Impact of affect labelling as an implicit emotion regulation strategy on negative and positive emotions

Affect labelling is an implicit emotion regulation strategy, but its effectiveness across stimuli with different emotional valences and for different groups of individuals remains unclear. This study examined the impact of affect labelling on the processing of (1) general negative and positive stimuli in groups with high/low anxiety and depression, and (2) spider stimuli in groups with high/low spider fear. Participants viewed emotion pictures and were asked to select emotion words (affect labelling) or emotion images (affect matching) that best fit their emotional response. In a subsequent test, an odd/even number judgment task was presented on top of previously labelled, matched, or new stimuli. We hypothesised that affect labelling compared to matching would reduce emotional interference from the background stimuli (faster RT, higher accuracy). The results showed no advantages for labelling compared to matching. Rather, the reverse (negative pictures in experiment 1) or differences with new pictures were found, which could be explained by familiarity. Accuracy differences were only found for neutral pictures. The absence of a sustained effect of affect labelling contributes to other studies showing immediate rather than lasting benefits. An alternative explanation for the null effects is limited sensitivity of interference measures for assessing implicit emotion regulation.