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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Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance. And we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things. We can look at it from different perspectives. We can focus on the silver lining. We can contextualize it. So you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus, but you don't always need to refocus on the problem. So you want to be flexible.
Flexibility and how you deploy your attention is really the mantra that I personally live by based on what I know of how all this works. There are a couple of caveats I wanna throw out there. When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding, I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance.
There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are not productive like substance abuse. We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding, not good. So you wanna be balanced.
Yeah. I mean if the problem keeps – like you want to listen to what your mind and body are telling you. And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it. But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis, which may not be positive, negative experiences, as time moves on, sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives.
And we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks, like you have to do it this way, that tends not to work out very well.
It's a religion in the city that I live in. That's right.
So we actually, it's called the Big House, actually the largest football stadium in the country. So close to 110,000. Whoa. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. And we sing in unison. And it's actually, I never really was into football before moving to Ann Arbor. And now I embrace it. It helps when you're the national championships, which we were champions, which we were last year.
Congratulations. We're working on it this year.
We should definitely have you out there. It is a load of fun.
Yeah. So emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon. Emotions can spread within seconds. They tend to... We tend to catch emotions more quickly when we're not sure of how we should be thinking or feeling in a particular situation. So we often are referencing other people in those instances as a source of information. The people around us, of course, are different.
a rich source of information. This is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently, right? We're trying to learn something about how to respond. And we know it can have these cascading effects, both in everyday life, in both the positive and the negative direction. But also, you know, in the digital world, we see these emotions that can spread really fast too.
So it's a very powerful phenomenon. It's one I'm often very attentive to when I come into the classroom, like you're trying to... You tend to not want to have a negative mood spread through an audience when you are teaching to them. And so you're sensitive to that kind of certain kinds of displays or tones that might convey that kind of emotional response.
And I think it's something that we need to be increasingly aware of, especially when we're working in any kind of group context. Like when you're working in a team, it is really important to keep the team engaged.
at the level of emotional tone that you feel if you're the leader or even just a member of this team that is committed to it, you want to keep that tone at the most productive level because if it dips below or above, that can sabotage how well you perform. And there's a lot of research on that.
And I'm very, very attentive to this when I am in group context, especially when I'm leading those groups, those teams, those labs, like really making sure that that kind of negative mojo does not, does not spread.
Well, you know, I haven't experienced firsthand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom, but obviously a lot of my colleagues have, and we see this playing out on lots of universities. These are very turbulent times. Turbulence activates emotion, and we know going back to...
an earlier part of our conversation when people experience strong emotions are often motivated to share those emotions with other people. That often takes the form of vocalizing them and that can elicit contagion throughout. And so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are making their way through people, groups, and societies.
What should you do in those circumstances? Well, I think it depends a lot on the context and what the nature of the emotional response is. And is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful? And there are differing views about when you should intervene and how to do it. I think in general, though, you bring the playbook of always wanting to
kind of validate like your emotional experience is a genuine response that you are having to the situation. In most cases, yes, we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicitous way. But I think in a lot of cases, the kinds of phenomenon we're talking about, like these are just honest emotional reactions. These are really difficult times. And I think
And trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really great first step. I mentioned to you before we started talking that I had this wonderful conflict mediator come to one of my classes recently to talk about how do you not just engage with emotional groups, but how do you engage with others?
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