Managing a feeling

The same pounding heart

Your heart is pounding, your breath is quick, your palms are damp, and your stomach is tight. Is this fear, excitement, anger, or the first moments of falling in love? The body’s signals alone do not settle it. You are standing at the edge of a stage, or opening a message from your boss, or looking across a table at someone new, and the signals are the same in each case. What differs is the story you tell about them.

In 1962 two psychologists, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, built an experiment around that idea. Male undergraduates at the University of Minnesota were told they were testing the effects of a vitamin compound, “Suproxin,” on vision, and were given an injection. For most of them it was epinephrine, the hormone also called adrenaline, which makes the heart race and the hands shake. A few received salt water. Some of the epinephrine group were told what the shot would really do; others were told nothing, and others were told to expect side effects such as numbness and itching, which were false. Then each student waited in a room with another “subject” who was really an actor. In one version the actor was cheerfully silly, shooting paper basketballs at the wastebasket, flying paper airplanes, and playing with a hula hoop. In another he grew angrier and angrier over a long, increasingly personal questionnaire and finally tore it up.

The paper reported that students who had no explanation for their racing hearts were more likely to take on the mood of the room, euphoric or angry, than those who had been told the shot would make their hearts race. The conclusion became a textbook idea, the “two-factor theory” of emotion: a bodily state of arousal plus a label supplied by the situation.

A second classic has had a similar career. In 1974 Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron stopped young men who had just crossed either a long, swaying footbridge about 230 feet (70 meters) above a river in North Vancouver, the Capilano Suspension Bridge, or a low, solid bridge over a small stream. An attractive woman interviewer asked each man to write a short story to a picture, then tore off a corner of paper, wrote her name and phone number on it, and said he was welcome to call. Nine of the 18 men from the high bridge who took a number called, against 2 of the 16 from the low bridge, and their stories had more sexual imagery. The suggestion was that the men mistook the bridge’s thrill for attraction. But the groups chose their own bridge, the cells were tiny, a version with a male interviewer showed no difference, and several later attempts to reproduce the result failed or found it only under special conditions. A 2003 study at amusement parks did find that people leaving a roller coaster rated a stranger’s photo as more attractive than people waiting in line, but only when they rode with someone other than a romantic partner. It is a good story. It is not a law.

Naming it

Even if the experiments were shaky, the idea behind them, that an emotion is partly an interpretation, is widely held. The “appraisal” tradition in psychology, associated with Magda Arnold, Richard Lazarus, and Klaus Scherer, says that what you feel depends on how you size up a situation: does it matter to my goals, is it going my way, who is responsible, can I cope? The same event can therefore produce different feelings. You overhear someone discussing your work at a party. If it is your boss, you may freeze. If it is a junior colleague, you may stride over and say, “See me tomorrow.” The sound was the same.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett goes further. In her “theory of constructed emotion,” the brain does not have a ready-made circuit for each emotion that fires when it is triggered. It predicts what the body’s signals mean, using concepts learned from experience and culture, and “fear” or “anger” is the category it settles on. Some evidence supports this: a 2012 meta-analysis found little sign that each emotion category maps cleanly onto its own brain region, and in 2019 a review led by Barrett concluded that people’s faces do not show emotions in the reliable, one-to-one way that popular accounts assume. Others disagree, and a large 2017 study of emotional videos found that people use about 27 categories with fuzzy edges between them. The question is open. The practical point does not depend on it: the words you have for a feeling shape what you can do with it.

That is the logic behind “affect labeling,” a finding from the laboratory of Matthew Lieberman. In a 2007 brain-imaging study of 30 people, those who put a name to the emotion on a face they were looking at (“angry” or “fearful”) showed less activity in the amygdala, and more in a region of the right prefrontal cortex, than those who only picked a first name for the same face. Later work has been more mixed. In a study of 88 people who were afraid of spiders, those who described their feelings in words while facing a spider showed a bigger drop in skin sweating a week later than those who used other strategies, but they did not report less fear. Other studies find that labeling helps about as much as distraction or rethinking, and that it can also dampen pleasant feelings. Naming a feeling is not a cure. It seems to take a little of the heat out of it, and it is free.

The lid and the lens

If feelings are partly interpreted, there are two broad ways to manage one. You can change what you do with it, or you can change what it means. The psychologist James Gross of Stanford sorted the possibilities along a timeline. Early ones change the situation. Late ones change the response. His two best-studied strategies sit at opposite ends. Suppression is a late strategy: the feeling arises and you hide its signs, keeping your face and voice still, like a lid pressed on a pot. Reappraisal is an early one: you change how you read the situation, like changing the lens on a camera, before the feeling has fully formed.

Gross and Robert Levenson tested suppression in 1993 by showing 85 people a disgusting film. Those told to hide their reactions did show less on their faces. But their felt disgust was unchanged, and measurements showed signs of more sympathetic arousal, such as more frequent blinking. A 1998 experiment with 120 people found that reappraisal worked differently: told to think about the film in a way that would make them feel less, people felt less disgust as well as showing less. Hiding a feeling, in this research, mainly hides the display.

The costs showed up elsewhere too. In experiments by Jane Richards and Gross, people who suppressed their reactions to emotional material remembered it worse afterward, as if holding the lid down used up attention. In a study by Emily Butler and colleagues, pairs of women who did not know each other discussed an upsetting topic; when one of them suppressed her emotions, the other’s blood pressure rose and they got on less well. And a 2002 brain-imaging study by Kevin Ochsner and colleagues found that when people reinterpreted upsetting photos so they felt less negative, activity rose in prefrontal regions and fell in the amygdala, consistent with the top-down control that the first lesson’s “slow road” predicts. A meta-analysis of 306 comparisons in 2012 found that reappraisal reduced negative feeling by a small-to-moderate amount, while suppression reduced expression but not experience.

Reappraisal can take a very simple form. In a 2010 study, students preparing for the graduate-school exam known as the GRE were told that the arousal they felt under pressure can help performance. They scored higher on the math section of a practice test, and, in a follow-up one to three months later, on the real exam. In 2014 Alison Wood Brooks found that people who told themselves “I am excited,” instead of trying to calm down, did better at karaoke singing, public speaking, and a math test. These are promising studies of modest size. They are an example of reading the same racing heart as readiness instead of danger, not a proof that mindset conquers anxiety.

When a low mood loops

Some feelings do not pass. They loop. A person turns over the same question, why do I feel like this, what is wrong with me, why did I say that, and the turning seems to be thinking but does not move anywhere. Psychologists call it rumination. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, who studied it for decades, found that people who respond to low mood by dwelling on it stay low longer and are more likely to develop depression than people who distract themselves or act. A neat natural experiment came on 17 October 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area at 5:04 in the afternoon, about half an hour before the third game of the World Series. Nolen-Hoeksema and Benita Morrow had questioned 137 university students two weeks earlier. Ten days and seven weeks after the quake they asked again. Students who had a ruminative style, and who dwelt on the quake in the first days, were still more depressed and stressed seven weeks later, even after their earlier mood was taken into account. Women score a little higher than men on rumination in a pooled analysis of 59 studies, but the difference is small.

Nolen-Hoeksema also noted that rumination does not help people solve their problems. It crowds out the actions that might, and it wears down social support. That may be why a low mood so often lifts when you do something. The best-tested form is behavioral activation: planning small, concrete, mildly pleasant or useful activities and doing them even when you do not feel like it. In a 2016 trial in England, 440 adults with depression were treated either with behavioral activation delivered by junior mental-health workers or with cognitive behavioral therapy delivered by psychological therapists. After a year the two groups did equally well. Reviews of exercise find a moderate benefit for depression, but with weak study quality: the large 2023 review of 97 earlier reviews found a median effect size of −0.43, and a 2024 network meta-analysis found walking, jogging, yoga, and strength training all helped, with very low to low certainty because the trials were small and imperfect. A 90-minute walk in a natural setting reduced rumination, and activity in a part of the prefrontal cortex tied to it, in a small 2015 study, while a walk beside a busy road did not.

Doing something that gives you a choice may help for a different reason. In a set of studies on “retail therapy,” people who were made sad and then made purchase decisions, even hypothetical ones, were less sad afterward than people who made no choices, apparently because choosing restores a sense of control. It did not help with anger, it was a laboratory effect, and it says nothing in favor of shopping as a habit. But it fits the pattern: a small action that restores a sense of agency can break the loop.

What the brain story gets right, and what it adds

Popular accounts of depression tend to tell it as a brain-circuit story: the amygdala fires, the hippocampus supplies reasons, and a part of the cingulate cortex holds the loop shut. Each part is real, but the neat version goes beyond the evidence. A worldwide consortium scanned about 8,900 people and found that the hippocampus is, on average, about 1 percent smaller in those with a history of depression. That is a small difference, and it was not present in a first episode; the groups overlap almost entirely, so no brain scan can diagnose depression in one person. A stricter pooling of 99 imaging experiments found no region that reliably lit up differently in depression across studies. A region of the cingulate cortex deep beneath the front of the brain looked like a promising target, and in 2005 Helen Mayberg’s team reported that electrical stimulation there lifted the mood of four of six patients with severe depression who had not responded to other treatments. In the large controlled trial that followed, 20 percent of those with active stimulation responded after six months, against 17 percent of those with the device switched off: no meaningful difference. It is a good example of a neat circuit story that did not survive a proper test.

Mood does bias memory. When you are sad, sad memories and failures come to mind more easily, and neutral events look gloomy. This “mood-congruent” memory shows up in many experiments, though not all (in 41 of 66 laboratory experiments in one review). The memories can be real. The selection is what is biased. People with depression also tend to recall their past in general terms rather than as specific episodes, and that habit, too, predicts a somewhat slower recovery. The brain is not inventing reasons so much as fishing in a pond that the mood has stocked.

The chemistry story is the one most often repeated and most often garbled. It is true that about 90 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the gut, where it helps move food along and regulates platelets, and that it is generally said not to cross into the brain, which makes its own. It is not true that the gut’s serotonin sets your mood. And the idea that depression is caused by a shortage of brain serotonin has not been established: a 2022 review of the evidence, by Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues, found no consistent support for it, which drew sharp replies from other psychiatrists that the theory had never been so simple. What is solid is that antidepressants do work, on average, better than placebo: a 2018 analysis of 522 trials with 116,477 people found that all 21 drugs it covered beat placebo, by a modest margin (an effect size of about 0.3). The “chemical imbalance” story was never proved, and the drugs are not useless. Do not stop a medication without talking to the doctor who prescribed it.