Yesterday I posted about the power of language in understanding how you feel.
After posting, I stumbled upon a study with this gem of a sentence:
In an interpretation of the Buddha’s original discourse on mindfulness, Analayo…described how labeling one’s emotions through words promotes more effective recognition of, detachment from, and regulation of affective experiences.
The study aimed to see connections between mindfulness and neuroscience activity. Participants were asked to choose the one of two words (e.g., angry, sad) that described the face in the picture, while being subjected to fMRI, amongst other controls. What the study found was that labeling one’s affects (or putting words to how one feels) may reduce negative affect and promote greater health.
These findings build on previous emotion regulation findings (e.g., 13,14,16) and suggest that mindfulness may be associated with enhancements in these neural affect regulation pathways. Further, these findings are consistent with historical accounts of mindfulness, which suggest that affect labeling practices encourage individuals to treat affective states as “objects” of attention, thus promoting a certain amount of detachment from these negative states.
That’s what I call scientifically Buddha-backed.