Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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? Frowns, frowns, frowns. There you go. Yeah. Give me the sad look. What does that look like? Bottom lip.
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. Okay. The difference between an emotion and a feeling.
We often use those terms synonymously, but scientifically, scientists actually draw a 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.
So feelings are the part, the facet of our emotional experiences that we're aware of.
That's right. Now, but it does get interesting, right? Like if this were a pink pen and I had a fear of cancer, for example- The pink might activate the thoughts about that cancer and elicit an emotional response. If I have a fear of blood, red, color. So we could generalize and make associations. But right now, I'm free as a bird.
Because they give us an edge, because they mobilize us to respond optimally to the situations that we find ourselves in. It's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it. So let's run through a couple of negative emotions that we often describe or hear them described as toxic. Anger, for example.
Anger is an emotion we experience when our understanding of right and wrong, of how things should be, is violated, and there's an opportunity for us to correct the record. We could actually fix things. My favorite example of this is my daughter rides her bicycle without her helmet. This is not the way things work in the Cross household. right? We care about brain safety. And I see this.
She knows better. I get angry. What does that anger do? It zooms me in on the transgression. It motivates me to approach the situation. It is conveying facial expressions to her to say, not good. All of this with the intent of making sure she doesn't do this again so that she doesn't injure herself. Take another example, sadness. How on earth could being sad be functional?
Well, we experience sadness when our understanding of the world and who we are is challenged in some way by something that happens that we cannot fix. So we're fired. We're rejected. We lose someone we love. Now we are faced with the task of having to reframe how we think about the world and ourselves in it. And so that takes some energy, right? So what does sadness motivate us to do?
It motivates us to kind of slow down physiologically, turn our attention inward to try to reflect on what's happening, to try to do that hard cognitive work. But, and this I find so fascinating, we're a social species, right? And like going away and into a corner to now just brood on this heavy stuff, that could be dangerous.
We might want to throw some lifelines out to the community to make sure they check up on us. And indeed we do. And the way that sadness allows us to do that is by doing what? Give it to me. Making the... There you go. We're jamming now, right? That is so powerful a cue to pull us in.
This conversation here about evolutionary significance touches on this topic of toxic positivity, which I talk about in the book as something that I'm not a huge fan of because we often hear that the goal in life should be to Maximize positivity and try to avoid negative emotional experiences. No bad vibes. Good vibes only. If that's your goal, number one, good luck.
You're giving people an unattainable goal. We have the capacity to experience these responses for a reason. When I think back to like performances that I have given where I've not experienced any anxiety, those are the ones that have tended to fall flat because there was no cue inside me that motivated me to energize and prepare. I mean, is this true for you?
Have you ever found that a little bit of anxiety can be your friend?
Look, no one is saying that negative emotions don't blow up and metastasize. This is why I got into this business in the first place. Because these emotions that we have, these negative emotions, they're tools, but they are unwieldy tools. If we use the metaphor of a hammer, Hammer in the right hands? My grandfather was a carpenter.
built beautiful homes, hammer in the wrong hand, my hand, a hammer, source of massive destruction. Same is true of our emotions. And so what I find so interesting is on the one hand, we're born into this world with this capacity to experience this wild range of emotions, positive and negative, and they serve us well. They're tools, but they're really unwieldy. So guess what?
We also evolve the capacity to to rein these tools in through these regulatory techniques that we all possess, but they don't come with a user's manual. And that in a certain sense is what I and lots of other scientists have been doing for many decades now is trying to build that user's manual to help people manage their emotions.
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