Less is more? Effects of exhaustive vs. minimal emotion labelling on emotion regulation strategy planning

ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that labelling emotions, or describing affective states using emotion words, facilitates emotion regulation. But how much labelling promotes emotion regulation? And which emotion regulation strategies does emotion labelling promote? Drawing on cognitive theories of emotion, we predicted that labelling emotions using fewer words would be less confusing and would facilitate forms of emotion regulation requiring more cognitively demanding processing of context. Participants (N = 82) mentally immersed themselves in an emotional vignette, were randomly assigned to an exhaustive or minimal emotion labelling manipulation, and then completed an emotion regulation strategy planning task. Minimal (vs. exhaustive) emotion labelling promoted higher subjective emotional clarity. Furthermore, in terms of specific emotion regulation strategies, minimal emotion labelling prompted more plans for problem solving and marginally more plans for reappraisal, but did not affect plans for behavioural activation or social support seeking. We discuss implications for the cognitive mechanisms supporting the generation of emotion regulation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotion regulation
• affect labelling
• emotion labelling
• emotional clarity

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

ORCID

Vera Vine http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-1920

Emily E. Bernstein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8609-3153

Notes

1. Coders were provided with the following examples for each type of feeling: for anger-type words, “e.g. Irritated, mad, frustrated;” for fear/anxiety-type, “e.g. Scared, worried, concerned;” for sadness-type, “e.g. Disappointed, down, lonely, alone;” and for embarrassment/shame-type, “e.g. Humiliated, embarrassed, silly.”

2. The effect sizes obtained for the different emotion regulation strategies were variable, and some were quite small. For the significant effect found on problem solving, the effect size can be considered medium, and observed power was adequate (.69). Although it appeared that our manipulation did not affect behavioral activation or social support seeking, it should be noted that the small sizes of these effects mean these tests were drastically underpowered (e.g. Achieved power for effects on behavioral activation was .15). Thus, adequately powered replications are needed before we can confirm the specificity of the effects of emotion labeling to some emotion regulation strategies and not others.

3. One interesting observation this afforded is the large proportion of behavioral activation and social support seeking strategies in our sample, which may point to the importance the understudied “overt” emotion regulation strategies (i.e., Strategies in the form of observable behaviors; Aldao & Dixon-Gordon, 2014).

4. Our participants tended to select the 5th or 6th strategy on their list as most likely and most effective, suggesting the first strategy participants think of might not actually be the one they would choose in the real world.