A growing number of studies have shown that labeling negative feelings can down-regulate distress. The present study aimed to test the effectiveness of affect labeling while manipulating two factors known to influence the emotion regulation process, namely timing, and emotional intensity. In Experiment 1, sixty-three participants completed a performance-based affect labeling paradigm in which they had to choose between two labels that best describe their feeling. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) Simultaneous labeling- the labeling occurs while wa ✉ * E-mail: Einat.Levy-Gigi@biu.ac.il 29 12 2022 17 12 e0279303 e0279303 30 12 2022 © 2022 Levy-Gigi, Shamay-Tsoory This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract A growing number of studies have shown that labeling negative feelings can down-regulate distress. The present study aimed to test the effectiveness of affect labeling while manipulating two factors known to influence the emotion regulation process, namely timing, and emotional intensity. While highly important, these studies have focused mostly on characterizing specific situations in which it is helpful (e.g., fear of spiders and public talking). Our study takes a step forward, trying to identify more general characteristics of this process. According to the process model of emotion regulation, two factors that substantially influence the effectiveness of the regulation process are timing and emotional intensity [ 6 – 8 ]. The present study aimed to characterize the efficacy of affect labeling in reducing distress while focusing on these two central factors in the emotion regulation process. In addition, while meaning-making strategies aim to reduce negative feelings by changing the meaning of the stimuli to be more neutral, affect labeling aims to simply define and specify the negative emotion with no conscious intention to modify the emotional response [ 26 ]. Therefore, it can be viewed as a less demanding process. The less demanding nature of affect labeling, together with its simple aim to define rather than change the aversive condition, may suggest that it would be highly effective in high-intensity situations. Indeed, a review of the literature on affect labeling reveals that most studies have used it to reduce distress in highly extreme conditions, including public speaking tasks [ 19 ], exposure to spiders [ 3 ], or when watching highly negative emotionally arousing pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) [ 2 , 16 , 18 , 20 ]. However, it is unclear whether it is effective, mostly in high-intensity conditions or also in low-intensity conditions. Building on studies showing that venting may increase emotional intensity [ 27 , 28 ], one possibility is that affect labeling would increase emotional intensity in low-intensity conditions. The results indicate that while affect labeling may help reduce distress in highly aversive conditions, it actually increases distress compared to baseline in low aversive conditions. The results are depicted in Fig 2 . Fig 2 Level of distress (means and SE) as a function of regulation type (baseline/affect labeling) and intensity (low/high). General discussion The present study is the first study to characterize the conditions by which affect labeling is effective while focusing on two central aspects in the emotion regulation process, namely, timing and intensity. In contrast to our prediction, we found no significant effect of labeling timing. Hence, participants exhibited similar levels of distress whether the labeling co-occurred with the presentation of the emotional stimulus, subsequently to it, or after a 10- second delay. In terms of the process model of emotion regulation [ 6 , 11 , 12 ], these findings may suggest that unlike common antecedent-focused strategies such as reappraisal that are most effective in reducing distress when applied earlier in the emotion regulation process, affect labeling effectively reduce distress even at later stages of the emotional process after the negative emotion supposedly gained strength and not only close to it. The results of the present study may have important clinical implications, especially considering the growing use of affect labeling as a complementary intervention method to reduce anxiety [ 3 , 18 , 19 , 36 , 51 , 52 ]. Specifically, it is possible that the mere opportunity to choose between different emotional labels to describe feelings may serve as a simple and easy-to-apply approach that helps individuals to reduce distress in highly aversive situations. This might be particularly useful because our results suggest a more flexible application of affect labeling, allowing different intervals between the aversive situation and the labeling process. However, affect labeling should be used cautiously in low-intensity conditions since it may increase rather than decrease distress. Alternatively, affect labeling can be used as an intervention that aims to improve individuals with blunted affect to identify and describe various feelings and, hence, reduce apathy and Specifically, it allows reaching relevant conclusions for treatment and educational settings, in which other people (e.g., the therapist or the parent) can propose different labels to facilitate emotion regulation and reduce levels of distress. Future studies may use naturalistic affect labeling, in which individuals generate their own emotions, to better imitate real-life situations. Similarly, it is possible that although the labels were carefully chosen [see also 34 ], they did not capture the exact feelings of the participants. However, the participants in both experiments confirmed that they selected labels that accurately described their feelings.