By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter
Putting feelings into words makes sadness and anger less intense, according to U.S. brain researchers on Thursday.
They said naming negative feelings activates a part of the brain that is in charge of impulse control.
Los Angeles brain researcher Matthew Lieberman at the University of California and his colleagues scanned the brains of 30 people, consisting of 18 women and 22 men aged between 18 and 36, who were shown pictures of faces expressing strong emotions. The results of the study were published in the U.S. journal Psychological Science.
The participants were asked to categorize the feelings in words like sad or angry, or to choose between two gender-specific names like ``Harry’’ or ``Sally’’ that matched each face.
It turned out that when people matched a word like sad to a sad-looking face, the response in the amygdala portion of the brain that deals with panic, fear and other strongly negative emotions decreased.
The findings revealed that while putting emotions into words decreases the response in those basic emotional circuits in the brain, it lights up the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is part of the brain that controls impulses.
``This is the only region in your brain which is more active when you choose an emotion word for the picture than when you choose a name for the picture,’’ said Lieberman.
The brain researchers did not discover significant differences along gender lines, but Lieberman said previous studies showed some differences in the benefits men and women acquire by talking about their feelings.
"While women may do more of this spontaneously, men are taught to do it, which makes them get more benefit from it," he said.
He said that the results might alter the traditional view of why talking about feelings helps.
"I think we all believe that by talking about our feelings, we reach deep new insights, and that understanding is what transforms us," he said.
"What we see is something that at first blush is far more trivial. By simply putting the name to an emotion, the person does not feel like they have come to any new insight. And yet we see this dampening response anyway."