A new study has found that the act of describing a feeling such as anger may have a significant impact on the body's physiological response to the situation that elicits the emotion.
Participants in the study by Karim Kassam from Carnegie Mellon University and Wendy Mendes from the University of California San Francisco, were asked to complete a difficult math task in the presence of evaluators trained to offer negative feedback as they worked through the assignment.
Negative feedback was designed to elicit anger in some participants and shame in others.
At the end of the task, participants were given a questionnaire that appraised their feelings (e.g. How angry are you right now?), or a set of neutral questions that did not assess their emotional state.
In the "anger" condition, participants who completed the questionnaire about emotional state had different physiological responses, measured by heart rate changes, compared to those who answered neutral questions.
Among these participants, reporting on one's emotional state was associated with a smaller increase in heart rate compared to not reporting on it.
The research is published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
