Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs

**Ralph Adolphs** (0:00)
I see somebody come up behind me. They can see, I'm trying to park. They can move over, no. They come right up behind me, go on the horn, eee, and you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right?
Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic downregulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. It's an experiment of one, I'm not claiming this as a published study, but I think there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated. You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent, and that's the place where you want to get.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:53)
Hey, everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I'm pleased to share that I'll be hosting three live events very soon.
The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th. The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theater on October 8th. And the third live event is in San Francisco at the Masonic on October 28th. At each of these events, I'll be discussing topics from the book, and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to hubermanlab.com/events, and use the code protocols to get early access. Again, that's hubermanlab.com/events, and use the code protocols to get early access to tickets.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs is a professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech University, and a world expert in the Neurobiology of emotions. Today, we discuss what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in our brain and body, and why some emotions seem to recruit our behavior in decision-making, and some simply don't. We also discuss where and how emotions are mapped in the body, and we dispel common myths about the brain-body storage of emotions from our past, which is a very commonly discussed topic that, frankly, as you'll learn today, many, if not most people, get wrong. We also discuss why some people are able to observe but not react to their emotions, and what tools may assist in helping you build better emotion regulation. As you'll soon realize, Dr. Adolphs is uniquely positioned to explain the real neuroscience and psychology of emotions and how to put that information to use. Today's conversation therefore ought to be valuable for people of every age and profession and for anyone interested in improving their emotional life and understanding of others. And now for my conversation with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs, welcome.

**Ralph Adolphs** (2:57)
Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:59)
Long time admirer of your work because you're one of the few people who has studied these things we call emotions, brain states, cognition and much more in humans. There have been others in the field of neuroscience, of course, but I would argue few people have combined a real grounding in neural circuits with an interest in what most people think of as a psychological set of issues in a way that also takes into account the animal data and really the broadest picture of this thing that we call emotions. I'm just going to start with a statement of gratitude. Thank you for doing that because it's so easy for people to stimulate a brain area, see an animal or a human behavior speak in a certain way and say, oh, this is the brain region for this. And you've long been pushing back on that.

**Ralph Adolphs** (3:38)
It's a tall order, you know, and one impetus for the work that I've been doing in the book that I co-wrote with David Anderson, the book that I have forthcoming with Princeton University Press is precisely to do what you just said, is to kind of integrate and pull together findings and emotion from animal studies, findings from social psychology. Typically, those people in those fields don't talk to one another. They do very different studies, have very different methodologies. And so trying to integrate across disciplines that are that far apart, to really try and get a sense for what are emotions in a sense that would satisfy psychologists and lay people about human emotions, but they would also speak to the mechanisms that you can study in mice, for example, or flies, as David Anderson does.