Series: From Sensation to Words — Part 2
Perhaps you’ve had this experience: you’re telling someone about a difficult conversation, and they say, “You sound angry.”
You pause.
No. That’s not it.
Then another word comes: Hurt.
Something shifts. The conversation hasn’t been undone. You haven’t decided what to do about it. But hurt feels closer to the truth, and you can finally say a little more.
Does finding a word actually do anything? Or does it just give you a better description of a feeling you already had?
Affect labeling means putting a feeling into words. Sometimes the word describes your own experience. In experiments, it may involve choosing a word for the emotion shown on another person’s face.
In a brain imaging study led by UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, participants looked at emotionally expressive faces and either chose a word for the emotion or completed a different task. During labeling, researchers observed less activity in the amygdala, a region involved in responding to emotionally significant information, alongside more activity in a prefrontal region.
That is an intriguing result. It does not mean that saying “anger” switches off anger, or that a scan can tell us how much better someone feels. It suggests that identifying an emotion may change what happens while a person encounters it.
There’s a practical difference between I feel bad and I feel disappointed. The second phrase gives you something more specific to consider. What were you hoping for? Who disappointed you? What mattered about it?
The word doesn’t answer those questions. It makes them possible.
Emotions do not always come one at a time.
You can be relieved that a relationship ended and grieve it. You can be angry with someone you love and frightened of losing them. You can feel proud of an accomplishment and strangely lonely afterward.
So when I ask a client, “What are you feeling?” I’m not looking for a correct answer on the first try. We might begin with tense, move to anxious, and eventually discover I thought she would be glad for me, and she wasn’t.
Even then, the word may change.
This is one reason I pay attention when someone corrects me. If I say “angry” and you say “No, embarrassed,” your correction matters. It brings us closer to your experience. Accepting a plausible word because a therapist offered it would take us in the other direction.
Not necessarily. Nor would that always be desirable. If you’re grieving someone, the goal is not to make grief disappear by naming it.
Affect labeling research does offer reason to take words seriously. In another study, people who feared spiders completed a brief exposure exercise. Those asked to name their feelings showed a lower physiological fear response one week later than comparison groups. They did not report less fear themselves. What changed depended on how the researchers measured it.
A word can help without producing immediate relief. It can also be offered too soon, before a person knows whether it fits.
In therapy, putting feelings into words is part of a conversation. You can hear a word, reject it, try another, or discover that what you need first is for someone to understand what happened. Being heard matters, although the studies above did not test whether a validating response from another person was responsible for their results.
Sometimes the useful sentence is not “I am angry.”
It’s “I think I’m angry, but I’m also afraid you’ll leave if I say so.”
That sentence gives us somewhere to begin.
In the final part of this series, we’ll look at a related question: whether writing about a difficult experience can help—and why the answer may differ from person to person.
Part 1: I Can Feel Something Happening. Why Can’t I Tell What I’m Feeling?
Part 2: Does Putting Feelings Into Words Really Help?
Part 3: Can Writing About Difficult Experiences Help? Stay tuned.
Anne Lindyberg, LMHC (Iowa), LCPC (Illinois), integrates the experiential therapy of Virginia Satir with Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and the Alexander Technique. She specializes in helping adults with complex and developmental trauma create lasting emotional change through therapy.
This article and other informational content on this website are provided for educational purposes only. They are not a substitute for individualized professional care, do not constitute advice specific to your circumstances, and do not establish a therapist-client relationship.
This work is created on the traditional and unceded lands of Indigenous peoples; a fuller acknowledgment of the land, its history, and its peoples is available on this website.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830
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