When Feeling Gets a Name

When Words Begin to Trap Us

In the previous text, we stayed for a while before the word. We observed a body that learns, imitates, differentiates, approaches, withdraws, and participates before being able to explain exactly what is happening.

Now we can move a little further.

Something happened.

Our heart accelerated. Our body became lighter or heavier. We felt the urge to approach, escape, stay, embrace, argue, or simply remain silent.

Then someone asks:

"What are you feeling?"

Perhaps we hesitate for a few seconds.

"Fear."

"Anxiety."

"Love."

"Anger."

"Shame."

We find a word.

And something changes.

The word did not enter an empty space. It encountered an experience that was already taking place. But as it encountered that experience, it also began to organize it.

This is where the central question of this text emerges:

What happens to an experience when we need to make it fit inside a word?

Perhaps naming is a form of cutting

We can explore this with something simpler.

Imagine a band of color slowly shifting from blue to purple. At some point, someone asks:

"Is this still blue, or is it already purple?"

At the extremes, the answer may seem easy. In the middle, perhaps not.

Danilo Silva Guimarães draws on a similar experience when reflecting on perception, ambiguity, and social life. He recalls a task involving color gradients in which, at certain points, it was no longer obvious where one color ended and another began. He then expands the question: coexistence, social practices, and environmental conditions can train different ways of perceiving, distinguishing, and naming what we encounter.

The color did not need to change abruptly for language to demand a boundary.

Perhaps something similar happens when we say:

"fear."

Where exactly does fear end and anxiety begin?

When does admiration become love?

Where does indignation differ from anger?

When does calmness become what we call peace?

We do not need to conclude that all words are arbitrary or that no real distinctions exist. We only need to notice that a word creates a boundary that is useful enough for us to relate to an experience that may be more continuous, mixed, and ambivalent than the name suggests.

Naming may be necessary.

But naming is not photographing.

It is making a cut.

The word we find already has a history

When we say "fear," we did not invent that word at that moment.

It was already here.

It was used by our parents, teachers, friends, books, songs, religions, health professionals, and the people with whom we grew up.

Along with it came examples of when we should feel fear, who could show it, when feeling it might be considered shameful, and what we should do afterward.

In 2022, Marta Rizo García, a researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, argued that communication, body, and emotions need to be thought about together. Her work on the affective turn questions the idea that emotions are purely internal events, separated from the social relationships through which they acquire expression and meaning.

Brazilian researchers studying emotions in early childhood education have approached a similar question from another direction. Jéssica Bispo Batista, Juliana Campregher Pasqualini, and Giselle Modé Magalhães discuss how children's affective development takes place within concrete social relationships and how cultural meanings progressively begin to mediate their relationship with the world.

Perhaps, then, the movement is not simply:

the body feels -> the mind discovers the correct word.

It may be more circular:

the body feels -> we find a word available in our culture -> the word organizes the experience -> we also learn to feel and interpret through that organization.

The word does not only emerge from feeling.

Once learned, it can return to feeling.

What if another language had arrived first?

This question can stay with us without requiring linguistic determinism.

We are not claiming that speaking another language automatically produces a different brain or makes it impossible to understand what people from other cultures feel.

We are asking something more modest:

If we had learned different words, distinctions, and metaphors from early childhood, would we organize all our experiences in exactly the same way?

Probably not.

A study published in 2023 compared 960 Brazilian and British participants and found differences between the groups in beliefs about emotional experience and emotional expression. The authors are careful not to suggest that there is a single homogeneous "Brazilian emotion." Rather, their findings indicate that cultural context participates in the beliefs we develop about how emotions should be experienced, controlled, or expressed.

Here we begin to understand why words are such powerful tools for relationships.

They do not merely give us names.

They provide shared ways of organizing what happens to us.

Understanding without translating immediately

There is a passage in the catalogue Indigenous Worlds that may help us remain with this question a little longer.

In presenting Yanomami, Ye'kwana, Xakriabá, Tikmu'un, and Pataxoop worlds, the exhibition invites visitors to experience Indigenous concepts without immediately translating them or comparing them with their own familiar reality.

The point is not to abandon translation forever.

It is to avoid allowing our previous categories to occupy the space before something different has had the chance to be perceived.

This gives us a simple exercise for our own lives.

When something arises within us, perhaps we can ask:

Do I need to name this immediately?

Or can I remain with it for a few moments before deciding whether it is fear, anger, anxiety, love, spirituality, failure, or something else?

Not because the name is bad.

But because the experience may still be forming.

The brain also changes when words enter the scene

Neuroscience can approach part of this question, as long as we do not ask it to settle the philosophical issue for us.

In 2022, Brazilian researchers from UFRJ and UFF carried out an EEG experiment in which participants viewed images of ultra-processed foods. Before some images, participants saw a sentence warning about negative consequences associated with those foods. Before other images, they saw a control sentence.

The food image itself remained the same.

But the verbal context had changed.

The textual warnings were associated with changes in the late positive potential, an EEG component related to the motivational relevance of stimuli, as well as lower ratings of pleasantness.

This does not allow us to say that "the word created the emotion."

But it does allow us to say something sufficient for our reflection:

a sequence of words presented before a visual experience can participate in how that experience is later processed and evaluated.

In 2024, another study used fNIRS while participants dealt with emotionally negative situations. Under some conditions, they first selected words to label their own emotional state and then attempted to reinterpret the situation.

Affect labeling changed the dynamics of what happened afterward and was associated with greater activity in prefrontal regions during reappraisal. Interestingly, in that experiment, combining labeling and reappraisal did not make subjective emotional regulation more effective than reappraisal without prior labeling.

This is particularly useful for us because it prevents an easy conclusion such as:

"Naming emotions is always beneficial."

Perhaps naming helps in some situations.

In others, perhaps the word introduces an organization that changes what we do next.

Science is still investigating these processes.

"I am afraid" and "this is dangerous"

Now we can make a small distinction.

Imagine that I say:

"I am feeling afraid."

I am trying to put an experience into words.

But I can go further:

"I am afraid because that person is dangerous."

Now I am no longer only naming my feeling.

I am proposing an explanation about the world.

And I can go further still:

"If I feel afraid whenever I meet people like that, it is because people like that are dangerous."

Notice how far we have traveled.

experience -> name -> explanation -> possible belief.

The fear can be completely real as an experience.

But the word "fear" did not automatically make the explanation we constructed afterward true.

And yet that explanation can return to influence the next encounter.

The next time I see someone who resembles that person:

learned word -> expectation -> attention -> bodily response -> "I knew it."

We are approaching the phenomenon that will become increasingly important throughout this series.

But we do not need to arrive there yet.

Perhaps a word should remain partly a question

"Fear."

"Love."

"Injustice."

"God."

"Freedom."

Not all of these words name emotions. Some open entire fields of experience, memory, relationships, history, and expectation.

We may need them.

Without words, it would be much harder to share what we experience, build something collectively, teach, disagree, remember, or ask questions.

The problem does not begin when we name.

Perhaps it begins when we forget that we named.

When the cut begins to look like the whole.

When we say "it is fear" and stop observing what is still happening.

When we say "it is love" and no longer feel the need to encounter the relationship again.

When we say "it is freedom" and stop asking: freedom for whom, from what, and to do what?

Perhaps we can carry one simple practice into the next text:

use the word without forcing the experience to end inside it.

We name because we need to relate.

But perhaps we can leave a small opening.

Because the experience may continue to change.

And if the experience continues to change, perhaps our words will also need to change.

The question remains:

What happens to an experience when we need to make it fit inside a word?

Perhaps the answer is not to stop naming.

Perhaps it is to learn to notice when the name that helped us find something begins, silently, to determine what we are still able to find.

Main References

BATISTA, J. B.; PASQUALINI, J. C.; MAGALHÃES, G. M. Estudo sobre Emoções e Sentimentos na Educação Infantil. Educação & Realidade, 2022.

FERNANDES, T. F. C. et al. Impact of textual warnings on emotional brain responses to ultra-processed food products. Frontiers in Nutrition, 2022.

FONSECA, R. G. et al. Cross-cultural differences in beliefs about emotions: A comparison between Brazilian and British participants. Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria, 2023.

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. Ambiguidades e ambivalências na percepção do mundo e das pessoas. Jornal da USP.

RIZO GARCÍA, Marta. Comunicación, cuerpo y emociones. La incorporación de la dimensión emocional en la investigación de la comunicación. Comunicación y Sociedad, 2022.

YOSHIMURA, Shinpei; SHIMOMURA, Kouga; ONODA, Keiichi. Diminished negative emotion regulation through affect labeling and reappraisal: insights from functional near infrared spectroscopy on lateral prefrontal cortex activation. BMC Psychology, 2024.

Mundos Indígenas. Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG. Primary source used here for the invitation to approach different Indigenous worlds without immediately imposing equivalences or translations.