emotion regulation

Making your emotion into a character or person can help you detach from the emotion. (pic credit :Andrii Shevchuk)

I often recommend watching the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out to people who feel overcome by their emotions or have trouble regulating them. The movie largely takes place inside the head of an 11-year-old girl who moves cities with her parents. She experiences a range of emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – that are depicted as characters. Joy was originally in the driving seat when the girl was born, but other characters/emotions take over at different stages of the story – with comic and dramatic effect.

Story aside, I regard Inside Out as a helpful metaphor for mental health. It shows that we can experience a range of emotions without having to become any of them. It also shows that we can have a relationship with all of our emotions, and it’s not necessary for us to identify with any one in particular. You can change your language to say that you’re having an angry moment (when Anger is in the driving seat, for example) rather than saying that you’re an angry person. That can feel liberating.

A new study takes this one step further and suggests that the act of making your emotions into a character or person, just as Inside Out did, can help you regulate and detach from the emotions (especially the negative ones). Researchers at the University of Texas Austin found that ‘anthropomorphic thinking’ – which means bringing an emotion to life, or thinking of an emotion as a person – can help you regulate that emotion.

They tested out anthropomorphic thinking by asking survey participants to write about a time when they felt very sad, with one group asked to bring sadness into life as if it were a person. They were then asked to rate their levels of sadness on a scale of one to seven. Findings showed lower levels of sadness the group that wrote about the emotion as a person. The effects were heightened if the emotion-as-a-person was perceived to be a completely separate, independent person.

The researchers said: “Based on research on emotion regulation and the psychological process of detachment, we show that individuals instructed to anthropomorphise sadness (i.e., think of sadness as a person) report less experienced sadness afterwards. We argue that this reduction of emotion occurs because anthropomorphic thinking increases the perceived distance between the self and the anthropomorphised emotion, thereby creating a feeling of detachment.”

So, the next time you feel overwhelmed by an emotion, try picking up a pen and writing a character sketch of this emotion to help you detach from it. But maybe stick to negative emotions: the strategy works in the same way for happy ones, too. So, if Joy is in your driving seat today, you may want to keep her close and let her be.

The research article When Sadness Comes Alive, Will It be Less Painful? The Effects of Anthropomorphic Thinking on Sadness Regulation and Consumption is published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

A summary of the research is published in Science Daily.

davanti counselling anxiety over generalisation

Anxious people tend to over-generalise in their response to emotional experiences. (pic courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net/StuartMiles)

If you suffer anxiety, chances are you’re more highly attuned to threats, and find it difficult to manage heightened emotion when you feel unsafe. New research shows that anxious people don’t just follow the “better safe than sorry” rule. It’s the way their brains work when it comes to discriminating between what’s threatening and what’s safe that’s the issue. In short, they ‘overgeneralise’

Researchers from the Weizzman Institute of Science in Israel asked people with anxiety to associate three different sound tones with three different outcomes. One was money loss, one money gain, and one was no consequence. They then heard new tones and had to decide if they’d heard the tone before. If correct, they won money. Anxious people were more likely to believe they’d heard one of the new tones earlier – and were more likely to mistake that tone for one associated with money loss or gain. No participant had a hearing issue, and so the difference in perception was due to linking differently to an emotional experience. In the real world, this means that anxious people don’t or can’t differentiate between new and old stimuli, and they can over-generalise an emotional experience whether it is new, old or threatening.

Study lead Rony Paz said: “Anxiety patients respond emotionally to such new stimuli as well, resulting in anxiety even in apparently irrelevant new situations. Importantly, they cannot control this, as it is a perceptual inability to discriminate.”

The study was reported on Science Daily from the full report published by Cell Press journal Current Biology.