Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

psychologist Dr. Matthew Lieberman of UCLA spearheaded a study where he and his colleagues scanned the brains of thirty people who were shown pictures of faces expressing strong emotions, such as sorrow and despair. Initially, activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is associated with fear, panic, and other intense emotions, increased dramatically. Yet, when people were able to connect a word with a facial expression, such as the word anger to describe an angry face, brain activity decreased significantly. Dr. Lieberman concludes that the ability to label our feelings “seems to dampen down the response in these basic emotional circuits of the brain. What lights up instead is the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls impulses.” Apparently, the unassuming act of putting a label on each of our feelings, called “affect labeling” by psychologists, lowers arousal and puts us back in the driver’s seat of our lives.