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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And so by leaving our phones outside of the space, we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way. When laptop screens are open in my seminars, I know that I've already lost the battle because I know the object, the stimulus is so tempting.
even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world, which I am not, I aspire to be captivating, but I know that I'm always going to lose compared to the screen, the email. I ask them to, yeah, no laptops in my class.
So far, so good. I actually explain to them the science behind this. I explain why I'm doing this. And I say that, hey, if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes, this is a divided attention task. I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open. And in the courses that I teach, it's more about discussion and thinking through things.
So they don't really have a need to type notes for exams, which I think makes it easier for me. But modifying our space is really strategically, like this is another valuable tool in our toolbox. Like when we have people over for football watching parties, let's say, it's pretty common where I come from in Ann Arbor. And my favorite food in the world is pizza.
And we have this wonderful New York City style pizza place in Ann Arbor now. I will order vast amounts of it, much more than we need. And when the game is over, I will insist that everyone take it with them because I know if it is in the refrigerator and I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water, if I see the pizza box, the queue,
it will elicit a emotional response, this desire, this appetitive response to consume the pizza, which is not the goal that I have from either a fitness or emotion regulatory point of view. So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at meeting my regulatory goals.
Yeah. Your example of your advisors resonates so strongly with myself.
Well, it entirely depends on my mental state. And prior to really getting involved in this space, I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess and sometimes it is spic and span, unbelievably organized and clean. And so let me share with you some of the research in this space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking.
a lot of people find that when they are experiencing chatter, they reflexively start organizing their spaces. So I'm a great example of this. My entire life, if we called my mother up right now, please let's not do it. But if we did, she could attest to the fact that there would always be a trail of towels and clothing from the bathroom to my bedroom and all over the place.
And my office is similar, piles of papers and books. And that's when life is good. I'm kind of free flowing. I'm getting in there. I'm being creative. I'm generating ideas. And I'm not really worried about everything around me. In fact, I'm really good at typically like tuning out my surroundings to focus in on the task at hand. I
When I'm experiencing chatter though, and this is true from the time I was little, I would always start putting things away. I would always start organizing things, making them nice and tidy. My office is always spotless. Sometimes I even take it further presently when I'm experiencing chatter. I clean up my office, then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy.
And if it's really bad, like I'll clean up my kids' rooms and things like that. This is a very common experience. When you're experiencing chatter, you don't feel like you are in control. You're not in the driver's seat. The thoughts and feelings are taking over and they're pushing you in directions and to places that you don't want to be.
It's an aversive state and it's chronically activated for a lot of people. Human beings... In general, we crave control. We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable. There's some survival value that that communicates to us, right? If we know things are certain and proceeding in a predictable way. Creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside.
It's called compensatory control. And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us augment our spaces to counteract, in this case, our emotional state. And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question, but it, for me, highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances.
When I'm not experiencing chatter, it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not. Like, no big deal. But when I'm motivated to think, feel, and behave in a particular way, then my circumstances are becoming more important.
The way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist and Some of those shifters are inside us. So there are these sensory shifters we talked about. There are attentional shifters. We haven't gotten into that yet, but we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions, and we can be strategic in how we do that.
There are perspective shifters, the way we think about our circumstances, reframing, distancing. Those are all on the inside. But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships, how other people can push our emotions in different directions. Sometimes other people can be amazing assets, sometimes tremendous liabilities.
There are physical shifters, like in our spaces, and we just talked about those. You can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter. People talk about culture as the air we breathe, right? We are in different cultures throughout our lives. And sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day.
So, you know, if you're going to your lab or you're on campus at Stanford, that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and weird practices maybe. That's no offense to Stanford, by the way, that's more academics. Academia has some weird practices.
If you then go to your podcast community, the team in the studio that we're sitting here, there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here. And those cultures that we are a part of, they powerfully shape our emotional lives. They influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value. So what kinds of emotional experience are we motivated to have?
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