You probably know that friend who says "ugh, I'm so anxious right now" in the group chat, and someone quietly wonders if that's a bit much? Or maybe you are that friend. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that saying our feelings out loud is a little indulgent, like we should just keep it together and move on. Turns out, your brain may disagree.
In a 2007 study, ‘Putting Feelings Into Words,’ published in the journal Psychological Science, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and team found that the simple act of naming an emotion, known as “affect labeling,” was associated with calmer activity in the amygdala, the brain’s built-in alarm system for detecting threat.
This is not wellness-app-talk. It’s a peer-reviewed fMRI study, and it dovetails with something a lot of Americans already do without a second thought: texting a friend “not gonna lie, I’m spiraling,” journaling through a bad day, or telling a therapist exactly what’s wrong. For readers familiar with therapy language, that instinct has some neuroscience behind it.
What the study actually did
In the UCLA-led study, 30 adults viewed photographs of faces showing fear or anger while inside an MRI scanner. Across different rounds, they were asked to do different things with what they saw: sometimes they just looked at the face, sometimes they picked the word (like ‘angry’ or ‘scared’) that best matched the expression, and sometimes they matched the face to another face showing the same emotion, with no words used at all. The researchers also added several comparison tasks, such as matching faces by gender rather than emotion, to rule out other explanations for what they found.
