Do we still have to talk about our feelings? (Co-supervisor: Daniel C Richardson)
Verbal ‘affective labeling’ and ‘reappraisal’ of emotional events can decrease the emotional salience
of those events and improve mental and physiological health. How? A slew of social neuroscience
studies (e.g., Burklund et al., 2014) show that affective labeling and reappraisal increase prefrontal
and ventral premotor activity while decreasing amygdala activity, a subcortical structure that is
significantly expanded in humans and that has long been linked to social and emotional life. We,
however, recently found that simply listening to any (e.g., non-affective) but less predictable
sentences (e.g., ‘She was discussing the frogs.’) also increases prefrontal and premotor activity while
decreasing amygdala activity. Many of the prefrontal and premotor cortices are the same as those
that might be involved in speech production. Furthermore, in a recent behavioral study, we showed
that the same sentences as used in this brain study also lead participants to rate emotional pictures
that follow those sentences as being less emotional. This suggests that any language that engages
brain regions involved in speech production will decrease emotional reactivity, regardless of why
those regions were engaged or the content of the language itself. In this project we wish to conduct
further behavioral studies to test this hypotheses. In particular, we might manipulate aspects of
spoken, read and produced language to determine what is driving the effect. In addition, we would
like to see how specific the effect is to language, e.g., can you just open and close you mouth and
decrease emotional reactivity? What about opening and closing your hand?