The UCLA Brain Study That Changes How You Handle Angry People

If everything you've been taught makes it worse, what actually works? And the answer comes from neuroscience research out of UCLA. It's so counterintuitive that most people resist it the first time they hear it, but the brain scanning data on this is unambiguous, and it works on every human brain. So back in 2007, Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues learned that naming an emotion drops amygdala activity and activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These two regions are inversely linked so that naming the emotion is the neural switch. You're really not calming them down, you're creating conditions for their own regulatory system to engage. Basically, you're lending them your prefrontal cortex for the 90 seconds it takes for the initial neurochemical wave to pass.