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Knowledge quiz
Emotions: how well do you know your feelings?
Does naming a feeling help? Is venting anger good for you? Do we get grumpier with age? Ten quick questions about emotions, checked against published research and the APA.
Just for reflection and learning — not a test or a diagnosis.
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Sources
- Lieberman MD, et al. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 2007.
- NHS. Mindfulness.
- Nummenmaa L, et al. Bodily maps of emotions. PNAS, 2014.
- Gross JJ, Levenson RW. Hiding feelings: the acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1997.
- American Psychological Association (APA). Control anger before it controls you.
- Verduyn P, et al. The relation between event processing and the duration of emotional experience. Emotion, 2011.
- Verduyn P, et al. Predicting the duration of emotional experience: two experience sampling studies. Emotion, 2009.
- Carstensen LL, et al. Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling. Psychology and Aging, 2011.
- Barrett LF, et al. Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2019.
Common questions
Does naming your emotions help?
Research suggests it can. In a brain-scan study, putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala, which reacts to emotional images.
Is it healthy to vent anger?
Not by “letting it rip.” The APA says that kind of venting tends to escalate anger. Expressing anger calmly and assertively, and using slow breathing, works better.
How long do emotions last?
Anywhere from a few seconds to several hours or longer. Feelings tend to last longer when we keep replaying what caused them.