Affect Labeling

Affect labeling involves label one's own feelings (e.g., "I feel angry"). Numerous studies have shown affect labeling to be an effective way to regulate one's emotions. These studies can be categories according to the main measures used.

Self-Report Measures. Summarizing the research, Torres & Lieberman (2018) write, "[W]hen participants apply affect labeling to emotionally charged stimuli, they tend to report diminished levels of affect compared to conditions that do not engage affect-labeling-related processing." To cite one specific example of this, Constantinou et al. (2014) found that participant who were shown unpleasant images (images known to induce affective symptoms) reported reduced symptoms if they were asked to label their feelings.

Autonomic Responses. Whereas experiencing emotional events tends to cause autonomic reactions (that is, involuntary reactions in the autonomic nervous system), studies have found that affect labeling leads to decreases in heart rate, skin conductance responses, and voice pitch (Torre & Lieberman, 2018). A recent study by Niles, Craske, Lieberman, & Hur (2015) asked participants to give a public speech; the treatment group was asked to label their feelings before the speech, while the control group was asked to perform a simple cognitive task. After the speech, participants in the treatment group showed steeper declines in heart rate and non-specific skin conductance than the control group.

Neural Responses. Studies have found that affect labeling tends to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex and decrease activity in the amygdala (Torre & Lieberman, 2018).

Behavioral Responses. In a fairly well-known study, Kircanski, Lieberman, & Craske (2012) asked participants with excessive fears of spiders to engage in a spider-exposure activity. Participants were put into four groups: mere exposure, cognitive reappraisal, distraction, and affect labeling. The affect labeling group did a better job than the distraction group in increasing behavioral approach (and equivalent to the other two groups) and showed a greater reduction in skin conductance response than all the groups. Additionally, "the greater percentage of anxiety and fear words that participants verbalized during exposure," the more steps they took towards approaching the spider and the greater skin conductance response they showed.

Torre & Lieberman (2018) summarize these findings by noting that affect labeling "has demonstrated a profile of regulatory effects that very closely resembles more widely accepted forms of emotion regulation, specifically reappraisal, despite seeming unlikely. In fact, people tend to have a strong lay theory that affect labeling shouldn’t work at all." These authors acknowledge that we don't know with much certainty the mechanism by which affect labeling works, but they hypothesize that affect labeling might work by reducing our uncertainty. "Emotions," they write, "can often be nebulous feeling states. By applying a label to those states, or even to evocative but ambiguous stimuli, we may be reducing our uncertainty about them by categorizing them."

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Constantinou, E., Van Den Houte, M., Bogaerts, K., Van Diest, I., & Van den Bergh, O. (2014). Can words heal? Using affect labeling to reduce the effects of unpleasant cues on symptom reporting. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 807.

Fan, R., Varol, O., Varamesh, A., Barron, A., van de Leemput, I. A., Scheffer, M., & Bollen, J. (2019). The minute-scale dynamics of online emotions reveal the effects of affect labeling. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(1), 92.

Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086-1091.

Niles, A. N., Craske, M. G., Lieberman, M. D., & Hur, C. (2015). Affect labeling enhances exposure effectiveness for public speaking anxiety. Behaviour research and therapy, 68, 27-36.

Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116-124.