Feelings Into Words: Contributions of Language to Exposure Therapy
Kircanski and colleagues took affect labelling out of the laboratory and into a clinical procedure. People afraid of spiders were repeatedly exposed to a live spider while doing one of four things: naming what they felt, reappraising the situation, distracting themselves, or simply being exposed with no instruction. A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the group that had named their feelings showed the smallest physical fear response, measured by skin conductance, and approached somewhat more closely than the distraction group. Their reported fear was no lower than anyone else's, which is worth stating plainly. A further finding points at the mechanism: the more anxiety and fear words a person used during exposure, the greater the reduction in fear response. So the technique that people expect to make things worse, saying out loud how frightened you are, was associated with the better outcome. This vault cites it as the clinical evidence for affect labelling.
Kircanski and colleagues took affect labelling out of the laboratory and into a clinical procedure. People afraid of spiders were repeatedly exposed to a live spider while doing one of four things: naming what they felt, reappraising the situation, distracting themselves, or simply being exposed with no instruction. A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the group that had named their feelings showed the smallest physical fear response, measured by skin conductance, and approached somewhat more closely than the distraction group. Their reported fear was no lower than anyone else's, which is worth stating plainly. A further finding points at the mechanism: the more anxiety and fear words a person used during exposure, the greater the reduction in fear response. So the technique that people expect to make things worse, saying out loud how frightened you are, was associated with the better outcome. This vault cites it as the clinical evidence for affect labelling.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D. & Craske, M. G. (2012). "Feelings into words: contributions of language to exposure therapy." Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086-1091. PMID 22902568. Spider-fearful participants; at one-week post-test with a different spider in a different context the affect-labelling group showed reduced skin conductance, and greater approach behaviour than distraction at a level the authors report as marginal.
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/10.1177/0956797612443830
DOI: 10.1177/0956797612443830