Talking about emotion and putting feelings into words has been hypothesized to
regulate emotion in psychotherapy as well as in everyday conversation.
However, the exact dynamics of how different strategies of verbalization
regulate emotion and how these strategies are reflected in characteristics of
the voice has received little scientific attention. In the present study, we
showed emotional pictures to 30 participants and asked them to verbally admit
or deny an emotional experience or a neutral fact concerning the picture in a
simulated conversation. We used a 2 × 2 factorial design manipulating the
focus (on emotion or facts) as well as the congruency (admitting or denying)
of the verbal expression. Analyses of skin conductance response (SCR) and
voice during the verbalization conditions revealed a main effect of the factor
focus. SCR and pitch of the voice were lower during emotion compared to fact
verbalization, indicating lower autonomic arousal. In contradiction to these
physiological parameters, participants reported that fact verbalization was
more effective in down-regulating their emotion than emotion verbalization.
These subjective ratings, however, were in line with voice parameters
associated with emotional valence. That is, voice intensity showed that fact
verbalization reduced negative valence more than emotion verbalization. In
sum, the results of our study provide evidence that emotion verbalization as
compared to fact verbalization is an effective emotion regulation strategy.
Moreover, based on the results of our study we propose that different
verbalization strategies influence valence and arousal aspects of emotion
selectively