Affect labeling as a buffer: reducing anxiety in the face of violent news

ABSTRACT

Affect labelling, the process of putting feelings into words, has been shown to have a calming effect on the brain. This study examines the impact of affect labelling on self-reported levels of anxiety after exposure to distressing news. We conducted an online experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either a control group or a treatment group. Both groups were exposed to news about a violent crime and then asked to report their level of anxiety. The treatment group also went through a questionnaire to label their feelings before reporting their anxiety level. We found that self-reported anxiety levels were significantly lower in the treatment group, suggesting that affect labelling can be an effective tool for reducing anxiety generated by negative news.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect labelling
• emotional regulation
• anxiety
• mental health

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D91
• I10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declaration

The online experiment reported in this paper was not a clinical trial, represented no risk of any kind for participants, and no individual data of subjects is exposed. For these reasons, there was no need for approval from an ethics committee. The experiment was approved by the AEA RCT Registry under the identification number AEARCTR-0011142.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2024.2308569.

Notes

¹ Alongside depression, anxiety disorders cost US$1 trillion per year to the world economy (World Health Organization 2016).

² This dates back at least to Breuer and Freud (1995). For a detailed history, see King et al. (2013).

³ Lieberman et al. (2011) is closest to our paper as they examine the impact of affect labelling on self-reported distress in their Study 1. Our main contribution is to provide a simple, online implementation of affect labelling and show that it has an impact on anxiety generated by typical media news, as opposed to their structured, lab-based implementation. Additionally, we have a between-subjects design, while they use a within-subjects experiment.

⁴ Vine et al. (2019) analyzes the impact of minimal affect labelling, as opposed to an exhaustive one, on emotional response, and in this sense is similar to our paper. While they use a guided-image procedure to evaluate how it affects emotional clarity, we focus on real news and its effect on anxiety.

⁵ The appendix describes the details.

⁶ Mundorf et al. (1990) finds that the presentation of disturbing news has an impact of three minutes.

⁷ Strictly speaking, in our experimental design $Y_i$ is a measure of calmness, not anxiety, as described in the appendix: a higher figure indicates the participant feels calmer. For ease of exposition, we choose to present it as a measure of anxiety, meaning that the regression equation is multiplied by -1. Hence we report all coefficients multiplied by -1.

⁸ The appendix describes how these variables were defined.

⁹ See Athey and Imbens (2017, section IV) for a discussion of controls in randomized experiments.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Grant E-26/211.157/2019(251190)].