back from the evidence that naming feelings changes them, and ask what naming a feeling actually involves. Their proposal is that affect labelling works like perceptual decision making: a person accumulates evidence, from bodily sensations, from the situation, from memory, until it crosses a threshold and a label is selected. That framing brings with it a well-developed set of mathematical tools, sequential sampling models, which describe how evidence accumulates and when a decision is made, and they review the research that has begun applying these to emotion labelling. The advantage is that the model separates components that the outcome alone confuses, including how much evidence a person requires before committing to a label and how quickly they gather it, which offers an account of why people differ so much in their ability to name what they feel. It is a theoretical review of an emerging approach rather than a body of settled findings.
Givon and colleagues take a step back from the evidence that naming feelings changes them, and ask what naming a feeling actually involves. Their proposal is that affect labelling works like perceptual decision making: a person accumulates evidence, from bodily sensations, from the situation, from memory, until it crosses a threshold and a label is selected. That framing brings with it a well-developed set of mathematical tools, sequential sampling models, which describe how evidence accumulates and when a decision is made, and they review the research that has begun applying these to emotion labelling. The advantage is that the model separates components that the outcome alone confuses, including how much evidence a person requires before committing to a label and how quickly they gather it, which offers an account of why people differ so much in their ability to name what they feel. It is a theoretical review of an emerging approach rather than a body of settled findings.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
doi:10.1016/j.tics.2025.09.017, published online 17 October 2025. A theoretical proposal recasting labelling as a perceptual decision modelled by evidence accumulation. Recorded here because it notes inconsistent findings in the literature, and because the terms amygdala, prefrontal and RVLPFC appear nowhere in its body text. That is an absence and not a refutation, and the article does not present it as one.
Where we use it
- Why Saying It Out Loud Makes It Feel Smaller, Why We Care
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.09.017
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2025.09.017