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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And it's typically keeping our emotions, I would argue, in check, in balance, in proportion. We're stripping away time with social media and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback. This enables us to release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way. And I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text
or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone. And I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society. So cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context. Now, that is not to say that social media
isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress, it can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change. But I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information.
I just got emailed this morning about And interviewed a fact check that I did in 2019. Yeah.
Well, it can be. And I think AI, I think of it as a new tool that has amazing potential. And I actually think it has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourselves fixed.
So if I look back at the last 20, 30 years of research on emotion regulation, I'm talking here not just about managing chatter, but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives. What I can do is I can point to several individual tools that that are empirically supported, science-based tools.
Scientists have done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically. They've often gone down to the brain level. They've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between. So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work. But what we are now learning is
Individual tools are not the name of the game because we are often doing multiple things to manage our emotions and the combinations of tools we use Within people, they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand. And there's variability between people as well. So the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated.
So if someone comes to me with a problem, I can go through all the tools in the toolbox. What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and say, hey, For the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are, here are the four things that you should do, but that person over there, they should do these six things.
I think AI has the potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis. And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology.
Yeah. Isn't it remarkable that this is such a common human experience? And for most people, they never talk about this with anyone else because this is such a private experience. So I often start presentations with a quote from Rafael Nadal, the tennis great, him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with. And he
And then I go to the audience and I say, hey, what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says they're struggling with the voices inside their head, right? Like that is typically warning sign, right? That maybe something is awry here and someone needs support. Yet, this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on.
So to answer your question, is it common for kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves? Yes. I believe this is called the study of pretense. According to one famous Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky, One of the ways self-control is first learned is actually through self-talk. And so what happens is you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things.
Andrew, you should do this or don't do that and sit this way and not that way. And then what children will often do is go off on their own and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves. And so if you've ever been around young kids, you've probably seen them talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls. No, Jimmy shouldn't do this. Jimmy should do that.
Some kids do it in the form not of with an actual toy, but they have an imaginary friend in their mind that they are engaging with these different interactions. And what the kids are doing in those contexts, according to this idea, is they're practicing self-control. They are repeating the things, the messages that their caretakers have told to them, right? They are reinforcing it in those ways.
And then as time goes on, and your sister demonstrated this, that outer voice becomes our inner voice. And we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives. But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress, Many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud, right? And there's very little research on this. And a lot of this is anecdotal.
But I have, when speaking to a lot of individuals, they say, yeah, sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud. And I thought something was wrong with me. It's always what I'm struggling with. like a major stressor.
So if we go back to reviewer number two, right, in the academic world, I remember once I wrote this invited article and a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this response. And I remember just walking, I was, it was so offensive. I remember walking around the neighborhood and I said, why don't you say that to my face? You know,
and I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it. I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working through it. But it almost seems like in real moments of stress, we revert back to this very primordial way of regulating ourselves that we first exercised when we were kids, which is this self-talk.
And so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices, according to you, to manage the challenges that he is facing. I've heard David talk on a number of occasions, and I think there is another important point to bring up here, which is
Showing 781–800 of 968 · page 40 of 49
← Previous
Next →