The science behind using anchor words, labelling or naming emotions:
“The right hemisphere of the brain takes the lead in perceiving visceral sensations (emotions come from this side of the brain), while the left hemisphere is mainly responsible for linguistics and logic.
When an emotion is felt in the body and “recognized” by the right hemisphere and then labelled (using anchor words) by the left hemisphere, hemispheric functions are integrated. An outcome of this hemispheric integration is that emotions appear to lose some of their intensity and power when they are labelled.”
from the report published by Lieberman et al., 2011