Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli
Lieberman and colleagues used brain imaging to ask why putting feelings into words helps. Participants viewed distressing images while either labelling the emotion the image produced or encoding it some other way. Labelling reduced activity in the amygdala and other structures associated with emotional response, and increased activity in one region only, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area associated with deliberate control. The two were inversely related: more activity in the prefrontal region went with less in the amygdala, and that relationship was carried through a third region in the medial prefrontal cortex. The authors propose a pathway along which naming an emotion dampens the response to it. The study is careful about the methodological limitations of earlier work in this area, which it was designed to correct. As with all imaging work of this period, the sample is small and the inference is about a mechanism rather than a proven causal chain.
Lieberman and colleagues used brain imaging to ask why putting feelings into words helps. Participants viewed distressing images while either labelling the emotion the image produced or encoding it some other way. Labelling reduced activity in the amygdala and other structures associated with emotional response, and increased activity in one region only, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area associated with deliberate control. The two were inversely related: more activity in the prefrontal region went with less in the amygdala, and that relationship was carried through a third region in the medial prefrontal cortex. The authors propose a pathway along which naming an emotion dampens the response to it. The study is careful about the methodological limitations of earlier work in this area, which it was designed to correct. As with all imaging work of this period, the sample is small and the inference is about a mechanism rather than a proven causal chain.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
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doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x. Affect labelling reduced amygdala and related limbic response to negative affective stimuli relative to control encoding conditions, including a gender-labelling control matched for verbal and attentional demand, and increased activity in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.
Where we use it
- Why Saying It Out Loud Makes It Feel Smaller, Why We Care
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https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x