The Feeling Machine

You may have heard “name it to tame it”. It’s catchy, and it’s based on real experiments — which is exactly why it’s worth checking what they found.

In 2007, a team at UCLA showed volunteers in a brain scanner pictures of faces with negative expressions. Compared with other tasks on the same pictures, choosing the word that named the emotion went with lower activity in the amygdala, a region that reacts strongly to emotional and threatening things, and higher activity in a region at the front right of the brain (Lieberman et al., 2007).

That’s where the slogan comes from. But notice what was measured: brain activity during a picture task. Not how people felt, and not real life. Those had to be tested separately.

In a review, Torre and Lieberman argue that labeling is a quiet, implicit form of emotion regulation, with effects on what people report, the body’s automatic responses, brain activity and behaviour — even if it doesn’t feel like regulating at the time (Torre & Lieberman, 2018).

But the newer set of four studies found no drop for unpleasant pictures, and labeling made pleasant feelings stronger (Vlasenko et al., 2021) — the opposite of the earlier result for pleasant pictures (Lieberman et al., 2011).

So which is it? Honestly, the jury is still out. Where the effect appears it is small, and it may depend on the exact task. That isn’t science failing. It’s science working: a claim gets tested again, by different people, and the picture gets sharper.

In 1980, researcher James Russell proposed that feeling-words fall around a circle defined by two dimensions: pleasant to unpleasant, and activated to calm (Russell, 1980). When Estonian, Greek and Polish speakers judged how similar feeling-words were in their own languages, the same circle appeared (Russell et al., 1989).

But two dimensions get you to a neighbourhood, not an address. Anger, stress and fear are all unpleasant and activated. Are they the same feeling? Would the same thing help? Telling feelings like these apart is called emotional granularity, or emotion differentiation (Kashdan et al., 2015).

In the research that review covers, people with more granularity were less likely to cope in harmful ways, such as aggression, when intensely distressed. That is a link between people who already differ, not proof that learning words causes it — but it is why the skill is worth studying.

Why would granularity dip in the teens? The researchers’ best explanation: young children tend to report one feeling at a time, while teens have had little experience making sense of feelings that arrive together — proud and nervous, relieved and guilty (Nook et al., 2018).

One influential theory goes further. The theory of constructed emotion proposes that your brain constantly predicts what sensations from your body and the world mean, using concepts built from past experience — and that this is how an emotion is made (Barrett, 2017). If so, the emotion concepts you learn are part of the toolkit your brain builds feelings with.

It’s a theory, not a settled fact: other scientists hold a more “classical” view, in which emotions such as fear and anger are built in, each with its own biological signature. Faces add a twist. A large review found that people do scowl when angry more often than chance would predict, but how people show emotions varies a lot across cultures, situations and individuals (Barrett et al., 2019).

First: naming a feeling is a cheap experiment. In the lab it helped a little or not at all, depending on the study, and people expect it to backfire. So try it, and keep your own data.

Second: name it, don’t rehearse it. One precise word is different from replaying the moment again and again.

Third: grow your vocabulary on purpose. Your teens may be when feelings start arriving in combinations. The goal isn’t to feel less. It’s to have better words for what you feel.