Words give brain handle on feelings

[Mind's High Mailinglist]

http://dailyme.com/story/2009021400003665/

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scientists are starting to understand
something poets, songwriters and diarists have long known: putting
feelings into words helps ease the mind.

"It is a pretty well-established finding that this occurs, but we
don't know why," Matthew Lieberman of the University of California,
Los Angeles, said on Saturday at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

"When you put feelings into words, you are turning on the same regions
in the brain that are involved in emotional self-control," Lieberman
said.

"It regulates distress," said Lieberman, who studies the brain using
technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI,
which highlights brain regions as they become active.

Lieberman's findings are based on studies in which healthy subjects
lie in an MRI machine and view emotionally evocative pictures, such as
scared or angry faces. Study participants touch a button corresponding
to a word that expresses that emotion.

When study subjects put feelings into words in this way, the
researchers noted increased brain activity in the ventrolateral
prefrontal cortex, a brain region known for dampening negative
emotions.

At the same time, they saw decreases in activity in the amygdala, the
brain machinery responsible for processing feelings about
relationships and emotions like fear, rage and aggression.

Lieberman said this may explain why many teenagers and others take up
pen and paper when they are filled with angst.

"I think it certainly could play a role in why people of any age write
diaries or bad lyrics to songs," he said.

"That is certainly a possibility."

Lieberman said he is now doing studies to see how putting words into
feelings might help people who fear spiders or have anxiety disorders.