Name Your Emotions

If you name your emotions, you can domesticate them. So indicates recent research, which also suggested why meditation works. Brain scans indicated that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. This could explain purported emotional benefits of meditation, during which meditators often label their negative emotions in effort to “let them go.” It is much more difficult to let go of whatever you have not named. Unnamed, it can more readily cling to your soul. You cannot orient yourself to what you have not termed.

Psychologists have long held that people who talk about their feelings have greater control over them, though they are not sure how talking accomplishes this. UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues connected thirty people to “functional magnetic resonance imaging” (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to study photos of male or female faces exhibiting emotional expressions. Beneath the array of photos were choices of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearful”—together with two possible names for the people in the pictures, one name male and other name female.

When introduced to these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender‑appropriate name which seemed to fit the face they saw. When the participants chose terms denoting negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area apparently associated with thinking in words concerning various emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, remained relatively calm.

By contrast, when the subjects selected names seemingly appropriate for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes—indicating that only the labeling of emotions makes a difference in brain activity.

“In the same way you hit the brake while driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in a recent issue of Psychological Science.

In a second experiment, twenty-seven of the same subjects completed questionnaires to ascertain how “mindful” they are. Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques significantly assist people to pay more attention to their present sensations, emotions and thoughts, while at the same time, not reacting strongly to them. Those who meditate regularly typically recognize, acknowledge and name their negative emotions on the way to “letting them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful mental frameworks to those from subjects who seemed to be less mindful, they found a stark difference: the mindful subjects evidenced—and directly experienced—greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala as an apparent consequence of labeling their emotions.

“These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health,” said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which was recently detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.

In sum, meditation proved effective to the process not only of learning what is present within us, but also of letting go of those things which hinder rather than help us to move forward more fully alive and free, into the one thing that matters: our daily life and relationships. Meditation, like dialogue, assists us to name, and then to release.