The Evolving Leader

REPLAY: How Emotions Are Made with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett

• Lisa Feldman Barrett • Season 7

Share episode

Back in 2020, we released a two-part conversation (S1 Ep15 and 16) with neuroscientist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. We’re long-time admirers of Lisa’s work and were thrilled that she agreed to join co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender to discuss her work on The Evolving Leader podcast. It’s also clear that Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is a big hit with our listeners as four years after release these two episodes continue to sit at the top of our listener chart, so here we’ve decided to pull them together into a special extended episode.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is profoundly changing our understanding of the brain and in particular, our emotions. Since the ancient philosophers, and into our last century of scientific endeavour, emotions have been seen as hard-wired responses to external stimuli, located in specific regions of the brain. Lisa’s work has over-turned this age-old model which shapes everything from our current beliefs about emotional intelligence to facial recognition software widely being deployed around the world.

Beyond this extended conversation, you’ll find more of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work in her two books, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020) and How Emotions are Made (2017), as well as hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)


Social:

Instagram           @evolvingleader
LinkedIn             The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter               @Evolving_Leader
YouTube           @evolvingleader

 
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team

Jean Gomes:

In this show, we revisit our most popular guest, the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, with an extended conversation about the latest understanding of how emotions work. Lisa's pioneering research has transformed an understanding of emotion that's largely remained unchallenged for two millennia. Instead of seeing emotions as hard wired responses to external situations, her work has revealed a very different picture that we construct our emotions to make sense of the world. This understanding is opening up a whole new set of avenues for how we can operate, both in terms of improving our well being, but also our judgment, decision making and relationships.

Scott Allender:

Hi friends. Welcome to the evolving leader podcast. I'm Scott Allender, and with me, as always, is the impeccably dressed Jean Gomes.

Jean Gomes:

How are you feeling, Scott?

Scott Allender:

Super energized. I've been looking forward to being in our recording studio with our guest today for a long time, and I know you have too. Do you want to tell us about how you're feeling?

Jean Gomes:

I am well, I'm feeling like you. I'm super energized and happy, and I'm paying attention to my emotions, because today we are joined by Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of this incredible book, 'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain'. Dr Barrett, welcome to the evolving leader podcast. We're absolutely delighted to have you here. It's fair to say that your book and work has made a profound impact on us and many others, and not in the incremental sense of understanding, but a paradigm shift. Often that phrase is really inappropriately used, but in the case of the theory of constructed emotion, it's undoubtedly warranted. So welcome.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Jean Gomes:

So Lisa, can you start by giving us a quick tour of your journey in your career and what inspired you to write this book?

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Sure, I mean, I originally went to graduate school thinking that I was going to become a therapist, so I was training to be a clinical psychologist, and while I was training, I had to do research, and none of the studies that I was running were conducting were replicating. So what you do when you go to graduate school is usually try to replicate things that have been published first, and then you go on and do your own studies. And I couldn't get anything to replicate. And I actually thought about dropping out of graduate school because I thought, well, clearly I'm just not cut out for this science business and but the findings that were failing to replicate had to do with people's reports of emotion about how they felt, and what I realized was that these failures to replicate other people's work were really could be re described as me replicating my own findings again and again and again, and this began a mystery for me that shifted my entire trajectory of my scientific work, and I ended up not going into clinical practice, but actually taking an academic job and founding a scientific laboratory, which is now, we're almost in our 30th year, and in the process, I retrained as a neuroscientist. And, you know, I would say, up until about 2013 I had very little interest in speaking to the public directly, I felt that I really didn't feel like I had anything to say. I'm a scientist. I'm most comfortable in a laboratory doing research. Our lab is very large for even for a neuroscience lab, and very productive. And so I have a lot of young scientists who I mentor, and that was really my main focus, doing research on emotion. And the dilemma that I encountered, really when I was a graduate student, was very, very hard to unravel. And this was the idea that, you know, what I was observing when I was a graduate student, over and over and over, is that people fail to make distinctions between certain types of emotional experiences. So when they report feeling anxious, they also report feeling angry and depressed and guilty, and when they report feeling happy, they also report feeling tranquil and excited. And I, you know, so pleasant or unpleasant. And I originally had thought when I was a student, you know, maybe people just aren't aware of the emotions they're having. So the problem is that they're the emotions themselves themselves the way I was thinking at the time, the emotions themselves were distinct, but people were unaware of those distinctions, so they were basically emotionally unaware. And I thought, well, I'll just find what the objective markers are of these emotions. Be able to measure people objectively what their emotional states are, and then maybe even be able to teach people how to become more aware. That was sort of the general idea. And all the way through graduate school and into the beginning of my academic career, my scientific career, I realized that there actually are no objective markers of any emotion category at all. You know, Darwin is touted as, having said Charles Darwin that you know, every emotion category has its own distinct facial expression when you look at the evidence. And I just published a paper last year with four other senior scientists. We reviewed over 1000 papers. You know, what you find is that this the Americans or Western stereotype for an anger expression say, like scowling, right? Is the expression everyone around the world is supposed to scowl when they're angry, and we're supposed to recognize scowls as anger. Well, it turns out that in large urban cultures, about 30% of the time people scowl when they're angry. That's more than chance, so scowling is an expression of anger, but people do many, many different things with their faces when they're angry, and about 70% of the time they're not scowling. So we call that low reliability, and they scowl when they're not angry. They scowl when they're concentrating hard. They scowl when they want to indicate that something isn't very funny. They scowl when they have gas, you know. And so that's very low specificity, and

Jean Gomes:

I noticed that in Scott a lot.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

And so everything that you measure about emotion, whether it's the face or the voice or physical changes in the body, or even neural patterns of neural activity in the brain, there's no one to one mapping for a specific physical pattern and a specific emotion instance of emotion. And so this is what I studied. And I studied this kind of paradox, which is that many people experience anger and sadness and fear, happiness, gratitude, awe, pride. We experience these emotions as distinct, but we often don't report them that way, and we can't find a single physical marker to distinguish these categories. This, to me, seemed like a really, really interesting puzzle, which I worked on for about 25 years. And, you know, there are competing views, and it's a very contentious debate. It has been really for 150 years that scientists have been studying emotion, and I had no interest really in talking to the public until in 2013 when a young journalist came to me and really wanted to write about this paradigm shift that was this kind of scientific revolution that we were really egging on, I would say, in our lab and with some other labs. And so she wrote, she spent probably six months interviewing me and wrote this article, and then her editor wanted to know why anybody should care? Like, so who cares if we believe that emotions work one way, and actually, you know, they work another way. And who cares if there are no objective markers for emotion, like, Why does any of this matter? So she came to me, and she said, you know, can you please explain what the implications are? And I was, you know, my reaction was sort of like what I would now think of as kind of dismissive, you know, like, why should I have to explain this? It's just, I'm doing science. Do we ask people, you know, when they want to study the Higgs boson? Do we ask them why? Why do they want to study this? What's interesting about it? No, they just study it, you know. So, just be interested in how things work. Your brain is really interesting organ. Just be interested in how it works, you know, like, why do I do? Why does it matter? Why do I have to have, like, some big immediate, you know, implication for the public? And she just, you know, her editor just basically refused to publish this, and it was her first feature article, and I felt really bad she spent all this time talking to me. And so I sat down and thought about it for five minutes, and I realized actually it's pretty serious that people are using the wrong ideas about emotion. Wars have been started. People have been killed. Children who have you know who like with autism and so on, have been given treatments that can't work, and they don't work, and there's no possibility that they could work. And that may sound like hyperbole, but it really isn't. And I realized that it was really important that people understand that science matters to their everyday life and when physicians and lawyers and economists and you know, all the people teachers, all the people who are making decisions about you and your outcomes are using the wrong idea about how something works, something is important and central as emotion, that's a pretty serious thing. And so I decided the to write, you know, I basically I swore I would never write a popular science book. And so I just violated my own claims and wrote one. And thought, well, you know, the what I can do is I can just put the information out there, and if people find it useful, great that that, that would make me really happy. And you know, so far, three and a half years later, the book is still, seems like it's still having an impact on people's lives, at least from what I hear over email and so on for the better.

Scott Allender:

So you've upended the classical view, is

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Sure. Well, I mean the the way to how you describe it, and it's so fascinating. And when I read think about a fingerprint, or in, in in science, we would read your book, I was I was loving it, and I was also kind refer to it, sometimes people will refer to it as an essence. of frustrated, because I realized I was carrying around So, you know that there's an essence to the cat to a this sort of classical view, and I didn't really want it up ended in me. So what I was, what I was really clear for me in the book, category, so a category like anger or a category like fear, was that there's not a consistent expression of emotion you know all the instances of fear say will have a common, like you just talked about, right? The scowl could mean different things, but the but where the emotion lives in the observable pattern. It might not that pattern might not occur brain. You talked a lot about that as well. You talked about every time, but it will occur enough times with enough amygdala damage in a patient, and how the brain constructed emotions in different ways. Can you? Can you start to illuminate regularity that you could diagnose someone as being afraid a bit of that for us? based on the presence of these features like a wide eyed gasping stare or a scream, or the likelihood of running away or sweating or heart racing, right? So that there's some pattern that occurs, and the assumption is that this pattern issues from is caused by an internal essence, like a circuit in the brain. And I chose fear as the example, because for many, many years, scientists believed, and some scientists still believe, that the amygdala, which is a cluster of cells deep inside the temporal lobe of your brain, that this cluster of cells contains the circuit for fear. And what's interesting about that is the circuitry in in the amygdala, so the amygdala is not really one thing, it's actually a cluster of, you know, a bunch of, it's like a bunch of little clusters, actually, which sit together tightly, tightly integrated. And if you look at brain imaging studies, you know about, again, about 30% of the studies when we induce fear in the lab, about 30% of the studies show an increase in amygdala activity, but that means 70% of the studies don't that's that's a lot of studies where people are experiencing fear and and there's no change, no noticeable change in the amygdala. Also, there's an increase in amygdala activity in lots and lots and lots of other emotion categories, and even in instances that people don't experience as emotional at all. So for example, if I just show you something novel that you've never seen before, like a person's face you've never seen, or a scene that you've never seen before, or an object you've never seen, and I stick your head in a brain scanner while I'm doing this, we'll see massive changes in up regulation and amygdala activity that has nothing to do with emotion and but I think the key findings here are that first of all, there's a woman who has full amygdala damage on both sides. So there, you know, you have two sides of your brain, and there's an Amygdala on each side. And she lost both amygdala when she was 12 due to an illness. And she experiences fear. She doesn't experience the full range that a neurotypical person would would experience, but she definitely experiences fear. She just doesn't use the word fear, but she and she can learn fear, you know. So if she goes to the dentist and she has a really painful experience of the dentist, she never wants to go back to the dentist. That's what scientists call fear learning. In the laboratory, we induce fear learning. Fear learning. Fear learning, I'm putting that in scare quotes. It's really classical called Classical conditioning, or Pavlovian conditioning, for the psychology wonks who are listening. But fear learning is basically, we sort of will show someone, you know, like a colored block, like a blue square, and then we shock them with electric, electrical current. And we just do that over and over, and eventually they have a reaction to the blue square, because their brain is predicting that the shock is going to come. Well, she doesn't show that response, you know, but she does show fear learning, you know, in the real world, in relation to dentists and police and, you know, things that are very impactful in high intensity. Even more importantly, there's a case that's been studied in the literature of twins. These are two women who are genetically identical, and they they both have high school degrees. They married very similar guys. They live very close to one another. They are, you know, so their lives are really similar. They both developed this disease that that caused them to lose the majority of their amygdala tissue. One of them shows similar deficit, sort of similar pattern, to this other patient, SM, who I just mentioned, but her sister is completely normal in with respect to her fear responses. So that must mean that there, there must be multiple ways that your brain can make an instance of fear can cause you to be fearful, and that's also why only 30% of the studies must (you know) that that's one explanation for why only 30% of the studies show an increase in amygdala activity during fear. Your brain has lots of when something is really important to a biological system, that biological system will have multiple ways of making it. That's a concept in biology called degeneracy. It's a really crappy name, but that's the name. It just means, basically, there's more than one way to skin a cat. You know, when something is really important, you're that biological system finds more than one way to make it, make that thing that's important. And if that way, if you lose one path, one way, you still have the capacity this. The function is still maintained. So the amygdala, it's its main function is not fear. It sometimes is the neurons in the amygdala are sometimes involved in creating fear, but not always, and expressions of fear are highly variable, even within, you know, people within a single culture and even within a single animal in responding to threat, and some expressions of fear in other cultures are really, seem really odd to us. You know, like in Bali for example, the stereotypic thing to do in fear is not to freeze or to run away, it's to fall asleep.

Phil Kerby:

Hi, producer Phil here, if you're enjoying The Evolving Leader podcast, then please do subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, so you catch all future episodes. Now, let's get back to the show.

Jean Gomes:

So Lisa, let's shift on to your theory for a moment. And you've done a huge amount of work, so there's a lot of moving parts to this. I remember having to read several parts of the book several times just to get these parts into my head. You know, we've got this classical view which has been so dominant to our understanding, and probably one of the simplest ways of understanding it is this notion that you you have parts of the brain associated with different types of emotion. So your hard wired emotions, you have fear circuits like the amygdala, and then something triggers that from an external perspective. So, you know, it's the proverbial, you know, snake in the grass, or it's the car about to run you over, and you get a triggered response, which is accompanied with what we all know, like the heart rate going up and adrenaline, cortisol coursing around your body, and so on, and then you move into action, and it's fight or flight and so on. That feels so intuitively, right? And I know science is built out of metaphors, so it's a really simple, easy to go to metaphor, and it's been dominant in in our world for a long time, so let's break down what, what this constructed theory of emotions looks like. Can you? Can you give us the building blocks?

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Sure, and I'm really, I really appreciate that you that you asked in the way that you did. Because oftentimes, when I'm talking with people, they'll ask me for the punchline before they have the ingredient, the ingredients, the the building blocks. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why the classical view makes so much sense to us is that it's it's grounded in kind of a cherished narrative that has been in western civilization for, well really, since the time of Plato. And that's this idea that you have an inner beast and you have a rational self, and the two are really, you know, there, there's a battle, constant battle, between your inner beast and your rational self for control of your behavior. And when your inner beast wins that battle, the assumption is that you're either immoral or you're sick. And you know, scientists took that, that those ideas, which really come from Plato, and they sort of tattooed it onto the brain. Because, you know, the brain is about, it's like a big gray blob, and, you know, it without special tools. It's, it's really easy to impose a sort of an architecture on it. And, you know, that story kind of worked. Actually, when you just look at the brain with the naked eye, it sort of fits. Unfortunately, when we start really peering into the brain with specialized tools, what we find is nothing that looks like that story. And when we start really observing how people experience emotion and behave in emotional situations, and we look outside our own culture to other cultures that are especially those that are remote or smaller scale cultures, we see tremendous variability in how people, even in our own culture, think about what you do. What do you guys do when, when you're afraid? I mean, sometimes you might freeze, but sometimes you will, you know, attack like yell or, you know, sometimes people laugh in the face of fear. I mean, people do many things in fear. So I think the first thing to understand is that fear is not a thing. It's a population of instances, meaning you do lots of things in fear. Your brain can make fear in lots of ways. There isn't really one, there's a maybe, like a vocabulary of fear that your brain can make that's the first thing to understand. That's true of every emotion. Every emotion is really not a thing. It's a category, and it's a variable category. What your brain is always trying to do is it's trying to make an instance of emotion that fits the situation that you're in. So that's the first, I think building block is to understand that we're dealing with a lot of variability. That's what your brain has to deal with. I think the second thing to realize is that what is your brain's main job? Think about what your brain's main job is. Your brain's main job is not to think or to have emotions, to make emotions, or to smell or see or do any of those things. Your brain's main job it evolved to regulate your body. That's what it's doing all the time, as you're thinking and feeling and seeing and imagining and so on. That's not how it feels to you or to me, but that actually is what's happening. And to do this, your brain is essentially running a budget for your body. So it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting salt and glucose and oxygen and all the things that all the resources that your your brain needs to keep your body healthy. So it's trying to figure out where all of these nutrients need to go. And you don't have one bank account, you have lots, because you have lots of systems in your body. So the way to think about it is, you know, when your brain is going to stand you up, it's going to raise your blood pressure as you're standing or maybe just a little before so that oxygen can make it to your brain so you don't faint, because that is metabolically costly for you to have to recover from a broken bone. So your brain is always trying to anticipate your the needs of your body and make and meet those needs before they arise. And that's what body budgeting is for. And your body is always sending sensory cues about that body budgeting to your brain, and your brain has to make sense of those. Now, here's a really interesting thing, from a brain's perspective, if you take the brain's perspective, it is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull, so your brain is receiving sense data from your body. It doesn't know what's actually happening in your body. Doesn't know the causes of those sense data. It only knows the effects. So it knows something's going on down there. It just doesn't know what it has the it has the effects. It gets the sense data which are the result of something, but it doesn't know the cause. Similarly, out in the world, you know, your brain gets flashes of light and changes in air pressure, which you know transduce through your ear, becomes sound and chemicals that become smell and taste, and again, your brain is receiving the results of some changes in the world, but it doesn't know what they are. So if your brain has to do body budgeting, and it's got to figure out what it needs to do next to keep you alive and well, and all it has are the results of things happening. It doesn't know the causes. How does it achieve its goal. And the answer is, it has one other source of information, and that is, it has your past experiences that it has learned so your brain, what it does is it conjures or reinstates past experiences to make a guess about what the sensate what the sense data mean, and that's really what body budgeting is. Your brain is is constantly from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die, it is trying to make sense meaning of sense data from your body and from the world in order to keep you alive and well, and it has to make guesses using your past experience. And none of this is happening consciously. It's all happening basically outside of your awareness. And the last piece, which is really cool is that these guesses that your brain makes happen predictably. They happen before the sense data arrives. So basically, if we were to stop time right now, what would be happening for you, for me, for the your all the listeners, all our listeners right now, is each brain would be taking stock of what just occurred and using past experience to make a set of predictions about what is going to happen next. What am I going to see next? What am I going to hear next? How am I going to feel next? What's going to happen in my body next? What actions do I need to take next? And then your brain starts to prepare those sensations and actions, and then it waits for the sense data to come from the world and from the body that to either confirm or or change those predictions. And so when your brain uses past experiences of anger to make sense of the sense data in the moment, your brain is basically conjuring up an instance of anger. It's your you will be experiencing your racing heart and your flushed face and your tears as anger. And if your brain was using past experiences of fear, you would be experiencing your racing heart and your flushed face and your tears as fear, and if your brain was using past experiences of joy to make sense of those sensations, you would be experiencing joy. Your brain basically uses your past in order to make sense, to predict and make sense of your immediate future, which becomes your present.

Scott Allender:

Why are they felt? So these predictions that are happening. So there's these, these, this interplay between making sense of our body budget, drawing on current context, past experience, using concepts to give us language about what's happening. Why is that experienced as a feeling instead of just cognitive information? Why is that feeling sometimes more intense than other times, and why do some people, and this is kind of obviously a generalization. I know people who you know have emotions, and I know people who seem to, you know, be their emotions, right? There's their very have a very intense emotional experience of life. What I know is a lot of questions in that, but

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Yeah, so I will say that we don't, no one has emotions. Everyone makes emotions. You may not be aware that you're making them, but you are. So that's the first thing to realize. You know you are your brain, or you know you are your brain that is having a constant conversation with your body, and so you're making them and but you know, Scott, the question that you're asking, Why do we feel? Why do we feel? Why isn't all this stuff that's happening under the hood just happen like, Why do we feel it? No one knows the answer to that question. I mean, that's the gazillion dollar question. Why did evolution endow us with this capacity, and how much can other animals feel too and I don't think anybody nobody can really answer that, but one thing that we know for sure is that in the evolution of animals, better ability to sense the world around you and to sense your body results in better control of your of your body budget and your actions. So sensation, you sense things because as a as an animal, because it helps your nervous system control your actions and control your body budget better. That's That's why we sense things. So the interesting thing about sensations from the body is that you don't experience those sensations directly, like when you look out in the world, you experience vision, right? You see things in a very, very high dimensional way, because you see lots of details, you see colors, you see lines. You can see things in really high detail. The sense data coming from your body, you aren't really wired to feel it directly, to sense it directly. I mean, right now you're sitting there quietly with a set of headphones on, but inside your body, there is a whole drama going on continuously. Basically, everybody has going on inside them a constant drama that they are largely unaware of. And that's a really good thing, because if you were aware of all the sensations going on inside your body at any given moment in time, you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again. So the way that we're wired is to experience those that that whole orchestra of sensations as feeling as feeling pleasant or comfortable, feeling unpleasant or distressed, feeling really worked up or feeling really calm. We call this mood. Scientists call it affect. And that affect, that mood, is with you every waking moment of your life, because your brain is always regulating your body budget, and your body is always sending sensations back to you, sense data back to your brain, and your brain is always conjuring that into feeling. So whether your brain makes that into an emotion or not, you are constantly in a state of feeling, those affective feelings are properties of being conscious. They are not properties of emotion, per se. But your brain has to make sense of them. So how does your brain know whether an ache in your gut is hunger or anger or longing or anticipation? How does it know? And the answer is it doesn't. It's guessing. It's guessing based on the context that you're in. It's making a guess. And this is really important, because your brain can guess wrong, and so can physicians. So the answer, I think, Scott to your question, is we have feeling, because feeling lets us know, generally speaking, whether some whether everything is okay with our body budget or not okay. If you're feeling pleasant and comfortable, things are pretty okay. Your your body budget is solvent. If you're feeling uncomfortable, distressed, fatigued, things are not okay with your body budget. That doesn't tell your brain what's wrong. It's just something is wrong, and it gives you a little bit of extra control, you know, to try to figure it out when it's not really clear. And that's the best guess that we can have. But the important thing to know is that your body budget, the sensations that come from your body budgeting, and the affect that you experience it as that's with you all the time. When you're driving, well, when I used to drive, I mean, it's, you know, in this COVID moment, I'm not driving very much. But you know, when you drive on the street and somebody cuts you off on the highway or something, and your immediate reaction is that guy is an asshole. Their affect, your affect is your brain is constructing it as a property of that assholeness of that person. You're not experiencing yourself as angry. You're experiencing the affect, the intense affect, that disruption in your body budget as a property of that person as evidence that that person actually is an asshole, as opposed to somebody who just didn't see you, or maybe somebody who's racing to the hospital to sit to try to you know, because this kid is sick or something. Is that affective is important, but it it's not

Jean Gomes:

So let me, let me just move this to something very informative on its own. Your brain has to make it meaningful in order to know exactly what it what to do about it. slightly different, in terms of you've got this interplay sense making interplay between your predicting brain making sense of affect the circumstances you're in, and you are making a distinction here between this body budget, this affect, which is not the same as emotion. It's the feeling senses within your body, and some sometimes referred as interoception I think, then that plays out in terms of your interpretation of this in language, your the words that you use to describe the the emotions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Yeah, what I would say is that your brain is making sense. Really. What it's doing is it's making sense of interoceptive cues, which are cues from your body that you experience consciously as affect. And it's doing this continuously, and sometimes it makes emotion when, when there's a big disruption in your body budget, because your brain is expecting to make a big outlay of energy, or when you're feeling really fatigued, because your body budget basically is running a deficit, your brain makes sense of those moments as emotions, because in our culture, big changes in affect usually are understood as emotion, and the language that you use comes along. It's not that language is driving this. It's that when your brain is making a prediction, really what it's doing is it's constructing a concept. So figuratively speaking, when your brain has to make sense of sense data, it's not asking, what is this? It's asking, what is this like? What is this similar to the last time I was in this situation with these sense data, what was I? What? What did I? What caused the sense data? What did I do next? What did I feel next? And in psychology, a group of things which are similar to one another is a category. So you could say your brain is constructing a category, or, you know, a representation of a category in your mind is called a concept. So you could say, well, your brain is using past experiences to conjure a concept that's tailored to this specific situation, to anticipate and make sense of the sense data so that it knows how to act. And if it's using past experiences that someone taught you or anger, then it's making anger. If it's using past experiences that someone taught you was determination, then you're making determination and so on.

Jean Gomes:

Can you talk a little bit about emotional granularity in this context? Because that forms a very important part of your your thinking.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Well, emotional granularity is the word that we is the name that we gave to a phenomenon that I think many, many people understand, and that is what, what is the precision with which a person's brain can make emotion concepts? So for some people, they understand irritation and frustration and anger and rage to be very different experiences. For some people, those are all synonyms of the same experience, anger the same so all part of the same concept, but that's distinct from sadness and fear. For some people, sadness and fear and anger are synonyms to mean I feel bad, I feel like crap, and we could do the same thing on the positive end, what I'm describing is that people differ in the precision with which their brain can make emotions. So in a similar way I might distinguish between cyan blue and peacock peacock blue and navy blue and royal blue and cobalt blue, whereas my husband might see blue and somebody from the barenmo tribe in New Guinea, Papu New Guinea would see blue as a variety of green, the wavelength of light is the same. That's the that's the sense data, but the experience of the color, which involves not just the sense data, but also your brains using past experience to make sense of that sense data is is different, and so people learn your emotion concepts come from, where all your abstract concepts come from, you learn them because someone taught them to you. When you have kids and you you might point out a truck to your kid, or you might show a kid a little toy dog and label the kid the dog for the kid. What you're doing basically is you're teaching a child concepts. When you do that, you don't realize that's what you're doing, but you're basically taking experiences and why are they wiring them into the brain? Because a baby's brain is born under construction. So you're wiring the concepts of a culture into that child's brain for use in later prediction and construction of regulation of action. And the same thing happens with emotion categories, that happens with any kind of category, like animals and food and whatever you're basically equipping the brain to make sense of sense data so that we can think and feel and do all the things that we do very naturally.

Jean Gomes:

What are the implications of having more kind of emotional granularity or less? You think,

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Well, I don't have to think. I mean, I the evidence is that more granularity, better granularity, is better for your mental and physical health. The way we think about knowledge or concepts, is that they're, like, tools for regulating your body budget, the more precise tools you have, like, think about when you're building something right? If you know, my husband, in his toolbox, has, like, I don't know, 100,000 kinds of screwdrivers, like, every size, every kind of head. You know, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but, like, there are a lot of them and so, but he has very precise tools, and he can build very precise things. If he only had one tool, like one screwdriver, he wouldn't be able to build as many things, and they wouldn't look as nice, and they wouldn't be as functional. The sort of a similar thing that the more precision and flexibility your brain has, the more granularity, the more granular, the more precise and specific instances of emotion can be tailored to particular situation, the less drag there is on your body budget. And as a consequence, you're less likely to get sick, it's much easier for you to cope with challenges that will you know that you would face on a day to day basis, so you're less likely to become use alcohol or to deal with like stresses, for example. And when you're sick, you're the evidence suggests miraculous to me, that actually you're you get better faster. The inference we're making is that that's those are observations that have been published. The inference we make is that it must be because the granularity buys you a couple of things. It allows your brain to regulate your body more precisely with less kind of drag or tax on your body budget. And it also allows you to communicate to other people more precisely. And we are social animals, we don't just regulate our own body budgets. We make, metaphorically, investments and like deposits and withdrawals from other people's body budgets. And so anything which is going to facilitate precise communication is going to be beneficial.

Jean Gomes:

In this second show with the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, we look at the implications of her revolutionary theory of constructed emotions on emotional intelligence and leadership.

Scott Allender:

Lisa, you know, ever since our conversation last time I this is going to sound silly, we can edit this out if it's if it's ridiculous, but I can't look at emojis the same way. We live in an emoji world. And people will text me and they'll send me an emoji, and I'm like, Well, now I think I know what that's supposed to mean, but there's no universal expression of emotion, so maybe I don't know what that means.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

That's good. Actually, you should not edit that out. We did a study with emojis, and we showed exactly what you just, what you just what you just described experiencing. We don't just experience where our brains aren't just guessing what facial movements mean on real faces. They're also guessing what emojis mean. And the studies that we did with emojis came out really exactly the way we hypothesized based on our work and other people's work on on how brains, you know, infer emotional meaning in in faces.

Jean Gomes:

So Lisa, last time, we had a fascinating conversation about your theory, which upends the conventions of the classical understanding of what emotions are how they're made, how we can possibly read them or not. And I suppose the focus of this conversation we'd love to have with you, what are the implications on those sacred cows, all the things that we've taken for granted as being truisms in psychology, in emotional intelligence, maybe even leadership development, that there's a whole multi billion dollar industry out there saying these things, which, to be honest, aren't necessarily as as as reliable as we might have thought a few years ago. So we wanted to just kind of dig into that a little bit and see what your thoughts are. Let's start with a kind of a really big question, which is, what's the difference between, you know, a healthy and an unhealthy emotion? You know, because we're told the whole time that there are healthy and unhealthy emotional responses in situations, and, you know, how does, how does your theory Look at that?

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Well, I think that it's really not possible to talk about any instance of emotion in the abstract, without referring to the person who is constructing it and the situation in which it's occurring. So I don't really think you can say that in general, there are healthy or unhealthy emotions. So for example, the way that the meaning of shame, for example, in a western culture can sometimes be, you know, healthy and useful, and sometimes not. And in certain Eastern cultures, shame is a very healthy emotion to have. So the instances of emotion that are linked to illness in in the US and in Western countries don't necessarily translate into illness in other countries. And so I think it's all about the context. Think about what your brain is doing. Your brain is making predictions. These predictions are not just kind of abstract guesses. Your brain is actually predicting what you need to do next and what you will see next, and what you will hear next, and what you will feel next as a way of efficiently controlling your actions. And sometimes, when your brain is making these predictions, it's constructing an emotion to make sense of what's going on inside your body in relation to what's going on around you in the world. And so there are times when anger can be really healthy and there are times when it can be really unhealthy. There are times when you know, anger is a really good fit to the situation that will allow you to behave in a way that is really effective. And there are times when it isn't, and there are times when it is but its expression is, you know, it's not just you know, in each emotion is not really a thing. It's a category of things, a population of variable things. So if I'm in a faculty meeting and someone and I become angry at someone, there are useful ways of expressing that anger, and there are very unhelpful and UN useful ways of expressing that anger. So an emotion can be, you know, healthful or unhealthful, good or bad, depending on the way that you express it in in a particular situation. So I just, I just don't think it's a answerable question. I kind of think it's the wrong question to be asking, actually.

Jean Gomes:

Exactly, and I think this is, you know, this is really interesting, that there are a lot of questions that are actually the wrong I mean, we asked you a lot of questions where you said exactly the same thing to us last time. It's the wrong question to be asking, and we really want you to tell us that, because it's the wrong starting point. So another I've got one more because it's on my mind, which is the kind of classical view of the fight or flight response, which is probably the most powerful experience that we will have that validates this idea of signature emotions and hard wired responses and external stimulus triggering something. It's very difficult to break out of that mental model, because it's such a powerful emotional response, and so I'm just wondering, how does how do we think about the kind of triggered fight or flight response which produces this very consistent physical and emotional reaction in us as not being hardwired?

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Well, I think there's so much to unpack in what you just said that we're gonna have to take one thing at a time here. Yeah. So first of all, nothing is hard wired in the sense that even even a reflex like the patella reflex, when, when somebody you know hits your patellar tendon and your knee, your leg kind of kicks up a little. I mean, even In a reflex like that is not you wouldn't say it's exactly hard you. wired, in the sense that when the response is executed, it's always identical, no matter what the context is, because that's just not true. For example, when an animal freezes or an animal runs away in the face of a threat, the way that the animal runs is not the same, whether, if it's an area that the animals been in before versus not been in before, if how much you know, glucose, when's the last time the animal ate? How much did the animal sleep? Is the is it grassy? Is it bumpy? Is it sandy? The point is that what looks to us like exactly the same response is not exactly the same response under the hood. It's actually there are a population of responses that the animal can give that we're just ignoring or we can't see with the naked eye, all the little variants. So that's the first thing to say, is that even what we think of as reflexes evidence from behavioral ecology and ethology, comparative neuroscience shows us are not identical. If I have a glass in my hand and I reach out, let's say I have a glass in front of me and I want to drink what's in the glass, I reach out and I grab the glass, and let's say I do that three times. There's no guarantee that the neurons that made that happen, those three times are identical, even though the action to our eye looks identical. So I think that's the first thing to really understand. And when you're really trying to understand the brain and you're trying to understand small biological changes that can have meaningful behavioral effects, you really have to understand that neurons are not wired together in the sense that they're soldered together, there are 1000s of neurons that speak to a single neuron, and a single neuron speaks to 1000s of neurons. And so these, these kind of like isolated little circuits just don't exist in the brain for very many things. They do exist for some things, but not for very not for very many so that's the first thing to understand. The second thing to understand is that we do have, we could call them programs, or like collections of circuits. Let's say that can be executed quickly when the brain believes that that that its life is in danger. So what is that? What is happening in a predicting brain? Because all brains really are structured to be predictive. So how does that work exactly? And so the way it works is, is kind of like this, the brain. We could be talking about a human brain, or we could to be talking about a mouse brain. It doesn't really matter here. The brain is going to make a set of motor predictions. So if we were to stop the world right now, just freeze it. Your brain right now is has some internal representation, some kind of model of it's firing in some pattern to capture what is going on around in the world, the sensory data from the world and the sensory data from the body. So it's my it has a model of what the world looks like and sounds like and smells like, and what is going on inside your own body. And based on that, your brain is launching predictions about what's going to happen next. Typically, what happens is the predictions are first, what what do I need to change inside the body in order to support movement. What movement am I going to make? Then, based on that, the brain is predicting, well, the last time I moved, last time my body was in this state and I moved in this way, what did I see? What did I hear? What did I feel? And then, as the brain is making these predictions, information is actually coming in from the world and from the body, and that information will either if it matches the prediction, then the motor responses are executed. And so to you, it feels like you're just reacting, but actually, your brain has been preparing that the actions you know several 100 milliseconds before you actually execute them. If the information doesn't match, then your brain has the option to learn that new information, to take in whatever the non matching information is, which we call prediction error, so that it can change its prediction and actually predict better next time, or it can go with its own model. And there are reasons why a brain might miss, see or miss hear, not that is not taking the prediction error. So what is a reflex? A reflex is where the brain prepares the prediction and doesn't wait for the incoming information to check against because it's predicting that your life is in danger. So it's just going to execute the response and not worry about, like, what happens next? It's just the circumstances are dire enough that it's just going to execute the response without weight, without checking, and that's that's one way to think about what a reflex is. That doesn't mean, though, that the reflex is context insensitive. It doesn't mean that it's stereotyped in any way because remember your every brain is making a prediction based on the context it's currently in. So this explains how something can be look reflexive, but still be very, very contextually sensitive. And we can see that in animals that are hours old, like a larval zebra fish, for example, has three or four different escape behaviors that it can perform based on context. This animal hasn't really had very much time to learn, but it has. He's only been alive for a few hours, but it has several different actions that it can execute in an emergency, not one so when it flees, basically it doesn't have a single flea behavior. It has multiple flea behaviors. And this is like a tiny, little, tiny little nervous system without much learning. So it's always contextual. And I guess the final thing to say here is that if you run up a flight of stairs, your heart beats against your chest, and you can feel your heart beating if you drink too much coffee, you know, you can feel your heart raising. You feel kind of very, you know, kind of activated. If your brain is preparing you for a fight or flight response, as you would say, it's also preparing you to feel the sensory consequences of those and you could just experience that as high arousal, unpleasant high arousal, but you don't, because your brain has been wired full of emotion concepts, and so you make sense of that high arousal unpleasant feeling as fear or as anger. But it's a very automatic thing. You You don't have to make sense of it that way. And if your brain doesn't make sense of it that way, your brain will behave differently, and your actions will be different. So for example, when an animal attacks another animal. So let's say an animal is faced with a predator. The first if an when an animal is faced with a predator, like, say, a rat or any kind of mammal is faced with a predator, usually it will run away if it can, if the if the predator is too close, the animal will attack. Is that fear? Is that anger? What is it? Well, that's that's humans making meaning out of what that animal is doing. The animal is clearly protecting itself. But is that protection anger? Is it fear that you know so it's not that we're hardwired to make emotions. We definitely have assemblies of neurons, collections of circuits, if you will, to engage in protective maneuvers that we don't deliberate about it. That's absolutely true. But there are emotions, per se in our culture, we make sense of them as emotions, because that's what we've learned to do. When there's an intense change in the body, you have an inch an intense change in your mood, or your what we call affective feelings. You feel pleasant, you feel unpleasant, you feel worked up, you feel calm. And we make sense of those, usually as emotions.

Jean Gomes:

That's really helpful. And again, you're pulling apart this distinction between affect your body budget sensation from emotion. I think that's where it's easy to go wrong in this in this instance of of the conversation. So that's really helpful.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

I mean, it sounds kind of crazy, until you actually start using it in your everyday life. So I was in New Zealand right before the pandemic hit, and things were really starting to heat up, and my daughter got on a plane to meet me in New Zealand for spring break, which is a tradition that we've had really since she's been in high school. And I, you know, I called my husband and I said, I'm, I'm feeling really uncertain, and I have really high arousal, and I'm, it feels really uncomfortable. Now I, if I was a normal person, I probably would have said, I'm really, really afraid, but that would invoke a whole set of predictions for behavior that I really didn't need right then. And so it was just better for me to just describe more, more generally, what the feeling was. Sometimes it's not helpful. Sometimes, when you feel like shit, you need to make sense of it to know what to do. You need to know, do I need to sleep? Do I need a hug from a friend? Do I need to go talk to my boss? Like, what do I need to do here? And that's when it's very helpful to make an emotion because emotions are prescriptions for action. They're the way that your one way that your brain is making sense of what's going on inside your own body in relation to what's going on around you in the world.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please head over to Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and review. Thank you for listening. Now let's get back to the

Scott Allender:

It makes perfect sense to me that there aren't

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Sure. So, I mean, there's a there's sort conversation. healthy or unhealthy emotions, or good or bad emotions, that of a more general point to make, and then there's more specific all emotions, in a sense, are information right. In the points to make about what to do about it. So I'll make the more emotional intelligence work that I do, oftentimes the difference between healthy and unhealthy expression of emotion is general point first, which is that, why do brains predict? correlated to the degree that one understands the emotions that they're experiencing. Oftentimes, I experience people Brains predict because it's the most metabolically efficient way that don't recognize their behavior on others or on their to run a body. And it turns out that metabolic efficiency is, team, or the culture and climates that they're creating. It's not because of intention. It's not, you know, they have no like, really important in evolution, and it's actually malice. There's nothing like that. If it's a negative environment that they're creating, it's, it's honestly, really important in your own health. So every time you behaviors that are born out of, you know, what I would say is, needlessly spend resources, that is your brain, you know, gets you know, a lack of self awareness, right? Well, a lot of people would describe it that way, of course, but an emotional you ready for big metabolic outlay that you don't need, that lack of awareness, like, I don't know what's going on inside of would be called stress, and you you either don't expend that me, and I'm acting in reactivity without stopping to process and analyze. I'd really love to hear you how your research is, is that energy, or you do, but you don't replenish the energy informed that. spend, you pay a little tax, and that tax, it's a little tax, little that tax adds up over time, and it might take five years, it might take 10 years, it might take 20 years, but eventually you are more susceptible to developing metabolic illness like heart disease or certain types of cancer or diabetes or depression or Alzheimer's disease, so all of which have a metabolic component. And when I say they have a metabolic component, I'm not saying they are caught. We can reduce everything to metabolism, right? Because that's just the wrong way to think about illness. You know, the way we think about illness is that there are multiple weak, interacting causes, and they all work together to produce an illness. So metabolism is kind of the overlooked piece in with a lot of a lot of illnesses, not diabetes, obviously, but other illnesses which don't appear to have anything to do with metabolism, but they do. So what is communication between people good for? Well, if I make myself predictable to you, then you become predictable to me, and then my interactions with you are much more metabolically efficient. And that's a good thing. That's what you want. That's why we have norms and rules in society. That's why we have rules that we all follow. Like right now. You know, nobody's picking their nose, nobody is dancing around naked. Nobody is, you know, swearing. Well, I mean, I do sometimes, you know, I do. Sometimes use salty language, but and it gets a laugh because it's really unexpected. So occasionally unexpected things are good. And sometimes we we actually seek novelty, but in interactions with people, we usually want to them, to be predictable to us. We want to know what we want to be able to have the communication for it to go smoothly. Means we can anticipate what they're going to say and do, and they can do the same for us. If you're not aware of your impact on people, then things are not going to go smoothly. If you are not aware of your signal value to people, then you will end up having really fraught interactions that are going to be metabolically costly for everybody, and people will dislike you, or they won't trust you, or that will be the consequence, really, that they will find you difficult to interact with because they can't really predict and they may be unaware that that's why they dislike you, but that really is a factor. So for example, my husband, when he concentrates really hard, gives a full facial scowl, like the stereotypic anger expression. I mean really. And he was telling me this story when I first met him, about how he had gone to see a therapist, and he made this full facial scowl. The therapist asked him the question, and he was like, really thinking about it? And, you know, he made this scowl. And the therapist said, are you why are you angry? And he said, I'm not angry. I'm thinking about what you're saying. And he said, Oh, you know. Therapist said, Oh no, you're clearly angry, but you just don't know it. There's so much to say about that. I don't even know where to start. But first of all, my husband left that therapist and never went back, because that was a profound breach of empathic connection between you know, that was just dis It was incredibly disrespectful thing to say. Yeah, but more than that, I was realizing I do that all the time. I mean, I I'm constantly concentrating, like, when my students give a presentation, I am and I'm like, I wonder if I'm scowling when I do when I'm lit. So I go into my lab meeting, and I say to my lab, I have 25 you know, students and postdocs, whatever, and I say them, you know, I just learned, I just discovered, yeah, do I maybe when you're presenting, I'm actually scowling, and I'm actually concentrating, I'm not unhappy with what you're saying. And they're like, Oh, my God, really, oh, you know, I mean, it was like this watershed moment, and I realized that I'm a migraine sufferer. Sometimes when I have a migraine, I'm going to be a little more terse, and I'm going to be actually, has nothing to do with anybody I'm talking to. It's just I'm kind I'm in pain. So I just tell them, like, today, I didn't get very much sleep today. So if I'm a little testy, I'm trying not to be. But if I'm a little testy, please don't just attribute it to me not having had sleep, or I have I have a headache today, or, you know, I'm basically letting them know if there's something in my tone, because they're, you know, they're constantly worried about how I'm evaluating them, and I'm constantly trying to get them not to be worried about that, because I want them to, you know, feel free to challenge and explore and occasionally fail, and that's how they're going to do their best work, right? And so I'm basically verbally giving them cues, and now they verbally give each other cues you know, use your words is actually a useful thing, even for adults, actually, frankly, when we're communicating with each other. So that would be the first thing I would say, is be aware of your own expressive vocabulary and either and consider what you know if people don't know you very well, or if they're from other cultures, or what have you, they're just going to be using stereotypes to interpret or guess at the meaning of your expressions. And so it's going to take them a while to learn about you specifically, and you don't want to have things get off on the wrong foot. So try to become aware of your own signal value and try to adjust it to the extent that you can, that would be the first thing. And the second thing, I would say, is it's very hard for your brain to grab a hold of its own predictive capacities and kind of change them in the moment. That's that's really hard. But what you can do, I mean, because your brain is using your past to make predictions about the future, which become your present eventually, right. So in a sense, you could say what you're always doing is you're always cultivating your past for the purposes of who you're going to be in the future, what you're going to experience in the future, what you're going to do in the future. It's really hard to reach back into your past and change it. You can try. You can go to therapy, you can you can try. But it's much easier to try to change the present, because the present is a way of cultivating the past. So you could say you're always cultivating the past, even in this moment right now, we are cultivating our own past as a way of changing who we're going to be in the future. And you can harness that to shift your emotional vocabulary, to broaden it, to to change it in ways that will be productive for you, so that in the future it won't it won't be so hard. You won't have to do it in the moment. You won't have to change things in the moment, because you're basically seeding your brain to predict differently. You know, in the future.

Scott Allender:

That makes a lot of sense. What are some of the

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

Yeah. So again, I would say, I guess it implications? I mean, I can infer them based on what you're saying, but for our leadership population that's listening to this right now, what are some of the implications that you would depends on what kind of a leader you are, right? So there are draw on your discoveries for the future of leadership? I know it's kind of a vague question, but I'm just curious, like, what, what? What might the leader take from this that's listening to this right now? different leadership styles, and I think the first thing is to become aware of what kind of leader are you. You know, I'm the kind of leader. I like people. I don't really want behavioral compliance. I want people to buy it. I want them to own it. I want them to really invest themselves in what I want them to do. So I don't I want to convince. I want them to be convinced that what I want them to do is what they want to do, and that requires that a couple of things. One is that it requires that I do a little bit of work to support their body budgets. So I think in the past, we've talked about, you know your brain, your brain's most important job is controlling your body, and to do that, it's running a budget for your body. You have a lot of systems in your body. And so your brain is running a budget. It's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and water, and you know, all of the nutrients and and other chemicals that your body needs to keep you a lot, to keep alive and healthy. And so you can think about your brain like, like the financial office of a multinational corporation, every new thing that you learn and every action, every movement of your body costs something metabolically, and every breath that you take, every everything you eat out the sleep and so on, are sort of like deposits in that body budget. And we are social animals, so we didn't evolve to just so that our brains run up. You know, I have full responsibility for our own body budgets. We actually, you know, figuratively speaking, we make withdrawals and deposits into other people's body budgets too. So if you're a leader, you know, you will be making withdrawals and deposits into your teams or your you know your workers body budgets. And research shows really clearly that the things that really keep a workers body budget solvent definitely predict increased productivity in the workplace, not because people are happy, but but, but because their body budgets, they have a surplus to spend on the work that you want them to do. I mean, they are happier and they will feel better, but the feeling is a side effect of what's happening about with the body budget. So if you work, for example, if you're asking your your workers, to learn something new, to be creative, to do something novel, to even to interact with each other, around on a team where the outcomes are uncertain for a period of time, uncertainty is a like all of these things are really expensive things from a body budgeting standpoint, then provide body budgeting support. And that can mean work life balance. It can mean making sure that the temperature and the water and the light are good for for a human body. It can mean giving people a little more control over their own work life. It can mean, you know, supportive comments even when you're being critical, right? So there's a way to give critical feedback while still being supportive to somebody's body budget. And we're not doing these things because because people are weak, or because they're snowflakes or whatever. We're doing it because we want to get the best out of them. And if you support the body budgets of your workers, those workers will give you their, they will work for you really, really, really hard. I mean, I think this is what, this is what Henry Ford knew when he, you know, made some of the innovations that he made in American industry, in work, you know, the American industrial environment that produced the middle class and in a terrific boon in in American productivity. So, I mean, I think that would be one thing that I would say, and the other thing that I would say to a leader is use your own emotions, your own affective feelings, and the way that your brain makes sense of them, use them as a guide to what's going on. Like when I get angry about something, my first reaction is not to yell at someone. It's not to swear and stamp my feet. It's not I stop and I think, okay, somebody just something. Somebody just blocked my goal. Somebody just violated a deeply held belief that I have, like, something just happened. What was it? So I'm basically, I'm I'm aware of what the meaning making that my brain is using, and I'm when I get angry, I know, you know, one of three or four things has probably just happened, which is it? And then I really deliberate about, in a leadership position, I deliberate about, there are no gut reactions, right? There are no like reflexes. I stop and I deliberate with a lot of effort and try to figure out, what do I think strategically the best way is to handle this. Now, you could describe that as system one and system two. You could describe that as reaction, and, you know, reason or whatever. You can describe it in those terms. But that's not actually what's happening under the hood. What's actually happening under the hood is my brain made an automatic it made an automatic set of predictions and created meaning I experienced something, and I use that experience as a cue, and I stopped. And then I considered what the various predictions could have been. And then I try to figure out, in this situation, I know what my either my short term goal is, or my long term goal, and so I need to figure out what's the right thing to do. And sometimes I can do it in the blink of an eye. I can do it really fast. Sometimes I can't. I need a weight, and that's really hard for me. You know, I'm somebody who wants to act quickly and decisively. And sometimes I need to wait 10 minutes or a half an hour or an hour or even a day, depending on what it is and what the consequences will be. And I think if you do that, you are you're saving yourself and your workers from the chaos that ensues when you have a knee jerk reaction, which is what we call it, when we refer to something that is occurring like a reflex. Basically, it's occurring automatically, where you know you aren't considering all of the possible trajectories of what could happen. And as a leader, that's your job. You You have to be able to do mental time travel. You have to figure out, well, am I optimizing for the short term or the long or the intermediate or the long term goal? And you know, so it sounds like it's really hard, and it sounds like a lot of navel gazing and but it's, it's just a skill that you practice in, like driving it. The more you practice it, the better you get at it, the faster that you that you get at it, and and it becomes a skill like any other skill.

Jean Gomes:

I had an episode last week where the lens that you have provided to me in this thinking really paid off. So I was on a call with a number of people, including the the CEO of one of our clients. I was leading with my chin on a point. You know, I was making a strident point that I believed in the CEO said, No, I don't agree with that. And, you know, I have excellent relationship with with this client been, you know, working with them for many years, I felt the world collapse underneath me briefly. And you know, it would have been very easy for me to in that moment, to have fallen into the I need to prove my worth. I need to demonstrate that I'm not wrong. And all I would have done was have a cascade of defensive comments or backtracking or whatever, none of which would have made me, you know, look me better in that situation. And what, what I did in that moment was I separated the affect which was driving the show from the emotion, which was, there wasn't actually much emotion, it was all affect. And that was supremely valuable, because I realized that there was no information here that was actionable, except your body budget, your the metabolic cost you're experiencing right now is very high. I need to get that down. And it provided a, you know, like the perennial wisdom around not reacting and you know, and so, but it provided a completely different locus of control for me.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

That's brilliant. That's brilliant because here's what you did. You basically what you did was you forestalled the meaning making. So the the negative affect, the negative feeling, was a cue, right? Something is wrong, right? This is there's a metabolic cost here. Something is wrong and I need to do something. But if your brain is creates an emotion out of that, that's a solution to the problem. And maybe what you want to do is so embarrassment or shame or anger or fear, these would all be solution. They would all be specific, physical like behavioral solutions to the problem of this, this body budgeting moment. And instead, what you did was you stopped and you were curious. You went looking for more information in before you came up with a solution. That's exactly so you remember that your your emotions are your brain's way of making sense of what's going on inside your body in relation to the world, or you could say it's your brain's way of making sense of their affect, your feeling these simple feelings in relation to what's going on around the world. And it's a solution. It's a proposed solution, yeah, but sometimes, and sometimes that's good, right? Sometimes you you want that automatic solution there and you need that, but sometimes you can just use the affect as a cue to stop and be curious and to try to gather more information so that you can figure out what the best solution will be, in a way that you wouldn't have known before, because you just automatically went with the prediction that your brain just automatically offered you, but you can, you can use feelings as a cue to stop and to be curious. And you know, as I'm sure you know, that's really hard, hard to do in the moment. But if you practice it, you can do it. You can absolutely do it.

Jean Gomes:

And it's very, I mean, it gives you not only a sense of control, but it's actually very satisfying, because it gives you a completely different option to the one that you know you might have tried to hone over many years in other dimensions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

And it has great body budgeting consequences for you, because you won't be lying in bed that night going over in your mind, arguing with yourself and with the CEO and all of that arguing that you're doing with yourself has body budgeting costs for you. You may not be aware of that, but it certainly does. And so you're just prolonging those body budgeting taxes in a sense, when you like ruminate and go over you know you're arguing with someone in your head. You don't want to do that. That's really not how that's not it's never really a good idea actually, to do that.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jean Gomes

Co-host
Head Shot

Scott Allender

Co-host