Affect Labelling
Affect labelling is putting a feeling into words, and the claim that doing so takes some of the heat out of it. Not describing the situation, not explaining the feeling, not arguing with it. Naming it: this is fear, this is envy, this is shame. Researchers call it implicit emotion regulation, meaning it seems to work without the person trying to regulate anything. The evidence is stratified, and the strongest part is not the part people care about. What a brain scanner sees is consistent and has been for close to two decades. What a person reports feeling is the smallest and least reliable effect of the set, and no meta-analysis, meaning a study that pools all the other studies into one estimate, has ever been done on it. That absence is the finding.
What it is
The practice is one word applied to a live feeling. It has no effortful step, no reframing, nothing to think differently about. You attach the word, and the claim is that the charge drops on its own. That is what separates it from strategies where the person is knowingly doing work, and it is why researchers put it in a different category.
The slogan and the science belong to different people. "Name it to tame it" is the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel's phrase, popularised with Tina Payne Bryson. The research everyone means when they say it belongs to Matthew Lieberman's group at UCLA, and the founding paper, published in 2007, is Lieberman with Eisenberger, Crockett, Tom, Pfeifer and Way. The standard synthesis is a 2018 review whose first author is Jared Torre, not Lieberman. This site keeps the two apart on purpose, and the separate page for the slogan exists for that reason.
The single most useful detail about the founding study, and almost nobody repeats it, is what it compared naming against. The control condition asked people to label the gender of a face rather than its emotion. Same verbal effort, same attention pulled off the image, no emotional content. The control produced no effect on the alarm-related brain response. That is what makes the finding more than "doing a word puzzle distracts you".