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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Okay. So my guess is like when you were growing up in school, is that something that you would have just come out and blurted out?
The norms here have powerfully, powerfully changed. I remember when my parents got divorced when I was 12 years old, my mom insisted that I go to see a social worker to talk about it. We went, I don't know, two or three times. And, you know, I went, but, you know, I remember saying to her, if you tell anyone that we have gone here, anyone, right? Like I was petrified.
So I think because of the work that... we have pushed to like de-stigmatize this, which is a really good thing to be clear. We talk about this more openly. We may be endorsed having these experiences more openly than we did before. And I think that's another piece of piece of the puzzle. So, um, you know, here's what I can say with confidence. Um, there's a lot of suffering right now. Uh,
people are struggling with their emotions. I think people have always been struggling with their emotions. What fills me with hope is that we've got some science-based tools that we could share with people to, to actually help them. And these are for the most part, or, you know, at least the ones that I talk about, these are non-invasive tools.
Here's another little tidbit that blows my mind to use that technical phrase. Um, 1949, I believe it was, a Portuguese physician invents an emotion regulation intervention that wins him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. It is viewed as such an amazing advance that it wins the grandest prize in all of science and medicine. It is the frontal lobotomy. I mean, isn't that wild?
Now, clearly, these were for extreme cases of emotion dysregulation, not just the curveballs of life, which I hope it wasn't used too much for that purpose. But we've come a long way. Our understanding of what emotions are and how they work and how you could push them around, amplify, diminish them, extend them, make them more constrained, vastly improved. That is something that is super exciting.
But we don't teach people about this. So that's the other question that you gestured towards. Why is it? That we struggle so badly with this. If we have these emotions, why aren't we actually reining them in more effectively? I never had a class in this growing up. Some of the things that I was actually taught growing up, turns out, are not correct.
Like I was taught to always, always approach my emotions immediately the moment they are elicited. Dive in, try to fix them. Works in some cases. In other cases, taking some time away and then coming back can be really useful. So I think a big opportunity here is like, let's give people the tools.
Sorry. I, I, I was about to say, but my wife always tells me, don't point your finger. It's just excitement. I'm just getting excited. Um, thank you for that. Let's, let's address this. Um, um, I think this fundamentally has to do with, uh, whether we think we can actually control our minds or not, control our emotions or not. Are they under our control or are they in the driver's seat?
And several years ago, I came across this study that just floored me. Approximately 40% of, in this case, I believe it was adolescents, when asked, can you control your emotions? Said, no, you can't. I mean, you gave everyone who's listening or watching the name of my lab, the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. Like, viewing this finding was, I interpreted it as like an existential threat.
Personal insult, yeah. Yeah, it's like, what have I chosen to do with my life? My life has been a lie! Yes, that's like, what is happening here? I'm too young for the midlife crisis, right? And... And so I really kind of, you know, my advisor was a very wise, wise psychologist. I remember saying, listen to the data. And so I did. Like, what could this possibly be capturing?
And I spent a chapter talking about this in the book. There are facets of our emotional lives that we cannot control. And I now believe that. With every iota of being that I am. Let me give you a couple examples. You ever brush up against someone who doesn't smell very good?
Yeah, do you have an automatic reaction when that occurs?
Well, it's not just you. This is a pretty automatic response that most of us have when we encounter that kind of noxious response. And the inverse is true as well. I just got back from overseas and I was walking through the international terminal and I walked through this store that I've relabeled the emotion regulation emporium. Why have I relabeled it?
Because all they sell are these sprays that we spritz all over us to manage how other people feel about us and how we feel about ourselves. Perfume and cologne, right? Like you just get a whiff of that stuff and, ah, let's go, let's go a little bit darker though. That's, so that's one category of automatic responses. Like I cannot control what I'm going to encounter, uh,
Some have some experience, a sensory experience that pushes my emotions around. No control over that. What about or I mean, I guess I could choose to evade certain people that might smell us our way. But inevitably, I'm going to come across someone. Let's talk about dark thoughts for a second. So have you ever experienced a thought? It just popped up in your head to seemingly randomly.
You have no idea why. But it's a dark thought of sorts. It's something that you wouldn't want to readily admit to someone else. You're kind of embarrassed by it.
Well, you know, you are not alone. So there's research on this that describes this as close to a universal experience. We have these thoughts that just pop up in our heads. We don't always know why. Sometimes we could come up with explanations for it. I'll give you a fun example to stick with the physical fitness example or comparison.
So when I'm in the gym, I will often have a thought when I'm carrying an exceptionally heavy dumbbell. It's like really heavy, just to be clear. When I'm carrying that dumbbell from one side of the gym to the next, I'll often imagine dropping it on a person's face that lies near my path. That's a dark thought, right? Why am I thinking about dropping a dumbbell on someone else's face?
It's probably adaptive. I don't want to drop it on their face. So this is a thought that's cuing me into the possibility of what might happen if I do. So it leads me to switch arms. I don't have control. I'm not purposefully thinking about that, right? Other kinds of thoughts like that pop up all the time in all of our minds.
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