People in distress are often told to try to say exactly how they feel. Despite this, recent empirical work found that emotion naming actually interfered with emotion regulation, such that participants who named their emotions before regulating (via reappraisal or acceptance) reported feeling worse than those who did not name their emotions before regulating. This may have occurred because naming one’s emotions “crystallized” them and thus impeded regulation. Importantly, this previous study was only conducted using college undergraduate participants, but age may be an important moderator due to theorized age-related changes in emotional goals, as well as changes in emotion regulation knowledge and behaviors across the lifespan. The current study replicated the procedures of the original emotion naming study in a new sample of younger adults (18-25 years, N=68) and older adults (60+ years, N=68). We hypothesized that we would replicate the original findings that emotion naming generally impedes regulation, however we also hypothesized a three-way interaction between age, naming, and regulating, such that older adults would not be detrimentally impacted by naming their emotions prior to regulation, but younger adults would. In contrast, we failed to replicate the original finding and instead found that, across our entire sample, naming made people feel worse on both regulation and non-regulation trials (i.e., naming did not impede regulation exclusively). We also did not find a three-way interaction, but instead found that age and naming interacted such that naming emotions aloud made older adults feel even worse than younger adults. These findings expand prior work by suggesting that emotion naming can have broadly negative emotional consequences regardless of regulatory context, and that older adults– despite often being viewed as expert emotion regulators– may in fact be more vulnerable to the emotional costs of labeling their feelings.
Wolfe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.