EMOTIONS AT WORK
Exploring how language shapes, influences and regulates emotion.
Surely the most confusing, wonderful, infuriating, exciting, occasionally downright depressing part of being human is our ability to feel emotions. Yes, each day it’s all aboard a rollercoaster of feels for a thrillingly unpredictable ride through the highs and lows. A whitewater rafting expedition through turbulent rivers of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine.
Yet for such an inherently human condition, until recently, emotions have been an area of much debate and very little scientific evidence. The challenge has been in taking intangible, complex, highly personal and difficult-to-define feelings, and expressing them in words.
Fortunately, advances in brain imaging have allowed us to observe the intimacies of brain activity, a method far less prone to differences in interpretation. And the resulting research has uncovered a fascinating relationship between language and emotions.
Why does this matter?
Well, if humans are filled with emotions, and our workplaces are filled with humans, understanding how language influences emotions should be a fundamental part of any leader’s skillset.
Putting words into feelings and feelings into words
Let’s begin with the question: how do language and emotions interact? Which comes first — words or feelings? Oh yes, it’s the age-old chicken-and-egg scenario here.
We’ll roll with the well-worn and most-proven psychological constructionist approach: language helps constitute emotion.
Studies show that when we’re experiencing emotions, various language areas in our brain are active, even when we aren’t using words to express how we feel. This suggests that language might do more than simply translate our feelings into words, it might also help shape those emotions to begin with.
Supporting this idea, when we’re unable to access language, we find it more difficult to identify emotions, even when our response doesn’t require words. And there’s evidence that increased access to language during a negative emotion can change the way we experience it.
Language also helps us learn and categorise emotions, even when they’re unfamiliar.
Psychologists Fugate, Gouzoules and Barrett showed a group of participants pictures of chimpanzees with various facial expressions. Half the group were shown the same images, but labelled with nonsense words. Later, both groups were shown images extracted from a morphed sequence between two expressions (a hoot to bared teeth, or bared teeth to a grin). They were asked to identify when two faces in the array showed the same emotion, and when they were different.
The group that had learned to associate the expressions with labels found the task easier, and were more likely to see the boundary between the different expressions. It didn’t matter if the words weren’t real; simply having a word to associate with the emotion made the difference.
On a more lowbrow note, I was especially delighted to discover that swearing not only effectively expresses our emotions, but can also amplify them. Oh yes, a good verbal ejaculation of filthy expletives can actually intensify your feelings. Feeling joyous? Want to feel more joyous? Just bellow a fiery ‘F*CK YEAH!’ and ride that post-profanity high.
You’re welcome.
Regulating emotions
The way we think about an emotion can also change the way we experience it. We can consciously change the intensity, meaning or expression of our experience by recategorising our emotional state. This is a psychology technique known as reappraisal.
Let’s say we were quivering at the top of a diving board, paralysed by fear. We could recategorise our feeling from ‘terrified’ to ‘exhilarated’. Neuroimaging shows that when we reappraise an experience, there’s activity in our ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices — areas associated with semantic knowledge and retrieval. This indicates that language is playing a role in changing our emotion.
It’s also possible to regulate our emotions simply by identifying them—a concept in psychology called affect labelling.
Psychologists Pennebaker, Lieberman and pals showed research participants facial expressions with strong emotions. Using an fMRI, they observed that the images elicited a strong response in the amygdala, an area associated with emotion — particularly fear.
Interestingly though, when participants were asked to label the emotion, activity decreased in the amygdala and increased in the prefrontal cortical regions, where vigilance and discrimination occur. Naming the emotion transferred it into an object of objective scrutiny, rather than something to be afraid of and react to emotionally.
Of course, if you regularly practise mindfulness, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. The concept of affect labelling certainly isn’t confined to psychology, and it definitely isn’t new. It’s known by many names, and the fundamentals used in numerous techniques.
In many forms of mindfulness, practitioners label their psychological state with a word. Feelings, senses and emotions are observed without judgement, and without trying to change or eliminate them. Not surprisingly, these forms of mindfulness produce the same brain activity as affect labelling experiments in psychology.
Whether it’s mindfulness techniques, journaling or telling kids to ‘use your words!’, it’s proven that writing or talking about emotions can help reduce the intensity and reduce stress, and offer a whole bunch of other benefits.
