Putting feelings into words, or “affect labeling,” can attenuate our emotional experiences. However, unlike explicit emotion regulation techniques, affect labeling may not even feel like a regulatory process as it occurs. Nevertheless, research investigating affect labeling has found it produces a pattern of effects like those seen during explicit emotion regulation, suggesting affect labeling is a form of implicit emotion regulation. In this review, we will outline research on affect labeling, comparing it to reappraisal, a form of explicit emotion regulation, along four major domains of effects—experiential, autonomic, neural, and behavioral—that establish it as a form of implicit emotion regulation. This review will then speculate on possible mechanisms driving affect labeling effects and other remaining unanswered questions.

When we think about emotion regulation, we likely think of a process that requires effort, whether physical or mental, that “removes” us in some way from the cause of our emotion. We might avert our eyes from a gruesome car crash or try convincing ourselves it isn’t as bad as it looks. Successful emotion regulation might be thought of as an escape from something that elicits an emotional response in us, eliminating our feelings by avoiding or changing the way we think about the eliciting stimulus. We probably would not think that focusing on our feelings without trying to change them could achieve the same effect. Emerging evidence depicts a surprising kind of emotion regulation: putting feelings into words, an act called “affect labeling,” can itself be a form of implicit emotion regulation. This notion about the benefits of talking about our feelings has existed in various forms including therapy (Esterling, L’Abate, Murray, & Pennebaker, 1999; Greenberg, 2002) and expressive writing (Pennebaker, 1993; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). Only over the past decade has affect labeling been focused upon specifically as a potential form of emotion regulation and tested within the lab.

Talking about our feelings or using emotional language to describe what upsets us does not necessarily feel like an exercise in emotion regulation. So how can we know if it is? One way is to see if engaging this behavior regulates emotional responses. When an individual experiences an emotion, it elicits loosely connected responses across experiential, physiological, and behavioral domains (Levenson, 2003; Mauss, Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2005). Emotion regulation is often conceptually defined as a manipulation of the quality, duration, or intensity of an emotion (Gross, 1998b; Gross & Thompson, 2007; Koole & Rothermund, 2011), which can be measured from emotion-related outputs in the aforementioned domains. A process engaged by an individual which necessarily modulates these primary channels of emotional output should be considered a kind of emotion regulation.

In this review, we will first establish the emotion regulatory effects of affect labeling by comparing it to a more well-studied form of emotion regulation, reappraisal, and discuss its merits as an implicit form of emotion regulation. Building from the extant research on affect labeling effects, we speculate on possible mechanisms through which affect labeling may operate. Finally, we highlight remaining open questions about affect labeling.

Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation Affect labeling has demonstrated a profile of regulatory effects that very closely resembles more widely accepted forms of emotion regulation, specifically reappraisal, despite seeming unlikely. In fact, people tend to have a strong lay theory that affect labeling shouldn’t work at all. When asked on a trial-by-trial basis how much distress they would feel in response to an aversive image, participants correctly predicted that they would feel less distress if they engaged in reappraisal but incorrectly predicted that they would feel more distress if they engaged in affect labeling, even when making these predictions after themselves reporting reduced distress during an actual affect labeling task (Lieberman et al., 2011). Individuals are largely unaware of the regulatory effects of affect labeling and allow these strong lay theories of how emotion regulation ought to work countermand their actual experiences with it. This impressive failure to accurately predict the direction of regulatory effects from affect labeling has an interesting implication for its placement within the larger emotion regulation literature. A defining characteristic of implicit emotion regulation is that it does not require conscious supervision or explicit intention, yet still alters an emotional experience (Koole & Rothermund, 2011). Given that individuals seem to believe affect labeling performs precisely the opposite to how it does, intent to regulate one’s emotions is not required for affect labeling to be effective and can operate even without a regulatory goal present. However, implicit forms of emotion regulation are also often thought not to require effort to deploy as is the case with habituation, fear extinction, or emotional conflict adaptation (Gyurak, Gross, & Etkin, 2011). Although it does not require intent to regulate an emotional experience for it to be effective, affect labeling is not effortless as it does require a conscious conversion of either the internal emotional experience or the external evocative stimulus into a linguistic symbol. In this way, affect labeling might feel like an explicit process because of the effort required, but its counterintuitive effects as a regulatory process without conscious awareness suggest it is indeed a form of emotion regulation, albeit an implicit one (Gyurak & Etkin, 2014).

Further Considerations Beyond understanding the mechanisms driving affect-labeling effects, many unanswered questions remain that require attention from future research. As interest and research in affect labeling grows, especially within the clinical domain, it becomes important to understand the limitations of affect labeling as an effective form of emotion regulation and acknowledge possible moderators and boundary conditions beyond which affect labeling may no longer be as effective. Further, understanding under what conditions affect labeling can and cannot operate may help identify the mechanisms which drive the effects and uncover ways to optimize the paradigm. As described in the section on Autonomic Consequences of Affect Labeling, some paradigms of affect-labeling tasks report delayed longer term effect without immediate reductions in affect-related signal, while other single-session paradigms did show immediate reductions. Interestingly, nearly all studies reporting only delayed effects required participants to self-generate the affect labels themselves rather than have them provided (e.g., describing felt emotions as they occur compared to selecting provided affect labels from word choices on a screen), while none of the studies reporting immediate decreases did. In fact, the only reported case where affect labeling significantly increased self-reported affect or autonomic arousal during the initial exposure also required participants to self-generate and verbalize their emotional experiences (Mendolia & Kleck, 1993; Ortner, 2015). Similarly, expressive writing, which often involves participants writing about emotions surrounding negative past events with relatively little instruction otherwise, also demonstrates long-term benefits up to months later, though it may also leave individuals feeling more negative affect immediately after writing sessions (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005; Esterling et al., 1999). Seemingly, when participants are provided affect labels to use, emotion regulation effects from affect labeling are observed immediately; however, when participants are required to self-generate the affect labels, emotion regulation effects are delayed and may even serve to temporarily increase reaction to the emotionally evocative stimulus. But the reason for this dichotomy remains unknown and, as of yet, untested. It could be that being provided labels is simply easier, reducing the choice space, making the labels more accessible, or even reducing need for introspection, any of which could possibly allow for individuals to more easily regulate their emotional responses in the moment. It is also possible that having labels provided encourages a kind of interpersonal emotion regulation process (Zaki & Williams, 2013) as the labels were provided by another individual (in these cases, the experimenter) and act as tacit signal of support or validation of the choices being made. It may also be that while self-generating labels may be more difficult and less effective in the immediate situation, those labels are ultimately more relevant to the individual generating them and lead to longer lasting effects as seen in expressive writing paradigms. As with any new topic of inquiry, a host of similar questions remain unanswered about affect labeling. Earlier it was mentioned that affect labeling describes applying labels to our own feelings, the feelings of others, or emotionally evocative objects. Differences among these kinds of affect labeling are largely unknown as to date and investigation of these differences presents a significant opportunity to understand more about affect labeling. In fact, we know of only one study which has attempted to identify differences among any of these types of affect labeling (McRae, Taitano, et al., 2010), which found that under certain conditions, such as duration of exposure and type of stimulus, labeling the object is more effective at reducing autonomic response than labeling one’s own feelings. Given the number of variables within this study, it is obvious that there may be many more important dimensions to affect labeling than have been studied and understood thus far. Additionally, some evidence suggests that using more affect-labeling words leads to better outcomes (Kircanski et al., 2012), yet other research demonstrated a curvilinear relationship suggesting that some usage of affect labels is beneficial but using none or using too many may be detrimental (Niles, Byrne Haltom, Lieberman, Hur, & Stanton, 2016). Is there such thing as an overusage of affect labeling? Or perhaps the issue is with the intensity of the emotion in question and a failure to regulate through affect labeling no matter how frequently it is applied. It has been shown in reappraisal that at higher levels of intensity, individuals prefer to engage in alternate regulation strategies like distraction (Shafir, Thiruchselvam, Suri, Gross, & Sheppes, 2016; Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011). How does the intensity of affect impact affect-labeling success? Several of the delayed time effects discussed earlier were found in clinical populations. By the very definition of a phobia, targeting the specific phobias of clinical patients may induce a higher intensity affective response than is typically seen in everyday life. Might this also help explain why immediate reductions were not seen? What role does choice have in affect labeling as an emotion regulation strategy when lay theories suggest it shouldn’t be effective? Are some individuals better suited to using affect labeling than others? Emotional granularity is our ability to distinguish and understand our emotional states at a higher level (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Smidt & Suvak, 2015). Because some forms of affect labeling rely on awareness of internal emotional states, would individuals who are better able to identify the specifics of their emotions, including perhaps what caused them, benefit more from affect labeling? Or would individuals with less understanding and awareness of their emotional states benefit more? If aiding the conscious appraisal and understanding of an emotional state is how affect labeling operates, then perhaps provided affect labels may be more advantageous to individuals with less emotional granularity. Throughout this review, we have demonstrated the number of effects that affect labeling has on primary domains of emotional responding, a profile shared by more explicit forms of emotion regulation, reappraisal in particular. We have discussed research in which affect labeling demonstrates reduced self-reported affect; reduced autonomic activity; activation of a nearly identical profile of neural regions such as increased activity in prefrontal control regions (especially vlPFC) along with decreased emotion-generative activity in the amygdala; and reduced emotion-related behavioral effects. We then considered how, despite the effort involved in converting perception of an emotion state or aversive stimulus into language, the regulatory effects of affect labeling are counterintuitive and unexpected and seem to operate outside awareness marking it as a form of implicit emotion regulation. Finally, we speculated on a number of possible mechanisms through which affect labeling may operate. Research on affect labeling as a form of implicit emotion regulation is still in its nascent stages; as research moves away from the basic finding that affect labeling can reduce emotional experiences, we will begin to see a clearer picture of how and why affect labeling works.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.