Putting feelings into words: affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation
Torre and Lieberman review the research on affect labelling and argue for a particular way of classifying it. Naming a feeling reduces the response to it, but unlike deliberate strategies such as reasoning your way to a different interpretation, it does not feel like regulating anything while it is happening. They compare labelling with reappraisal across four kinds of evidence, what people report experiencing, what their bodies do, what their brains do and how they behave, and find the same pattern of effects in each, which is their case for calling labelling a form of implicit emotion regulation. The distinction matters practically: a technique that works without feeling like work is one people will not credit and may not think to use. The review closes on what remains unexplained, including which mechanism produces the effect. This vault cites it as the best overview of the naming-your-feelings literature.
Torre and Lieberman review the research on affect labelling and argue for a particular way of classifying it. Naming a feeling reduces the response to it, but unlike deliberate strategies such as reasoning your way to a different interpretation, it does not feel like regulating anything while it is happening. They compare labelling with reappraisal across four kinds of evidence, what people report experiencing, what their bodies do, what their brains do and how they behave, and find the same pattern of effects in each, which is their case for calling labelling a form of implicit emotion regulation. The distinction matters practically: a technique that works without feeling like work is one people will not credit and may not think to use. The review closes on what remains unexplained, including which mechanism produces the effect. This vault cites it as the best overview of the naming-your-feelings literature.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
doi:10.1177/1754073917742706. Sets out four non-mutually-exclusive candidate mechanisms: distraction, self-reflection, symbolic conversion and uncertainty reduction.
Where we use it
- Why Saying It Out Loud Makes It Feel Smaller, Why We Care
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706
DOI: 10.1177/1754073917742706