Brain Scans Show Emotion Words Lose Their Calming Power in a Second Language

“Name it to tame it” is one of psychology’s catchiest pieces of advice. Put a feeling into words, and it loses some of its grip.

There’s solid brain research behind the idea. Saying “I’m sad” or “that’s anger” can quieten the brain’s alarm system.

But most people in the world speak more than one language. So which language should you use?

A new brain-imaging study of 151 bilingual adults in Spain tested exactly that. The answer was surprising.

Naming emotions calmed the brain’s alarm only in people’s dominant, native language. And people who used two languages equally showed no calming effect in either.

Does “name it to tame it” really work?

The idea

“Name it to tame it” is the everyday version of what researchers call affect labeling. It means putting a feeling into words.

It sounds too simple to matter. Yet decades of research suggest it does something real.

The brain evidence

A landmark 2007 brain-scan study at the University of California, Los Angeles, tested it directly. When people labelled emotional images with words, their amygdala responded less.

The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped region deep in the brain. It reacts quickly to threats and emotional signals, like an alarm.

The same study found more activity in part of the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain. That area may help turn the alarm down.

The authors of the new study put it simply. Labelling emotions, like saying “I’m sad” when feeling sad, is “a successful strategy to down-regulate emotions”.

Why language might matter

Here’s the puzzle. Words in a second language often feel less emotional than words in a native one.

The authors note that people’s skin, pupils and even saliva react less to emotional words in a second language.

So there were two possible outcomes.

A second language might calm you more, because it feels more distant. Or it might calm you less, because the words don’t connect as deeply.

The study: 151 bilinguals in a brain scanner

Who took part

The research was led by psychologists at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain. It was published in PNAS in August 2026.

All participants lived in the Valencian Community of Spain, where Spanish and Catalan are both official languages. Their average age was about 22.

After 3 were excluded for data quality, 151 people were analysed, in two groups.

The Spanish-English group is the classic “second language” case. English was learned later, in class, and used less.

The Spanish-Catalan group is a much stricter test. Catalan and Spanish are closely related, and many people learn both as young children.

Balanced and unbalanced

Within the Spanish-Catalan group, the researchers compared two sets of people.

• Unbalanced bilinguals (29 people): they clearly used one language more than the other.
• Balanced bilinguals (25 people): they used both languages to a similar degree.

The task

Inside an MRI scanner, participants looked at photos of faces showing emotions. Most of the faces showed negative emotions.

Sometimes they matched each face to the right emotion word. That’s the “name it” condition.

Other times they matched the same faces to a gender label instead. This control task also used words, but not emotional ones.

They did both tasks in each of their languages. The whole task took just under 10 minutes.

The researchers made the emotion words fair across languages. The words weren’t look-alikes, and they were matched for length and how common they are.

The order of the tasks was also mixed up, so practice or tiredness is an unlikely explanation for the differences.

What the study found

Naming feelings worked, but only in the dominant language

In the Spanish-English group, naming emotions in Spanish reduced amygdala activity compared with the gender task. The effect was moderate in size.

In English, there was no significant reduction.

The unbalanced Spanish-Catalan group showed the same pattern.

Naming emotions in their dominant language calmed the amygdala. In their weaker language, it didn’t.

That matters. Catalan is close to Spanish and learned early, yet the weaker language still didn’t produce the calming effect.

It wasn’t a matter of getting answers wrong. On average, every group picked the right emotion word more than 90% of the time, in both languages.

The surprise: balanced bilinguals

The most unexpected result came from the balanced bilinguals. They showed no calming effect in either language.

The researchers also found a sliding scale. The more evenly people used their two languages, the smaller the gap between them.

The authors called this “surprising”. It suggests that being equally at home in two languages doesn’t make the effect work in both.

What the brain connections showed

The researchers also looked at how brain regions worked together.

In the dominant language, naming emotions increased the link between the amygdala and a language region at the front of the brain. In weak English, that link reversed.

Visual areas of the brain were also more active when people labelled emotions in a weaker second language. The authors suggest the brain may stay more tuned to emotional cues.

Why balanced bilinguals might miss out

An open question

The authors say their results don’t fit neatly with any existing theory. They offer some possible explanations, but haven’t tested them.

Possible explanations

One idea is that finding the right emotion word takes more effort in a less dominant language. If the word comes less easily, labelling may not settle the feeling.

Another idea is that spreading your emotional life across two languages might “cool down” both. Neither language may build up the same emotional punch.

The authors describe this as a possibility worth testing, not a finding. Their best overall fit was that labelling works by reducing uncertainty about what you’re feeling.

What earlier research found

The original finding

The 2007 UCLA brain-scan study showed that labelling emotional images reduced amygdala activity. It also found an inverse link with a prefrontal region.

A first bilingual test

A 2021 study in Affective Science scanned 26 unbalanced bilinguals. Two of its authors also worked on the new study.

Labelling emotions in a foreign language didn’t reduce amygdala activity. It even produced higher activation than labelling in the native language.

The new study repeated that result and extended it to a much closer language pair.

Outside the lab

A 2018 study in Nature Human Behaviour tracked the emotions of 74,487 Twitter users. After people explicitly wrote about a negative feeling, the negative tone of their tweets dropped sharply.

The authors said this fits with labelling calming emotions. But it’s observational, and it didn’t look at language choice.

How it fits together

Together, these studies support the idea that naming feelings can take the edge off. The new work adds a boundary: the words may need to be in the language that feels most yours.

How much should you trust this?

Early. It’s a well-designed study with a large sample for brain imaging. But it measured brain activity during a short lab task, not how people feel or cope in real life.

What makes it convincing

• 151 people is a large sample for a brain-scan study.
• The main result appeared in two separate bilingual groups, and repeats an earlier study.
• Each person was compared with themselves, doing a matched control task.
• The authors declared no competing interests.

What makes me cautious

• It measured amygdala activity, not how calm people actually felt.
• The task lasted under 10 minutes and used photos of other people’s faces, not people’s own feelings.
• All participants were young adults from one region of Spain.
• Nearly all the unbalanced bilinguals had Spanish as their dominant language, so language and group overlap.
• The balanced bilingual finding is new and surprising, so it needs repeating.
• Language dominance was partly based on what people reported about themselves.

What this means for you

• Naming feelings is still worth doing. The basic effect keeps turning up in brain studies.
• If you’re bilingual, try your strongest language. When you’re upset, the words that come most naturally may work best.
• Notice which language feels most “yours”. For some people, that isn’t the first language they learned.
• In therapy, language may matter. The authors suggest language choice could affect how well labelling works, and call for clinical studies.
• Don’t worry if you’re balanced. This was one lab task. It says nothing about how well you handle emotions overall.

In this short video, Dan Siegel explains the idea behind “name it to tame it”:

What we still don’t know

1. Do people actually feel calmer? The study measured brain activity, not feelings.
2. Why do balanced bilinguals miss out? The authors could only suggest explanations.
3. Does it apply in therapy? No one has tested language choice in real treatment.
4. What about other languages? This study covered Spanish, Catalan and English only.
5. What if a later language becomes dominant? The authors suggest testing people whose second language took over.

My take: the language of your feelings matters

What I like about this study is that it tested a simple question with a clever design. Using two language pairs made the result much harder to dismiss.

I’m less convinced about the balanced bilingual finding, for now. It’s intriguing, but it’s one group of 25 people, and nobody knows why it happens.

Still, the main message is easy to use. When you name what you’re feeling, the words that feel most like home may do the most good.