Where does labeling collide?

In the sociology of deviance, labeling names a social process rather than a property of an act. Howard Becker's 1963 Outsiders argued that deviance is not a quality of what a person does but a consequence of the rules and sanctions that others apply to an offender, so the same act counts as deviant only once it is labeled. Edwin Lemert had earlier separated primary deviance, the original rule-breaking, from secondary deviance, the conduct that follows once a person absorbs the deviant label and reorganizes their life around it. The label can become a master status that outweighs a person's other roles and, through the reactions it provokes, helps produce the very behavior it names. Link and Phelan's 2001 review recast this as stigma, tracing how labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination combine where one group has the power to make a label stick. Here labeling is treated as a cause of deviance, not a neutral record of it.[1][2]

Unit

A social reaction that attaches a deviant label to a person

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through case histories, interviews, and records of how officials apply and enforce deviant labels

In affective neuroscience, affect labeling means putting a feeling into words, and the finding is that naming an emotion tends to reduce it. Lieberman and colleagues' 2007 study, Putting Feelings Into Words, had people label the emotion shown in a face and observed lower activity in the amygdala alongside greater activity in a region of prefrontal cortex, a pattern read as the verbal label dampening the emotional response. The act is naming what one feels, and the effect lands on the person doing the naming. This is a mechanism inside one brain, not a label a society pins on a person, a target on a training example, or the print on a package. The collision is only in the word: to label a feeling is, on this account, to soothe it, which runs opposite to what labeling does in the sociology of deviance, where the label helps create the very thing it names.[3]

Unit

An emotion named in words by the person feeling it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied with functional neuroimaging and self-reported affect during labeling tasks

In biochemistry a label is a detectable atom or group attached to a molecule so its path through a reaction or an organism can be followed. Schoenheimer and Rittenberg's 1935 Deuterium as an indicator in the study of intermediary metabolism fed animals fats carrying heavy hydrogen and traced the tagged atoms, showing that body constituents are continually broken down and rebuilt. Later work extended the idea to radioactive isotopes and to fluorescent tags, as reviewed in Giepmans and colleagues' 2006 The Fluorescent Toolbox for Assessing Protein Location and Function, which surveys the markers used to locate and track proteins in living cells. Here the referent is a physical tracer bound to a molecule, not a category assigned to a data example or a status placed on a person by others.[4][5]

Unit

A single labelled molecule, or the fraction of molecules carrying the tag

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Detected by mass spectrometry, radioactivity counting, or fluorescence imaging of the tag