Expressing your emotions honestly reduces fearas has just been shown by a study by the University of California (USA) published in the journalPsychological Science.
According to the authors, naming emotions when faced with a fear can make it disappear. In their experiments, Michelle Craske and her colleagues worked with subjects with a certain fear of spiders and studied their reaction to contact with a live tarantula. Some voiced expressions such as “I feel anxiety and fear for this ugly and terrifying spider,” while others were asked to soften their emotions with phrases such as “that spider can’t do anything to me and I’m not afraid of it.” After a week, the participants returned to face the animal and were asked to try to touch it with a finger while its physiological response was measured, especially how their hands were sweating. Those who had expressed their fearful emotions the way they felt them the first time managed to get closer to the tarantula, and even touch it, and suffered less anxiety than the rest.
Although they still do not understand why this phenomenon is due, the researchers say that admitting fear out loud and expressing emotions can help us change them or, at least, soften them. Analyzing the exact words that individuals used to describe their experience, they found thatthose who had reduced their fear the fastest were those who used the most negative wordsto describe the arachnid. According to Craske, this is the first study to show that “theemotional labeling of fear and anxietyin a real-world setting it has positive effects. ”The researchers will now look at how this strategy could help people who have suffered trauma, such as victims of abduction or domestic violence.
