semantic-depth

A label has semantic depth when it names what a thing means — "human," "landscape," "angry" — not just an incidental feature like "male" or "left-facing."

In affect labeling, semantically deep labels trigger the vlPFC–amygdala regulatory pathway (the same pathway that dampens emotion), while shallow feature labels (like gender tags) do not. The distinction suggests the mechanism is not "any naming" but "naming that engages the conceptual system at a level deep enough to reprocess the stimulus's meaning."