This episode is also on Bilibili too.
How do you deal with negative emotions?
There’s one incredibly simple, brute-force method: name the emotion.
Just ask yourself, ‘What am I feeling right now?’ Then put that feeling into words and give it a name (what I’m feeling is ‘anxiety’), and you can weaken that negative emotion.
What’s even more remarkable is that this same operation affects positive and negative emotions asymmetrically. If you name a positive emotion (what I’m feeling is ‘contentment’), the positive emotion actually gets stronger.
The same operation can suppress negative emotions and amplify positive ones. Kind of remarkable.
The academic term for ‘naming an emotion with words’ is affect labelling. Labelling must use language to sum up an emotional experience. Nonverbal reactions—such as grunting or pulling a funny face when an emotion arises—don’t count as affect labelling.
The effect of affect labelling in suppressing negative emotions was the first to be demonstrated.
Matthew Lieberman, the author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect and a neuroscientist, and his colleagues conducted a study[i] showing that affect labelling helps reduce negative emotions. In the study, participants first looked at a series of images that might trigger negative emotions (such as a snarling dog or pictures of impoverished children), and then labelled the emotions they felt (for example, the dog evoked ‘anger’, while the impoverished children evoked ‘sadness’). As a control, another group labelled the content of the images rather than their emotions (for example, the dog was an ‘animal’ and the children were ‘people’). Finally, the researchers assessed the intensity of the negative emotions the participants experienced.
The result: the negative emotions felt by participants who labelled their emotions weakened significantly.
The key point is that throughout the experiment, the researchers never suggested or asked participants to try to reduce their negative emotions. Most participants were also completely unaware that labelling emotions would change them. This shows that affect labelling automatically regulates negative emotions unconsciously—quite different from common emotion-regulation strategies such as controlling anger through deep breathing.
These findings, along with the study itself, sparked the curiosity of other psychologists. They wanted to know what would happen if the target were changed to positive emotions.
The result was quite unexpected. In later studies, psychologists including Christian Waugh of Wake Forest University used similar experimental procedures[ii] to show that labelling positive emotions not only fails to weaken them, but actually strengthens them.
Why does the same psychological process have such dramatically different effects on positive and negative emotions?
Christian Waugh speculated that this is because the thought processes triggered after labelling negative emotions and positive emotions are completely different.
Negative emotions arise, of course, because we’ve run into some kind of trouble. Labelling a negative emotion makes us more clearly aware that we’re in this unpleasant situation, which prompts us to reflect on how to solve the problem:
Why do I feel ‘humiliated’? Because a colleague gave me a hard time at work today. So what should I do? Next week, I’ll have an open and honest talk with him.
Finding the cause of a negative emotion and looking for a solution will make you feel better. Even if the problem isn’t solved right away, this reduces uncertainty. What people fear most isn’t having to solve a problem; it’s that directionless ‘uncertainty’. People fear ‘fuzziness’ most of all. That’s why labelling a negative emotion makes your mood feel less awful.
So what happens when we label positive emotions? When we feel good, it usually means there’s no problem that needs solving and no action that needs taking. Positive emotional experiences are therefore usually very brief. Happiness is always gone in a flash. Labelling a positive emotion happens to solve this problem. By labelling it, our attention is drawn to the positive emotion, and we become more clearly aware of the feeling. This makes the positive emotion last longer, and our experience becomes better as a result.
In a nutshell, labelling a negative emotion reminds us to think about how to solve the problem, reducing uncertainty; labelling a positive emotion reminds us to pay attention to that emotion. Through these two mechanisms, affect labelling both suppresses negative emotions and strengthens positive ones.
Christian Waugh recently offered three suggestions for affect labelling in an article[iii]:
1. Use more specific vocabulary to describe emotions whenever possible. Words like ‘delight’, ‘interest’, and ‘contentment’ are better than the vague ‘happiness.’
2. Saying it out loud or writing it down works better than merely thinking it.
3. Affect labelling can’t conjure an emotion out of thin air. If you aren’t actually happy but try to stick a ‘happy’ label on yourself to hint that you should cheer up, the effect will be limited; affect labelling works best when applied to a genuine emotion.
Written by: Zhichao Wei
[i] Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116-124.
[ii] Vlasenko, V. V., Rogers, E. G., & Waugh, C. E. (2021). Affect labelling increases the intensity of positive emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 35(7), 1350-1364.
[iii] Christian Waugh. Asking one simple question can entirely change how you feel. https://psyche.co/ideas/asking-one-simple-question-can-entirely-change-how-you-feel
Leave a Reply