Talking About Feelings

Much of my work involves encouraging people to talk about their feelings--a process formally known as affect labeling--which can happen in a free-flowing coaching conversation or in a structured environment like a T-group.  Experience tells me that this is a useful practice...but why?  What happens when we talk about our feelings?

Stephanie West Allen recently referred me to a post of hers from June 2007 that noted a "flurry of articles...about the neuroscience research showing that labeling your feelings can quiet your brain and increase impulse control."  Stephanie also linked to the original Psychological Science research article by Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger et al, Putting Feelings into Words (PDF), that prompted that flurry in the popular press, and it's fascinating reading:

Putting feelings into words has long been thought to be one of the best ways to manage negative emotional experiences. Talk therapies have been formally practiced for more than a century and, although varying in structure and content, are commonly based on the assumption that talking about one's feelings and problems is an effective method for minimizing the impact of negative emotional events on current experience...

Recent neuroimaging research has begun to offer insight into a possible neurocognitive mechanism by which putting feelings into words may alleviate negative emotional responses. A number of studies of affect labeling have demonstrated that linguistic processing of the emotional aspects of an emotional image produces less amygdala activity than perceptual processing of the emotional aspects of the same image (Hariri, Bookheimer, & Mazziotta, 2000; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho, Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005). Additionally, these studies have demonstrated greater activity during linguistic processing than during nonlinguistic processing of emotion in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), a region associated with the symbolic processing of emotional information (Cunningham, Johnson, Gatenby, Gore, & Banaji, 2003; Nomura et al., 2003) and with top-down inhibitory processes (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004). Finally, the magnitude of RVLPFC activity during affect labeling has been inversely correlated with the magnitude of amygdala activity during affect labeling in these studies. Together, these results suggest that putting feelings into words may activate RVLPFC, which in turn may dampen the response of the amygdala, thus helping to alleviate emotional distress...

The results of this study provide the first clear demonstration that affect labeling disrupts the affective responses in the limbic system that would otherwise occur in the presence of negative emotional images...

These data thus suggest that one route by which putting feelings into words may regulate negative affect is by increasing activity in RVLPFC, which in turn dampens activity in the amygdala by way of intermediate connections through [the medial prefrontal cortex]...

In summary, this study provides the first unambiguous evidence that affect labeling, compared with other ways of encoding, produces diminished responses to negative emotional images in the amygdala and other limbic regions...

These findings begin to shed light on how putting negative feelings into words can help regulate negative experience, a process that may ultimately contribute to better mental and physical health.

Lieberman is apparently at work on a new research article dealing with similar issues, a draft of which is also available online: Symbolic Processing of Affect (PDF).  From the introduction:

[T]here is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the process of sharing one's worry, of putting bad feelings into words, can diminish one's emotional distress at least under certain circumstances. This chapter will examine the neurocognitive mechanisms of disruption effects, the process by which putting feelings into words can disrupt the feelings being verbalized.

I'm reluctant to quote further from this work-in-progress--the cover page warns "DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION"--but a cursory reading suggests that Lieberman's latest neuroscientific research provides further evidence that talking about our feelings is an extremely helpful process.

(Note the new "neuroscience" category that I've added with this post.  My recent interchange with Stephanie West Allen--who writes regularly on the topic of neuroscience and conflict resolution--has highlighted for me the importance of integrating a better understanding of current neuroscience research with the rest of my work.) 

Photo by malias.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.