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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I'll do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic to my students, and I'll set up this Google form. that will allow them, I'll ask them the same question I posed to you.
In the last couple of weeks, have you ever experienced a thought just popped up, you wouldn't want to tell someone else about it, and it just comes up and you write it into the field, and it's anonymous, and I can then see what the thoughts are. This is some dark stuff that we see coming up.
So we don't have control always over the thoughts and feelings that arise spontaneously, but what we do have control over is, is how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they are activated. That's the playground of emotion regulation. There is room for both of these interpretations. You tell me before, you don't feel like you can move your arm up and down pretty easily.
It's under your control, but your emotions are not. Well, maybe it's the case that you can't control the feeling of anger or the emotional experience of anger, anxiety that when it's elicited, but once it's activated, I assure you there are things that you could do to push that experience around. And that's the part to really home in on.
And I cannot tell you, I'm speaking, I'll give you a personal example, and then I'll give you one from one of my kids, actually. It is bleeping, liberating, liberating to know that, huh, I just felt a certain way There's nothing wrong with me, right? This is just how human beings work, right? I'm going to experience a dark thought every now and then.
I'm going to experience some anxiety every now and again. I don't feel bad about myself when I find myself getting anxious about something. Instead, I think, oh, this is my mind giving me an inch here. And that allows me to channel that experience productively. So A couple of years ago, my, my daughter switched over to a new school. It was more academically demanding.
And I go into her bedroom and, and I noticed she's like visibly distraught. And I could like, what, what's going on? And so, you know, she's, she's kind of like, I don't know what's happening. Like I feel it in my body. And like, I don't know what this is. And she was, is basically an anxiety reaction. Totally normal. She had a test the next day. This is her.
body and mind doing what it's supposed to be doing. There's an important thing that lies ahead. I need to focus in. Once I reframe this for her, this is nothing wrong with you. This is what we call anxiety. It's a normal reaction to important circumstances that are potentially threatening. And what it means is you got to zoom in and focus in on your work.
Once I gave her that interpretation, the entire response, the volume on it diminished and That I think is the opportunity that exists if you understand a little bit about what emotions are and what their function is.
Well, I would take them through a few different shifters. And we could give plenty of examples if these aren't convincing. So let's start with one of my favorite shifters. I call the shifters these little tools you can use to push emotion around. Let's start with sensation. You listen to music? Of course. Why? Why?
Okay. Let's just stop with it makes you feel. You ask people this question of why we listen to music, close to 100% will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. If you then ask people, though, in other studies as we've done, last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to try to manage that emotion? Only between 10% and 30% will say they've used music.
Music is a powerful, powerful emotional shifter. You get effects within seconds. They're not necessarily long-lasting, but have you ever listened to music to pump you up when you're a little distressed? Did it work? It's like magic almost, how powerful it can be.
So if you have doubts as to your ability to shift your emotions, I would do a little experiment where I would identify in advance a few pump-me-up happy songs and try listening to those when you're not feeling that way and want to feel that way and observe what impact that has on you. That would be one thing you could try.
Just to explain to folks why this works, this is not, by the way, this effect that music has on our emotions is not exclusive to hearing. It's a product of sensation. So sensation is how we bring in information about the world and make sense of it, sensation perception. And I like to think of sensation as like, imagine you had satellite dishes mounted all over your body.
And their sole job is to help you bring in information about your surroundings and to give you the best chance of optimally navigating the world around you. And a big part of that is making sure you go where it's safe and not where it's dangerous. And so one of the ways that sensation works is it is tightly linked with emotion in the sense that when you encounter something,
that might be approach-oriented or might be threatening, it's activating the corresponding sets of emotions. All of our senses follow this property. So hearing, music, you know, like... Look back in history. There are bands that accompany militaries through battle. That's kind of interesting if you think about it, right?
You've got these... This is a threatening... It doesn't get much more threatening than this. Playing the music, right? Channeling our emotions. You should try... I don't know if people can do this quite easily, but if you ever like strip away the, the kind of soundtrack to films, we sometimes do this in studies. Like it is wild just to hear dialogue. Yeah.
Like imagine jaws without, I'll stop doing it right there. Or imagine like watching a sitcom without the laugh track. You don't, doesn't have the same punch. Um, Taste. We don't probably need to spend too much time on taste, right? Think of something that tastes great. It's an emotional experience. Something that tastes foul, opposite direction. What about touch? Touch is a powerful tool.
I call it – the technique of touch that I'm particularly fond of is affectionate but not creepy touch, which is to say when an affectionate embrace is wanted between partners, parents, and kids – There's a lot of research which shows that this could be a powerful tool for regulating your emotions very, very quickly. A creepy touch, of course, pushes us in the opposite direction.
We've got to give people the disclaimer. So, you know, that's one set of examples that I would ask people to consider. But we could keep going deeper and deeper through the toolbox to give more insight.
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