How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time - Dr Ethan Kross - #914

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
The Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. What's that mean?

**Dr. Ethan Kross** (0:08)
Well, what that means is we get to ask two kinds of questions in my lab. So number one, we try to understand how do people work when it comes to managing their emotions. We really care about getting in there to understand the mechanics that underlie what we call emotion regulation. And then the second kind of question we tackle is, how can we use this understanding of the nuts and bolts that explain how people can manage our emotions to actually help them do a better job of that in their daily lives outside the lab? And so trying to address those two big picture issues is something that keeps us really busy and is something that is really fun, fun way to spend your life.

**Chris Williamson** (0:52)
From your time decades looking at them, what are emotions from a definitional perspective? How do you come to actually define them?

**Dr. Ethan Kross** (1:02)
It's a great question and it's funny. I often, when I'm speaking about this topic to folks, I often ask people, hey, who here feels comfortable coming up to the front and just telling us what it means to have an emotion? What is an emotion? It's kind of wild. We experience emotions according to this one study that I cite in my book, about 90% of the time that we're awake, we're experiencing some type of emotional response. We are truly an emotional species. And yet if you ask people, as I often do in presentations or when I'm teaching, what's an emotion? People often just stop and they have trouble answering that question. So let me pose it to you actually before I go give you my definition. What do you think an emotion is? And don't worry about being right or wrong.

**Chris Williamson** (1:50)
Yeah. A state in the brain that informs us of what is going on in the rest of our body.

**Dr. Ethan Kross** (2:01)
So not bad, not bad. So I defied emotions as responses we have to events in our lives that we deem meaningful, i.e. they capture our attention in some way. And these could be situations that happen to us as we're navigating the world outside or even situations we imagine in our minds. And when we encounter those circumstances, it's almost like a software program that gets loaded up to help us manage that circumstance. And that software program has a few different pieces, a few different components. So emotions activate what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. What do I mean by that? Well, when we experience emotion, there's often a physiological component. So if I experience a little bit of anxiety, I often feel that in my stomach. It kind of feels like the stomach is ringing. I've got to go to the toilet right away, depending on how potent a response that is, that predicts the strength of that impulse. Our emotions are also capturing our cognition, how we're thinking about our circumstances. So anxiety will kind of zoom us in on the potential threat in front of us.
And then there are motor responses and facial displays that often come along with our emotions. So can you tell when someone is angry at you sometimes by looking at their face?

**Chris Williamson** (3:27)
Frowns, frowns, running forwards.

**Dr. Ethan Kross** (3:29)
There you go. Yeah. Give me the sad look. What does that look like?

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
Bottom lip.

**Dr. Ethan Kross** (3:33)
There you go. There you go. My daughters are super skilled at that facial expression whenever I'm disciplining them, as I sometimes have to do. And it elicits a response. So I say loosely coordinated because these different facets of our emotional experience often cohere, but sometimes they don't. In other words, sometimes I could be super angry during a meeting at something that's happened, but I maintain my poker face. Sometimes I'll even smile. So there's some flexibility there. But the point is, it's this coordinated response that is designed to help us deal with the situation at hand. And so I'm a proponent of the belief that all of our emotions, even the ones we call bad, are useful when they're experienced in the right proportions, not too intense or not too long. There's one other little tidbit let me throw in there because I think it's important for just kind of clearing up the space here. The difference between an emotion and a feeling. We often use those terms synonymously, but scientifically scientists actually draw distinction. So you could think of an emotion as this umbrella term. It captures a lot of things that are happening within you, within your brain, within your body, your behaviors. Feelings are the conscious component of an emotional response. They're the part of an emotional response that we're aware of. It's a lot like when you are sick. When you get the flu, there are tons of things happening inside your body. You have no awareness of how the composition of your blood is changing, and your organs may be functioning differently, and so forth and so on. What you do have awareness of are the fever and chills that you're experiencing, right? That's like the sweat, so to speak.