Feel it, Label it, Change it?
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Emotion regulation is important in everyday life because it helps people manage their feelings. We investigated how two forms of emotion regulation shape emotional experience and brain activity. The first part of the thesis focused on reappraisal, an explicit strategy in which people consciously change how they think about a situation to reduce its emotional impact. Participants reported feeling less negative when using reappraisal. However, brain activity showed an opposite pattern than expected: instead of decreasing emotional responses in the brain, reappraisal was linked to increased brain activity, which may reflect sustained attention to emotional information and continued evaluation of its meaning. The second part examined affect labeling, an implicit strategy involving putting feelings into words. Across several experiments, this strategy did not consistently reduce negative emotional responses in behavior, self-reports, or brain activity during later re-exposure phases following the labeling task. This suggests that simply labeling emotions may not lead to lasting changes in emotional responses. The final part of the thesis showed systematic differences in how emotional images were rated when comparing published norm data with ratings from a Dutch sample. This highlights that emotional responses can vary across populations and validation of experimental materials is important. Overall, the thesis shows how reappraisal and affect labeling can influence emotional experience and brain responses under laboratory conditions. Reappraisal reliably alters how people feel, although its neural effects are more complex, while affect labeling does not appear to produce stable long-term changes. However, effects during labeling cannot be ruled out.
DOI: 10.33540/3554
Author: Jinyu Chen
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7163896002