Naming feelings: what the research supports
The short version: Children who understand and name emotions better tend to get on better with others and have somewhat fewer behavior problems — a consistent but modest link. The popular "name it to tame it" idea comes from a study in adults.
The studies
Trentacosta, C. J., & Fine, S. E. (2010). Emotion knowledge, social competence, and behavior problems in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Social Development, 19(1), 1–29. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00543.x · free full text
Who was studied: Many studies of children and adolescents, pooled together.
Design: Meta-analysis
What they found: Children's ability to recognize and understand specific emotions had small to medium-sized links with better social competence and fewer internalizing (anxious, sad) and externalizing (acting-out) problems. The links were consistent across studies, but modest.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
Who was studied: A small group of adults.
Design: Brain imaging (fMRI) experiment
What they found: When people put a word to the emotion in an image, activity in the amygdala — a brain region involved in alarm — went down, and a region of the prefrontal cortex became more active, compared with other ways of processing the same images.
How strong is the evidence?
The link between emotion knowledge and social skills is well established but correlational — it doesn't prove that teaching feeling words causes better behavior. The brain study is careful, but it's in adults.
What these studies don't show
- They don't show that a feelings chart alone changes behavior. The link is with understanding emotions, which grows through conversation.
- They don't show what happens in a young child's brain — the imaging was done in adults, so for children it's an analogy.
What it means for parents
- Go beyond happy, sad and angry: disappointed, left out, nervous, proud. More precise words give a child more to work with.
- Name your own feelings in passing — "I'm frustrated, I'm going to take a breath."
- Ask about characters' feelings in books; it's a safe place to practice.
Weather Inside (lesson 5) builds a feelings vocabulary through weather — including "fog" for "I don't know what I feel".