The power of identifying your emotions

The competitive learners among you may be disappointed to learn that there were no wrong answers for the quiz on the previous. Instead, the key was to recognise and identify our initial feelings, without any judgement or attempts to suppress them.

Psychiatrist Dr Daniel Siegel stated that “When you name it, you can tame it” and there is a growing body of research highlighting the calming effect that just naming our emotions can have on our brains.¹

The other purpose of this activity is to develop empathy and understanding. Our feelings toward certain images or situations can differ greatly, depending on our own experiences. Acknowledging the varied emotions associated with each of these stills can be a helpful first step towards cultivating kindness and compassion for others.

In the next step, we’ll take this further by exploring how our thoughts and feelings can have an impact on how we behave and the actions we take.

Discuss
How did you respond to the images in the quiz? Did you find it difficult to select a feeling from the list on each question? Share your responses – and check out the thoughts of others – in the Comments section below.

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¹ _{Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706}