The future of emotions
Clinical psychologist James Gross is fascinated by what emotions are, and he champions emotional literacy – a deeper understanding of what makes each of us tick.
In his research, Gross explores his “favorite topic,” emotion regulation, through the cognitive strategy of reappraisal to shift how we perceive and deal with unhelpful emotions. He talks about the Synergistic Mindsets intervention he co-developed, which is helping Gen Zers reframe their stress and regulate emotions. Emotions aren’t inherently bad, but we must separate the helpful from the harmful, Gross tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. I thought it would be good to briefly revisit the intent of this show since we've been doing it for quite a while. In 2017, when we started this show, we wanted to create a forum for showcasing the passion and the work of my colleagues at Stanford, who are doing amazing research to discover new things to solve problems facing humanity. This includes the fields of science, technology, medicine, engineering, law, business, arts and sciences, and humanities.
[00:00:34] Stanford University and many other universities have a long history of making research discoveries that positively impact big problems facing the public, the country, and the world. And it's these motivated humans who I wanted to showcase to show the problems they're working on, why they're working on it, and what the progress has been.
[00:00:55] In that spirit, I hope you'll walk away from every episode with a deeper understanding of the work that's happening at universities, how we share it, how we think about these problems, why we choose these problems, and what the progress is that we're making in a wide variety of disciplines. We also hope that you'll share this with family, friends, colleagues, so that everybody will have a better understanding of The Future of Everything.
[00:01:20] James Gross: To concrete over or cement over the emotions that we have that naturally arise in workplace and other contexts isn't a good start. I think just allowing that we do have emotions, they do arise, and that's not itself a problem. The problem comes from what happens next. And so if we can allow that emotions sometimes arise, we can be more, I think, strategic about whether the emotions are helpful or not. If not, what we can do about it.
[00:01:53] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If this podcast is bringing you value, go ahead and support it by rating and reviewing. We like to get a five if we deserve it, and we love to see your comments, and we read every single one. Today, James Gross will tell us that emotions are an important part of life, that we can learn how to recognize the source of our emotions, and we can learn how to regulate them in ways that can help us be happier and more successful in whatever we care about.
[00:02:26] It's the future of emotions. Before we get to the interview, let me remind you that we'll be doing the Future in a Minute segment at the end. I will ask James five rapid-fire questions, and he'll give me five, hopefully, rapid-fire answers So we all kind of know what emotions are: sadness, joy, happiness, surprise. These are things we experience every day.
[00:02:48] Sometimes it's obvious why we're experiencing an emotion. We just won a prize. Somebody gave us a gift that we love. We are happy. We are joyous. But other times, we experience emotions and it's not so clear why we're experiencing those emotions. So access to why it is that we're having certain feelings can be very useful. You may even wanna regulate your emotions. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that might not be the best choice.
[00:03:14] So, your ability to understand your emotions, understand their sources, and perhaps regulate them, is a critical skill for happiness in life. It enables you to be productive in the things that you care about and achieve a level of satisfaction that is hopefully very beneficial.
[00:03:31] Well, James Gross is a professor of psychology and philosophy at Stanford University, and he's an expert on emotions, where they come from, how we respond to them, ways we can learn to regulate them and when we wanna regulate them. He's even teaching a class about what makes you tick.
[00:03:50] Thanks for being here, James. Let me start out by just asking you simply, how did you decide to focus your research efforts on emotion and emotions?
[00:03:58] James Gross: You know, I've always been interested in what makes people tick, and as a kid, I looked around and saw all these funny behaviors that people called emotions: sadness, anger, tears, and so forth. And, they seemed like a really important part of why people do what they do, and, got interested. And so, as my interest grew and I decided I wanted to be a clinical psychologist and researcher, I focused my research on, on emotions.
[00:04:22] Russ Altman: So I guess a, a natural and hopefully fair question is if you can give us a working definition of what emotions are. I think many of us have an intuition, but I'd like to get from a pro what the kind of technical academic definition of emotion is.
[00:04:37] James Gross: Yeah, let's do that in two steps. First of all, what's the project of giving a definition for a term like emotion, right? So we're taking a term from everyday discourse, has its own history.
[00:04:47] It's a actually relatively recent term, past couple centuries. Used to mean a tumult in the outside, like a, an excited crowd would be an emotion. And that then slowly moved inwards over the past couple centuries. So what we're doing then is taking a term that's, emerged over time, in a given cultural context, and we're trying to make it a little bit more precise for scientific usage.
[00:05:09] So the way that scientists often think about emotions is that they're loosely coupled changes in a couple different response domains. Expressive behavior or peripheral physiology. Often there's a feeling component, maybe some cognitive changes. And all of these changes seem to be activated in the context of a situation that's encoded as personally meaningful.
[00:05:33] That is to say, there's something at stake, like I care about something. And in that context of caring, I have this loosely coupled set of changes that seem to help me respond to whatever it is I care about. We give labels to emotions like anger and fear and sadness, and there's all sorts of exciting debates about where we should draw lines and whether that's the best way to think about things.
[00:05:55] But emotions are responses to things we care about and they have a bunch of different aspects.
[00:06:00] Russ Altman: Great. Thank you so much. And so, you are a clinical psychologist, but you're also a philosopher, and so there is certainly a biological basis to emotions. And, and perhaps we won't spend a ton of time on that, but I I did wanna ask you about that biological basis, specifically in the context of, are humans the only organisms that we are sure experience emotions? And is that part of the definition as a uniquely human thing, or you don't care?
[00:06:27] James Gross: Great. So let me sneak up on that question too by saying that, you know, when we think about whether non-human animals have emotions, we probably wanna start with the idea that emotions are just one manifestation of this broader category that we call affect.
[00:06:43] And the term affect is incredibly slippery, but in my usage, I think of affect as this capacious term that tries to capture all manner of good for me, bad for me discriminations. Not in a philosophical, all things considered sort of way. In a, am I approaching or avoiding, or am I tending to kind of move towards something or away from something? So that's affect.
[00:07:05] And I take emotions to be a version of affect that may have some cognitive demands that might not be met in very simple, certainly unicellular, but even other more simple organisms. So I take emotions to be a higher bar than affect.
[00:07:21] And I would say that very simple organisms have affect. That is to say their behavior is reliably organized by the environment around them. We can predict whether they're gonna move towards or away from certain food sources or, thermal gradients. And so that's affect.
[00:07:37] But then for emotion, I think we have a slightly higher standard. And I do think other animals, non-human animals, meet that standard as well, but it's just a tougher standard, and there's more of a debate because we rely so heavily on verbal report, which is unavailable not just to non-human animals, but of course to some humans as well, infants and very old-
[00:07:59] Russ Altman: We're gonna get to that. Yes. So that actually is the perfect last sentence, because I do wanna. So, thank you for that introductory primer on, emotion, and I wanna get into your research. And I, of course, in preparation for these shows, I kind of stalk all your recent papers.
[00:08:13] But one of the themes is kind of what I would call meta-emotional, like you talk about emotional clarity, and that's one thing I I wanted to ask about, like, what does that mean? But also there's a lot of work on regulation of emotion and the fact that a, at least for humans, we can be aware of our emotions, and then there's a clear through line in your work that we can, and I use this in a good way, manipulate in a good way. I'm sure there's bad ways to manipulate emotions as well.
[00:08:36] So, tell me what's emotional clarity, and then maybe we'll go right into what is the degree to which we can regulate our emotions and, and that clearly is something that fascinates you.
[00:08:46] James Gross: Great. So as emotions play out, this multi-componential sort of response to situations that we care about, there are many different parts, and they play out over time. They're dynamic. They can be very, very strong and intense, or they can be, quite weak. And we, as agents, are often aware of these happenings.
[00:09:05] And so, when we are aware, because we feel kind of our body twitching and trembling and our hearts racing, we then have some level of sort of access to the fact that this stuff's happening in our body. And that's basically what we mean by clarity. To what degree are we able to crisply render in a differentiated way what's happening? That's, that's type clarity.
[00:09:29] There's another aspect of clarity that we're also interested in, which you might say is source clarity. So that's not just what is happening as emotions are unfolding, but what's the genesis? Why is it that I'm having this coordinated set of changes? So that's type and source clarity, and those are two parts of this project of being embodied and noticing as emotions grip us, what's happening.
[00:09:53] Russ Altman: Yes. And so, regulation, and that is a term that comes up a couple places in your work, and I, I find it very interesting because it, it's not clear, like, do we wanna regulate our emotions? Is that a skill that we should turn on and turn off kind of in an opportunistic manner to kind of optimize whatever performance or whatever we care about?
[00:10:11] So, talk to me about our real ability, because you could imagine regulation with respect to I change my affect. You introduced that idea of affect as an indicator of emotion, but I still may have the same emotions buried, or I might actually change things where actually the experience of the emotion is changing for me physiologically and cognitively. So, talk to me about regulation.
[00:10:31] James Gross: Yeah, great, my favorite topic in the world. So I, I, I take it that the starting point here is that like many other behaviors and responses that we have to the world around us, sometimes our responses are well-matched to the opportunities and demands. Other times they're not well-matched.
[00:10:48] We do dumb things or, you know, shortsighted things, or respond in ways that are hurtful to other people. And so, in those contexts, I think we, looking at our own emotions or looking at others' emotions, might have the impulse to try to influence either our own or others' emotions, and that's what I mean by regulate.
[00:11:08] That is to say, we notice, we talked about clarity, we talked about sort of the ability to sort of identify what emotions we're having and why we're having them. And those help us decide whether that emotional response is useful to us in a particular context. And I, it's really important to start with the idea that sometimes emotions are tremendously helpful. So this is not an emotion extermination campaign. This is an idea that we need to determine and get wise about when emotions are gonna be helpful for us or others and when they're not.
[00:11:41] And that's a tricky question philosophically and psychologically to determine what do we mean by helpful? Because something can be very helpful for me, but very bad for you as my interlocutor, or very, bad for me, but good for somebody else.
[00:11:54] So it's a very difficult thing, and I think it takes some, sort of sophistication to determine on the fly when an emotion is helpful or not. And it's that that's the setup then for the question, well, if I've decided that my emotion or someone else's emotion is not helpful or not useful in a particular context, however I wanna define that. Then we now have a new goal, which is to try to influence that emotion as it unfolds, and that's the regulation.
[00:12:25] And there are lots of ways to do regulation, and that's really been the centerpiece of what my work for the past three decades, trying to figure out what are the ways that people seem to be trying to influence their own emotions and others' emotions. Do all strategies work the same way? Short answer, they don't. And if they don't work the same way or as effectively as one another, what are some of the better ways to influence our emotions? And, if we can find some better ways, how can we train or support those better strategies?
[00:12:56] Russ Altman: So, that's fantastic. And now I wanna ask you, because I wanna put some meat on these bones.
[00:13:00] James Gross: Yeah
[00:13:01] Russ Altman: Which we, we're in a great position now to understand some of the active research projects in your lab that you're most excited about that are using all of these concepts that you've just, like, kind of laid out for us. I know, I know... I mean, I don't even, I'm afraid to even mention ones 'cause I don't wanna bias your answer. But you do, you've selected a wide variety of topics to make these studies in. And so, I guess the question is, what are the ones you'd like to talk about today?
[00:13:24] James Gross: Yeah. So I, I think the, let's talk about a line of work, and then we can double-click on some things if that's useful.
[00:13:29] Russ Altman: Great.
[00:13:30] James Gross: So, I think given the space I've just articulated with you, that we have emotions, they're sometimes helpful, sometimes not. When they're not, we try to do stuff to change them. And we've been busy trying to think what are the different strategies we can use. We need a kind of simple model for how emotions get generated if we wanna systematically study how people try to influence emotions.
[00:13:53] And so we start with just a fall-off-your-chair simple idea about how emotions in some situations depend on attention, and a certain way of representing the situation and our desired state of the world, which may be at odds with the actual situation. And it's that discrepancy in our view between the actual state of the world and the ideal or goal state of the world that generates the coordinated changes that we refer to as emotion. So, that's the generative process.
[00:14:25] And if that's a generative process, then what you can think of is efforts to target the situations that you might find yourself in. So those are situational strategies for regulation. You might target the attention, so those are attentional strategies. You might target your own thought process, the way you represent the ideal and actual, or you might target the responses as they unfold. And those are families of emotion regulation processes. And I think we've been particularly attracted to the cognitive step.
[00:14:55] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:14:56] James Gross: The step where you're in a situation, you're paying attention, and now how is it that you're representing the situation? As it is and as you'd wish it to be.
[00:15:07] And it's that discrepancy that I think is the motor of emotion. And if we can change that, those representations, we can possibly change the dysfunctional emotion that we seem to be tracking in ourselves or others.
[00:15:20] And that's brought us our attention to cognitive forms of emotion regulation.
[00:15:25] Russ Altman: Yes.
[00:15:25] James Gross: And one of those cognitive forms of regulation we've been particularly interested in is called reappraisal. Now, that's an awful term inherited, from-
[00:15:35] Russ Altman: That usually increases my taxes.
[00:15:38] James Gross: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and reappraisal came out of Dick Lazarus's work back in the 60's, and I, as homage to him, kept the term. I think it's complicated, but the, the basic idea is that we have an appraisal. That's a way of talking about this cognitive representation step, and the reappraisal is to change that. So, that's what we've been interested in. We're altering the cognitive representations that seem to be driving emotion, and reappraisal is this process.
[00:16:08] And one distinction we've drawn that I think is helpful is between efforts to change the representations of the actual state Which we, we call reconstrual, and efforts to change the desired state, which we call repurposing.
[00:16:25] So, these are two versions of, or flavors of reappraisal.
[00:16:30] Russ Altman: Yes.
[00:16:30] James Gross: And in one study, for example, we asked randomly assigned people, this is few years back in the context of, COVID. We asked people to look at COVID-related images, either with a filter of trying to change or reflect on their goals differently, or thinking about the images differently. And we contrasted that with two different kinds of control groups, one kind of an emotion processing group and another a low-level control group.
[00:16:59] And what we found is that either form of reappraisal seemed to decrease negative emotion immediately, increase positive emotion immediately, and it didn't seem like there was a price tag. It didn't seem like people were, you know, because they were feeling less negative, were about to do all sorts of silly things in the context of a pandemic. So that would be an example of a distinction that's theoretically motivated that we, you know, tried to test in a particular context.
[00:17:25] And some of the work that's ongoing is of course related to that, where we're trying to think about building reappraisal support vehicles, in the context of these are now students' projects that they're carrying forward, but using large language models to think about supporting reappraisal.
[00:17:43] So, what do you need to add as a front end to kind of tune what an LLM does? And this is obviously a rapidly changing target, but how is it you can leverage increasingly sophisticated tools, to provide the kind of support you'd like to see and that's often not available to people in shaping the kind of reappraisals that they try to undertake?
[00:18:05] Russ Altman: So, thank you. And, and I, I definitely wanna get to AI 'cause as you know, you've written a couple-
[00:18:09] James Gross: Yeah ...
[00:18:09] Russ Altman: ...papers with-
[00:18:10] James Gross: Yeah.
[00:18:10] Russ Altman: ...pretty spicy titles, and we'll get to that. But I, I did wanna, going back to the appraisal, you have a, a line of work in kind of what I would call clinical medical situations, like with people with, mental, disorders or pain, syndromes. And I, I can imagine that some of that reappraisal work is relevant there.
[00:18:27] And also, it was fascinating to read about the work where you look at teachers and their emotional regulation. And, and anybody who's watched, you know, a fifth grade teacher, the day is filled with, like, taking deep breaths and figuring out how to manage. And so, I just wanted to ask, specifically kind of, you said double-click before. Is there any, insights from the, in the medical setting or in the teaching setting that are particularly special or useful that have come out of that work?
[00:18:52] James Gross: Yeah. Well, great, Russ. So, so you're pointing in a, in a direction that I love to think about, which is, you know, given this basic work and given some of the findings we have from the lab, how do we apply this? How do we help people?
[00:19:03] And that can be parents dealing with kids 'cause it's so stressful these days. There can be teachers dealing with large classrooms. It can be people struggling with mental health conditions. It can be their providers who are trying to help people struggling. So, I think all of us, in one way or another, have emotions. That's part of being human, and we have emotions that are sometimes mistuned to the environment.
[00:19:24] So, I take it that our work is basically trying to translate some of these basic insights into advice or support for people in these contexts. And, you know, one bit of advice is just that it's helpful to recognize that we do have emotions. And I think there is sometimes in some contexts, and some of my colleagues have done work with judges and other contexts where it's sort of the thought is you shouldn't have emotions. But I think just to concrete over or cement over-
[00:19:55] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:19:55] James Gross: ...the emotions that we have that naturally arise in workplace and other contexts isn't a good start. I think just, you know, allowing that we do have emotions, they do arise, that's not itself a problem. The problem comes from what happens next.
[00:20:10] And so, if we can allow that emotions sometimes arise, we can be more, I think, strategic about whether the emotions are helpful or not, if not, what we can do about it. 'Cause if we start from the premise, "I can't ever have an emotion. I obviously am not having an emotion. Good people don't have emotions." You can't get very far because then you're in denial and you're having emotions 'cause it doesn't stop the emotion and all hell breaks loose.
[00:20:33] So for me, the starting point, kind of big take home I think here in the applied work is acknowledge emotions, realize they're sometimes helpful, sometimes not, and when they're not, believe because it's true, that there are some things you can do to influence those emotions in helpful ways. So, that's kind of the key take home package.
[00:20:53] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with James Gross from Stanford. We've been discussing and exploring ideas about what are emotions, what does it mean to regulate your emotions, and what are the value of those skills in applied circumstances like being a teacher or a doctor or a patient suffering from some kind of very frustrating disease so, now we're gonna move to the topic of young people and not only what their lives are like, but how we can teach them in the future about emotion and about understanding their own emotions.
[00:21:25] Before that, I just wanna remind you that at the end of the discussion, we're gonna have the Future in a Minute, where I will ask James five rapid-fire questions and he will give me something like five rapid-fire answers.
[00:21:37] So, James, right now it is well understood that young people, adolescents and, and beyond, are having a tough time. Social media contributes to this. There are worries about AI. The general world is somewhat chaotic, and I'm sure, I'm guessing, but I do have a little bit of experience, that there's a lot of emotions involved here. So, how do you, as a specialist in emotions, look at the current situation that young people find themselves in, and how do you kind of deconstruct it and understand it?
[00:22:07] James Gross: Great. Yeah, thanks, Russ. Important question. I mean, I think we're all aware that young people are struggling, these days. Many of them are struggling, and that means effectively they're experiencing higher levels of negative emotions, and lower levels of some of the positive emotions that we'd really like to see, feelings of closeness and comfort and so forth.
[00:22:28] And so what do we think about when we think about the challenges that they're facing from an affective science point of view? I think the starting point is, I think a very general one, which is to first determine what, what are the drivers of these diminished states of mental health?
[00:22:45] Russ Altman: Yeah, I totally agree with you, and one of my questions, just to point it, make it a little sharper-
[00:22:48] James Gross: Yeah
[00:22:48] Russ Altman: ...is do the young people understand what the sources of these emotions are? And, and that's just what you were about to talk about, I think.
[00:22:55] James Gross: Yeah, no, it's a great question. I don't think so, and I think; look, let's broaden the conversation just for a second. I think most of us humans have difficulty tracking why it is we're feeling what we're feeling at any temporal scale. Now, occasionally we're pretty clear. Something very specific happens, and then we have a big response to it and we can link the two. That's high levels of emotion clarity.
[00:23:18] But I think most of us walk around in these affective states that we're clear about some of the determinants, we're clear about some of the features, but a lot of this is pretty complicated and it's unclear to us. So that's just people. That's a human condition from my point of view. Now, it's possible that in some cultural contexts with tons of training from birth and lots of support, people would be much clearer than we are now. But that's not the world we're in.
[00:23:42] So, I take adolescents and young adults to be a special case of a more general phenomenon, right? So, I think it's not just them confused and everyone else is totally clear. I think everyone's kind of in the same boat, which is we're all pretty confused, but they may be particularly confused. And there is evidence, I think, that these Gen Z-ers are at increased risk, probabilistically, being in that kind of age range, this cohort seems to have had a bunch of things happen to them that have led them to have lower levels of mental health. Meaning again, decreased positive emotions and increased negative emotions.
[00:24:19] And so I don't think they're clear, and I think they're even less clear perhaps than we often are who are not in Gen Z. And I think we've been particularly interested in whether it's increased social media use, whether it's, you know, some of the very isolating sort of experiences that they had in pandemic times-
[00:24:40] Russ Altman: Yeah, yeah
[00:24:40] James Gross: When they were much younger. Whatever the drivers are, and there are many probably, we're interested in the psychological mechanisms that translate those distal antecedents into the lived reality of having a life that kinda sucks for the moment. And you know, there are macro structural sort of economic things, people applying to three, 400 jobs to get one if they're lucky.
[00:25:03] So, there are lots of things swirling around, and we've been very interested in trying to think about, well, what, what is it from this emotion regulation perspective that might be done to help people who are struggling? And we use the-
[00:25:15] Russ Altman: So that's interesting 'cause there you're kind of implying that we might be able to move the needle of this, kind of population level challenge.
[00:25:24] James Gross: Yeah, exactly. And I think there are, again, two steps probably to, to understanding how we're thinking about this. The first is a question about whether what we're seeing is all bad. In other words, what should our goal be? If we're thinking about a desired state of the world for these folks affectively, should it be that they feel no stress whatsoever?
[00:25:47] And we've challenged that in work with David Yeager. This is a Nature paper from a few years back. We argued that it's not the case that all stress is bad. It's the case that, high levels of stress that are poorly managed, that's what's toxic. And in fact, given the challenges of the world, what we want to, help young people with is the experience of stress that they learn how to manage.
[00:26:15] And so, we've developed what's called the synergistic mindsets intervention. So this is an intervention targeting younger people who have these difficulties, and it's synergistic mindsets intervention. What, what does that mean?
[00:26:30] So let's start with mindsets. For me, mindsets, and this is building on work by my colleague and friend Carol Dweck and Allie Crum, and others in the psych department here and elsewhere. So, mindsets are constellations of functionally related beliefs. And these beliefs shape the cognitive representations of desired and actual states. So they're sort of upstream or more stable determinants of these appraisals that we make, or representations we make of desired and actual states. So we're trying to move those beliefs so that we can change the appraisals. And that's the mindset part.
[00:27:07] The synergistic hinges on the idea that there are two literatures that seem relevant here. If what we're seeing is that people in this age group are feeling really stressed and overwhelmed by these challenges, one bit of work focuses on the idea that how you think about evaluation and challenge, the situations that might be difficult for you, is really important. And that kind of construal of the situation, for example, as thinking of an interview, "They're gonna find out all my weaknesses. This is gonna be horrible," or, "This is a chance for me to build my skills and get stronger and figure out whether this is a good fit."
[00:27:46] Those are two different possible ways of thinking about the same situation, and one of them is gonna be much more productive. It's gonna be more likely to lead to a challenge response, rather than a threat response physiologically, and that's gonna support different kinds of cognitive activity. So, that's one kind of mindset target that's in the world.
[00:28:07] A second mindset target that's been illuminated by Allie Crum and a number of others is the response that we have to the world when it's difficult for us. And Allie, in her work, has shown that the way we think about our stress response really matters. And we can imagine that when we start to feel stress, things are falling apart, we're losing control, off the tracks. Or we can think, "Great, this is my body revving up to help me get through a difficult time."
[00:28:38] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:28:38] James Gross: And the synergistic mindsets intervention just bangs those two together. And in a single intervention that's about 30 minutes, we found that if you package helpful advice about thinking about difficult situations with helpful advice about thinking about your responses to those situations. You end up with people who have more challenge responses than threat responses. They have diminished, negative emotion, increased positive emotion, diminished cortisol. So there's a whole package, of things that seems to be productive for them.
[00:29:11] Russ Altman: Is this a human-to-human intervention, or is there some kind of online thing?
[00:29:16] James Gross: Yes. It's, it's targeting specific individuals one by one using an internet-mediated tool.
[00:29:22] Russ Altman: Okay.
[00:29:22] James Gross: So there's, short videos and so forth. But these are one size fits all in this line of work rather than dynamically tailored on the fly. Yeah.
[00:29:30] Russ Altman: Right. So, so listen, we have about a minute left be, before the end, and I, I did wanna ask you about an exciting new class that you're teaching. I think it's called What Makes You Tick?
[00:29:39] James Gross: Oh, I'm, I'm so glad you asked. I love this...
[00:29:42] Russ Altman: Sounds like I would sign up for that because, you know- who doesn't love some introspection? So tell me-
[00:29:46] James Gross: Yeah
[00:29:46] Russ Altman: ... about the class, where it came from, how's it going?
[00:29:48] James Gross: Fantastic. Yeah. So this is a, the brainchild of one of my fantastic graduate students, Kate Petrova.
[00:29:54] And she and I were having conversations about, she loves to teach, I love to teach, and we were talking about how important all of these ideas are that you and I have been chatting about, and how they weren't, we thought, fully represented in the psychological curriculum. And so, we came up a couple years ago with the idea of making a class built around the idea of what makes you tick. And that's a question we all ask ourselves, "Why am I doing this? Why are other people doing these crazy things?"
[00:30:21] And in this class, we systematically unpack what would it look like to answer the question, what makes you tick? And is the model that we implicitly have about a conscious decider, is that really sufficient for the task of understanding human behavior? And our answer, to, to spoil the story is, it's not sufficient. It's part of the story. And we have a great time with this class. The one other thing, Russ, I'll quickly say-
[00:30:48] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:30:48] James Gross: ... is that pedagogically, we're, we're playing around with a really nice mixed format. So we cap the class at about 100, and we're taking advantage of this really nice space where we've got table groups of six. So it's a lecture, slide driven-
[00:31:02] Russ Altman: Nice
[00:31:02] James Gross: ... but we make heavy use of these seminar style discussions in class so that we can break out into groups, we can bring it back together, and we're just having a blast. This is our third cycle, and we have a bunch... Actually 'cause we don't have enough spots, you know, people are auditing.
[00:31:18] And so, so it's a great-
[00:31:19] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:31:19] James Gross: ... we're having a great time, and we're growing this. And, uh, I think we're gonna be capped, you know, at about 100 permanently because just of the nature of the interactions and stuff.
[00:31:27] Russ Altman: Yes.
[00:31:27] James Gross: But I'm having a blast, and, uh, I, I look forward to kind of spreading this interest around, 'cause I think people are, are, are naturally interested in what makes them tick.
[00:31:34] Russ Altman: Yes, yes. Well, that sounds wonderful. And, and I'm, actually, I have one more question, which I promised myself I would ask, and it's kind of out of the blue. Is EQ a real thing? Emotional intelligence?
[00:31:47] James Gross: Yeah
[00:31:47] Russ Altman: ... I could almost guess what you might say, but I really don't know. So give me, give me a quick answer on that.
[00:31:53] James Gross: Okay. So this is the shortest version I can give. So love Peter Salovey who came up with this term more than 20 years, 35 years ago now, I guess. And, um, this idea that we differ in our capacity to understand and use our emotions and then change them when they're,we need to make changes, that's a really important idea, as you might anticipate my saying.
[00:32:19] The idea that it's a kind of intelligence I think I worry about. The fact that they banged a whole bunch of things together back in their first thought piece on this, and the fact that it's now big business, and it's being sold-
[00:32:32] Russ Altman: Right, right
[00:32:32] James Gross: ... way ahead of where we are scientifically bugs me to pieces.
[00:32:36] So I like one piece of this, emotion regulation, which is one of four of their branches, and I think that's for real. But what we have to do with all of what they laid out is to subject these ideas to real significance and serious empirical investigation. The, the business of EQ is way ahead of the science, and that always bugs me.
[00:32:57] Russ Altman: Great. Thank you. So this was a fabulous conversation, but before we bring it to a close, I wanted to ask you if you're ready for our feature that we call The Future in a Minute?
[00:33:06] James Gross: Absolutely.
[00:33:07] Russ Altman: Great. So I'm gonna ask five questions. You give me your answers. They do not have to be long. And here's number one. What is one thing that gives you most hope about the future?
[00:33:17] James Gross: That's easy. It's people. It's my students. It's the students I see in the classes. Like, What Makes You Tick? They're excited, they're interested, learning new skills, and they are the future.
[00:33:28] Russ Altman: What's one thing you want people to walk away from this episode remembering?
[00:33:32] James Gross: That emotions exist and matter. Sometimes helpful, sometimes not. When not, we can do stuff about them.
[00:33:38] Russ Altman: Aside from money, what is the one thing you need to succeed in your work and your research?
[00:33:43] James Gross: That's easy, too. Passion. If you don't care about what you're doing, you're not gonna get very far. But if you love it, and that's all you think about, you're gonna get far.
[00:33:51] Russ Altman: If all goes well, what does the future look like?
[00:33:54] James Gross: We better understand what makes us tick and what makes other people tick. And with that understanding, we develop greater compassion and a greater ability to be our healthy, adjusted selves and help others do the same so we can reach our potential. And this isn't just, by the way, at the individual level.
[00:34:11] This is at the level of collectives and societies because the world is in a dire state right now. And I, I take it that as part of being human, we have these emotions, and we need to understand them and learn how to regulate them.
[00:34:23] Russ Altman: And finally, if you were starting over and you needed to get your degree or certification in a different discipline, what would it be?
[00:34:31] James Gross: I'm gonna cheat by saying that, you know, I so love what I do, that I would just find another path to it if I had to get a different degree. But I... Look, I, I think, you know, neuroscience, cognitive science, we're, we're pushing this idea that there's an affective science. I think, I anticipate that that will be a interdisciplinary hub as we move forward.
[00:34:50] So I think there are millions of paths to this. And our Stanford Center for Affective Science that I started a couple years ago, which brings students and faculty together for lunches and dinners, is a wonderful testament to how people from English and physics and math and biology can get together and have great conversations about this stuff.
[00:35:10] Russ Altman: Thanks to James Gross. That was the Future of Emotions. Thank you for listening to this episode. Don't forget, we have more than 350 back episodes where you can spend all day learning about The Future of anything. Also, we've got some amazing episodes coming up, so if you're not following the podcast, I would recommend you mash that button that says follow or subscribe, and that way you'll get notified whenever we release one of our amazing Futures of something.
[00:35:37] You can connect with me on many social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, where I'm @RBAltman or @RussBAltman. Also, you can follow the Stanford School of Engineering, which is @StanfordSchoolOfEngineering, or a little shorter, @StanfordENG.
