Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Putting feelings into words can dampen emotions, reducing the distress elicited by aversive stimuli. Across two experi-ments, we explored whether the effectiveness of such affect labeling depends on the concreteness of the label. Whereasconcrete labels (e.g., blood) may amplify negative emotions via perceptual reactivation, more abstract labels (e.g., danger)may distance the labeler from the source of emotional distress, thus alleviating negative affect. We investigated this pro-posal by having participants passively watch distressing images or label the same images with either concrete or abstractlabels. We found that abstract labels yielded a greater reduction in participants self-reported distress (compared to passivewatching) than concrete labels. These results suggest that not all labels are equally effective as emotion buffers: abstractlabels enable us to better separate ourselves from our negative feelings.