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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They give us practices, rituals to meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well. So that's another kind of influence that I don't think we often think about, but that is really quite powerful.
Remarkable. It's science fiction. If we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids to think about what we have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people, the glasses that they are wearing, we probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids.
Yeah, this is a question that comes up quite a bit, and it's a really hard one to answer because we haven't, of course, been tracking people's chatter and emotion dysregulation levels over the centuries. I think it's absolutely true that we now have new forms of technology that
are perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome, but they are also providing us with opportunities. So to be clear, I think social media and technology can and does do a lot of harm. And I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well.
And the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to navigate those digital technological landscapes. And I think we probably jumped into them without a user guide too quickly. And we're only learning now, 15 years later, or whatever the number is, that that was the case. But I don't know that I would... Well, I'll speak for myself.
I think net positive, there's a lot of good that has come from these technologies. If we think back centuries ago... It's not clear to me that the world wasn't a challenging place either.
I mean, you know, we used to get into fights and pull swords and there is huge, you know, people would invade readily if you go back further and there was the threat of illness and, you know, we weren't living nearly as long. And so I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species because
But, and this is I think a really important but, and I think about this often, the issues that we are talking about today on this podcast, this question of how we manage our emotional lives, this is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form. Because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies.
We've always been challenged by circumstances. And those circumstances are constantly evolving, providing new threats to us that now we need to learn how to manage. When, you know, when I was digging deep into the history of emotion regulation for SHIFT, I couldn't believe it that when I look back at the first surgical tool ever developed, you know what that is? Trephining. Trephining.
So trephination, tell everyone who's listening what that involved.
Or brain, or if we go back 8,000 to 10,000 years ago when this technology was first cutting edge, right? Like the new iPhone of the times, trephination- For spirits. For spirits. or maybe spirits, right? So one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation.
So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we use to manage our emotions. Then let's jump into the mental time travel machine or just the time travel machine and go to the late 1940s where there was another major spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline.
That's right.
A Portuguese physician develops the lobotomy. I think it was initially called a leucotomy. Essentially, making some holes in your frontal cortex.
Relieved people's interest in pursuing lots of... It caused major, major, major dysfunction. And to be clear... This is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention.
Yeah. Generally not a good thing. But, you know, just to go back to the lobotomy, what's amazing to me is like, that was... perceived to be such an advance that it won the Nobel Prize. Like the Nobel Prize. Because it calmed people down. Calmed people down, right?
So I raise these issues to just point that, like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage our emotions effectively for a really long time. And now fast forward to the present,
We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet, but I would argue that we have made major advances in identifying non-invasive science-based tools that can be leveraged to help people lead more productive emotional lives. And so, you know, you raised this question earlier about what is a productive life? What is a good life? And I think answering that question is in part
relevant to how I think about, how do you define self-control in many ways or emotion regulation? Or let me, not just how you define it, but what are the component parts? So we've been talking about tools throughout this conversation, all these different tools that exist, these different shifters for pushing our emotions or chat around. That's one core part of regulating effectively.
But another core part is our motivation or our goals. And you need both motivation and tools. So I can know about all the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered. If I'm not motivated to manage my emotions, I'm not going to use those tools. If, on the other hand, I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions, but I don't know what the tools are, I'm not going to be that effective.
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