The Exchanges

Q What are the core emotions? Like, are there universal emotions? Are there, like, how many emotions are there? Are there millions? Are there four? Are there five?

A You know, some scientists will tell you that there are six, and some will tell you that there are 22 or 24. I mean, I think if you look at the evidence, there's not really good evidence for either of those answers. In fact, there's evidence against both of those answers. I would say, um, there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions. What's universal is affect. Your brain regulates your body, your body. Sends, sends data to your brain and you feel it as affect because that's how you're wired. That's how everybody's wired. You know, affect is like this kind of like general barometer that lets you know how your body budget's doing. And that's true for everybody. As far as we can tell from all the cultures that have ever been studied, that's universal. But more than that, how you make sense of, you know, for example, there's one culture where The prescription for what you're supposed to do when you're afraid is go to sleep.

AI assessment note: “there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions.”

Q That's really interesting. And like, should we label emotions with kids?

A Absolutely. In this culture, I mean, in all culture, I think that kids have to learn, they have to become culturally competent in the categories that are meaningful in their culture, otherwise they can't communicate with other people. So remember, what a, what a word is referring to is a whole event that's occurring, that is how the child feels, what's happening in the world around the child in that moment, what's going on in the child's body in that moment, and then What actions are happen next and what the consequences are. For example, when you feel bad, do you know what to do next to make yourself not feel bad? Not really. It's a kind of a crapshoot. But if you know that you're sad or angry or afraid, well, there might not be one thing to do when you're sad, but then maybe there are two or three and your brain can kind of make a pretty good guess based on the situation, which one of those you should try. And, um, so in a sense, you know, emotions are ways of understanding what's happening in your own body in relation to what's happening in the world as a prediction for what to do next to make yourself Feel better or worse or get yourself into a state that, that your brain, you know, thinks would be a good state to be in. And I, I say it that way because people don't consciously do it a lot of the time. It's just, that's just business as usual for how brains work. And so the…

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. In this culture, I mean, in all culture”

Q And how does that skew? Is it fifty-fifty between empathy and solution, or is it mostly empathy?

A It depends on the person, you know. If you ask my daughter, who's 21 now, she will tell you almost a hundred percent of the time, I want empathy. And if you asked her, she would say, and my mother is constantly trying to solve problems, and all I really want is just a little empathy. But if you ask my husband, he would almost always say, I want a solution. I want you to help me find a solution to I want, I want instrumental help is what we would call it as a scientist. And I think I probably am more like him in that sense. I, I certainly want to feel understood, but I usually what I want is, is, um, help with the solution that actually makes me feel better. I don't need someone to just give me a hug and pat me on the back, but some, but occasionally that that's very welcome. I think it really varies from person to person, which is why It's really helpful to ask.

AI assessment note: “It depends on the person, you know.”

Q Are Made. And while emotions feel automatic and uncontrollable, Lisa's theory is that emotion is constructed in the moment. This conversation focuses on emotions. We'll dive into what they are and how they're made, and how this understanding helps us perform at our best, raise kids, and understand others. It's time to listen and learn. Can you tell me how you got interested in emotions? Where did that come from?

A Wow. Well, you know, who's not interested in emotions since we all have them, but when I was a graduate student, I, um, when I went to graduate school, I did not go to graduate school to study emotions. I went to study the self, you know, your view of yourself and why that matters, and I was using some measures of emotion that were not behaving themselves. They just weren't working the way they were supposed to work, so I thought, all right, I'm going to use very objective measures of emotion, so I'm going to, rather than asking people how they feel, which is what I was doing at the time, ah, I thought, all right, I know that there are universal facial expressions, that's what every textbook says, so I'll just learn how to measure emotion in people's faces. And then I went to the scientific literature and I read and I realized actually there's, even though people claim there's a lot of evidence for universal facial expressions of emotion that everybody scowls when they're angry and.

AI assessment note: “when I went to graduate school, I did not go to graduate school to study emotions.”

Q Are those the micro expressions that people talk about?

A Well, these are actually not micro expressions. They're, The idea that there are micro expressions and the idea that there are full blown facial expressions of emotion, scowling and anger, smiling and happiness, pouting and sadness come from the same theoretical view. And although there's a lot of claims that, you know, everyone in the world scowls when they're angry and everyone in the world recognizes a scowl as anger, uh, that's not actually what the data show. And I was, so I thought, oh, okay, well, I guess I can't measure emotion in the face. I'll measure emotion in the body because everybody knows that, you know, there's one bodily pattern for anger and one for fear and one for sadness. You know, so your blood pressure goes up in, in maybe you flush a bit, you know, in anger, but your heart races in fear and so on. And so again, I went to the research literature and I I read what the papers said, and then I read the data and they didn't match. Uh, in fact, there is no universal physical signature for any emotion that's ever been studied. And I thought, okay, well, I, I guess I better figure out, uh, how to image the brain because, you know, everyone knows that there's going to be one circuit for fear, one circuit for anger, one circuit for sadness. Everyone in the world has these circuits are born with them, and maybe even some animals have them too. And, you know, what …

AI assessment note: “these are actually not micro expressions.”

Q And often we don't even want to feel it in ourselves, let alone with somebody else, right? Like we, we, it seems like we suppress a lot of feelings. Talk to me about that. Like, does that come back to bite us? Does it make them linger? Does it cause other behaviors later on?

A The, the idea that, that suppressing feelings is really bad for you is part of an old hydraulic model of emotion that, you know, an emotion triggers in your brain. You need to let off steam, have catharsis, kind of get it out, and if you don't, something bad will happen. That's not really true. Here's more the way it works. You can think about your brain as running a budget for your body. You have cells. Those cells require energy. You're thinking, what the hell? I just asked her a question about, you know, is it bad not to express emotion? She's talking about cells. I'll get there. But I mean, I think the problem is if you really want to understand it, you have to start.

AI assessment note: “suppressing feelings is really bad for you is part of an old hydraulic model”

Q Are there certain things that we can do to make better decisions when we are feeling emotional?

A This is what I say to my students, too, actually. Whenever you hear something, or you see something, and you have this intense reaction of, I love it. This is awesome. Or a really negative reaction, tense, intense negative reaction, like, I hate this, that's stupid, or this is, you know, I hate that person, or whatever. Those are the moments to just stop, and, you know, use the intensity of your affect as a cue to stop and interrogate what's going on. If you love something, you're reading something, or you're hearing something, and, you know, on the news, maybe, or you're watching a YouTube thing, or whatever, and you love it, That, whatever was just said, validates some deeply held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated probably some deeply held belief that you just had. So stop and take a moment and think about it and try to, try to observe what's going on. You know, if you take a moment before the heat of the moment has you in its grip, You will make better decisions, but that's not about really being emotional or being, um, rational. That's about using your affect as a cue, as a, using it as a barometer, the way, what it was designed by evolution to, to be as a cue that this might be a moment where you want to slow down for a minute and take stock.

AI assessment note: “use the intensity of your affect as a cue to stop and interrogate”

Q So are P are some people actually more emotional than other people? Is that a thing? Or do they just have a bigger deficit than other people?

A Yes, both. So here's the thing. I, I, I sort of skipped over one piece because I'm already giving you all this complicated science stuff, but I'll just complicate things further and give you one other piece. So when your brain is regulating your body, Your body is sending sense data back to your brain that your brain needs in order to keep that regulation going. And you don't experience those sensations typically in a very precise way. So when your heart is beating and your lungs are expanding and, you know, everything else that's going on in that little internal drama that's like right now, for example, you're sitting there, you look like you're sitting quietly, but you have a whole You know, symphony of physical changes going on in your body, and your body is sending that sense data to your brain. Can you sense your liver functioning? Can you sense your heart beating?

AI assessment note: “Yes, both. So here's the thing.”

Q And in humans, like it can motivate us, right? Like sometimes fear drives us to do other, is that because it's a particular type of fear or is that because?

A Right. So that's the, that would be the old way of doing things. You could say, okay, well, instead of saying I have this category that's highly, with highly variable instances, a population in the Darwinian sense, you say, no, okay, really, I just have to find types of fear. I'm just going to, so I'm going to take the category fear and I'm just going to Chop it up into smaller bits. So, because what you're trying to do is say, okay, all the instances in, you know, this kind of fear are the same. But even, no matter how small you make those, those, those boxes, there's still variation in the boxes. You just can't get rid of the variation because it's inherent in the phenomenon. So there are some scientists who define emotions as behaviors. There are other scientists who define emotions as feelings. In our culture, colloquially, as people, we tend to define emotions as feelings. In other cultures, emotions are the action that's predicted in a particular situation, and feelings don't really play into it at all. It's, in fact, seen as kind of disrespectful to presume That you know how someone feels by how they act. In our culture, we very much think that we know how people feel and what they think by what they act. That's why words like microaggression, uh, you know, or micro expression exists because we make an inference. The, the brain, your brain is automatically making inferen…

AI assessment note: “You just can't get rid of the variation because it's inherent in the phenomenon.”

Q So there are no telltale signs that you could see, even if you could see inside somebody, would you see that this is anger or is there something in our blood or physiology that no, and it's not cultural either?

A Well, I, it's not completely a big random mess. I think the, the way to think about it is this, that first I'll give it to you by analogy, uh, and then, and then we'll say it by emotion. So Before Charles Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species, people believed that a category of animal, like a species of animal, like say a dog, there was a, a particular perfect dog. You know, there was a dog. It's kind of like the dog show view of, of dogs. There was a perfect Cocker Spaniel. There was a perfect Dalmatian. There was a perfect Siberian Husky. Every dog had some of the features of what made that breed perfect. Um, but there was a perfect animal with the perfect tail length and the perfect coat thickness and the perfect eye color. And All the individuals that you would see of that kind of dog varied from each other, but that was just error. It was just mistakes that really there was, there's, there was this perfect dog out there. And, um, philosophers would say there was an essence, you know, an essence of cocker spanielness that was, that was there. But what we saw in the world, all the cocker spaniels we saw, you know, they had varying features like And so there was a lot of error in the mix. And Charles Darwin came along and said, no, actually, what a species of an animal is, like a breed of Cocker Spaniel, is a collection of highly variable individuals. That what's rea…

AI assessment note: “first I'll give it to you by analogy, uh, and then, and then we'll say it by emotion.”

Q What are the things that we can do environmentally? You mentioned sort of like not having the chips around. Are there other things that you've learned that we can increase our environment to nudge us toward or put us on the path to success?

A A lot of the things that we know of that help to put us on the path to success are things that are only easy for people to do who have enough privilege to have control over their environments. So things like You know, getting enough sleep. I mean, you know, I said, well, that's the, that's the one, if you could only pick one thing, that would be the thing, but not everyone actually has that luxury. You know, ambient noise is, is, um, uh, random kind of loud, you know, bangs and, and kind of loud noise is, you know, what happens, for example, if you live in New York or whatever, you know, you, eventually your brain stops hearing that noise. It just becomes background.

AI assessment note: “things like You know, getting enough sleep... ambient noise is”