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 I'm still focusing there on the task at hand, but I have this sensory experience that is shifting my emotions really outside of my awareness and doing it relatively effortlessly. Distracting myself by focusing on something else entirely, that's a real attentional shift. Now I'm just not thinking about the issue at hand. And that's giving me some mental space.
But when I'm looking at the bigger picture, once again, I still have the experience I'm concerned about in full view. It isn't a focus of my attention, but I am reframing. I'm changing the way I think about it. Now, when I go to speak to another person, they are certainly helping me reframe it. So there's overlap there. But the added benefit I get when I talk to someone else is
that it's sometimes a lot easier for us to reframe when other people guide us through it than when we try to do it ourselves.
It's a great question. It's something that scientists actively study. I like to think of emotions as tools. So these are tools that we evolved to help us navigate the world. You can think about emotions as like these little software programs that get loaded up in particular situations. And these are programs that activate emotions. what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses.
What I mean by that is when you experience an emotion, your physiology may start to shift. So if we stick with anxiety, you might start to experience a kind of fight or flight response. You have to go to the bathroom, your palms start to sweat. Emotions capture our cognition or how we think as well. So when I experience anxiety, it zooms me in, it focuses me in on the problem at hand.
So I'm focusing really intently on it. Emotions also can influence our motor behavior or our facial display. So Mike, can you often tell when someone is sad, for example, by the look on their face? Sure, of course. So this is a loosely coordinated set of responses.
I say loosely because it's not the case that all three of those things always get triggered every time you experience an emotion, but they tend to hang together. And the whole idea here is that we evolve the capacity to experience these emotions because they help us. So anxiety focuses us in on potential threats, allowing us to prepare for them. Anger is another example.
Anger is something we experience when we perceive that our view of how things should work is violated. There is the opportunity to fix the situation. We experience anger. What about sadness? How on earth could sadness be useful? Well, we tend to experience sadness when we experience some change in our way of understanding ourself or the world. Something happens that challenges that worldview.
And there's nothing you can do or nothing you think you can do to actually change Fix it. So the loss of a loved one, getting fired, right? Now your view of yourself and the world is forever changed. You can't bring that person back. You can't get that new job.
So we experience this emotion that motivates us to introspect, to turn inward, to start doing that important thinking work that we need to do to start reframing
our lives and our place in this world this sadness experience also motivates us to slow down physiologically like just kind of pull back and withdraw but it also does something quite beautiful if you ask me which is it leaves this it gives off this kind of alarm
signal to everyone in our network in the form of a sad facial display that communicates to other people that, hey, don't leave me alone for too long because I am social and I need some connection. So check up on me at times, which is why when you see someone with a sad facial expression, you often want to help them. So that's what emotions are. They're different.
People often wonder what's the difference between emotion and a feeling. I like to point out that Feelings are the subjective part of an emotional experience. If you think about what happens when you are physically ill, there are lots of things happening in your body that you have no awareness of. But what you typically are aware of is your fever, right? The feelings of chills and the sweats.
That's a component of physical illness that you become aware. Feelings are that subjective component of an emotional response. It's like the temperature you experience when you're physically ill. Is that helpful for emotions?
I like to divide the world of tools into six buckets, three of which include exist inside you. These are tools that you can use wherever you are, really. These are what I call internal shifters. And then there are some shifters, shifter being shorthand for a tool you use to shift your emotion. There are some external shifters that exist outside of us. What are the three internal shifters?
The first one is sensation or sensory experiences. I think this is a shifter that we all have lots of intimate experiences with, but don't avail ourselves of in the heat of the moment. So when I'm talking about sensory experiences, I'm talking about things like sight, sound, touch, smell, experience.
You know, if you walk through an airport, the international duty-free section, you know, I think of that as an emotion regulation store because there's so many perfumes and colognes that are smelled. I think about... Why do we put those on? We put those on to manage the way other people feel about us.
A pleasant scent instantly elicits a type of emotional reaction, so much so that many hotels actually work with I'm making up that name. There is a technical name that is alluding me right now. But they work with folks to create these bespoke smells that they then pipe through the ventilation of the hotels to provide people with this positive emotional experience when they're in their facility.
That's one way you could shift your emotion. Another thing you could do is music.
you ask people as experimenters have hey why do you listen to music approximately 100 percent of participants will tell you i listen to music because i like the way it makes me feel but if you then ask people hey the last time you were angry anxious or sad what did you do to manage your emotions only between 10 and 30 percent of participants report listening to music
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