练习你的表情（一）Exercising your emotions（1）

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练习你的表情（上）EXERCISING YOUR EMOTIONS（1）

Chris Hatzis 
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’swhere expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’seavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, oneinterview at a time.

Sometimes you find yourselflistening to a podcast and coming close to tears - it’s just that good. Orsometimes you’re struggling not to laugh out loud on public transport. Or maybewhatever you just heard makes you want to rip out your headphones and stomp onthe ground in anger. As our guest today tells us, the key to your personalitymay lie in whether or not you follow through on these intense expressions ofemotion.

Dr Peter Koval is a lecturerfrom the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University ofMelbourne. He sits down with our reporter, Dr Andi Horvath, to chat aboutemotional stability and whether it’s a good thing to have.

Andi Horvath 

Peter, I was walkingaround the University and I noticed a lecture entitled, “Emotional stability,is it all that it’s cracked up to be?” I thought, I've got to eavesdrop on thispublic lecture. 

Andi Horvath 
That’s where I met you. Now, emotional stability, tell us about how in historyand in culture we’ve been told to be emotionally stable, after all, it’s why wemeditate, isn't it? 

Peter Koval 
Yes. I think we have got a long history of generally being cautious or suspiciousabout our emotions, and certainly if not trying to avoid having them alltogether, then at least trying to keep them at bay to a certain extent, keepthem stable. That I think goes back to ancient philosophy and spiritualreligious practices, but I think we’ve started to question that in particularin the last 30 or 40 years in psychology, and to recognise that emotions serveimportant functions, and that’s probably why we’re endowed with them, not justas humans, but probably other species as well. 

So we probably need to recognisetheir usefulness and their value, as well as of course try to keep them undercontrol and make sure they don’t overwhelm us. 

Andi Horvath 
Right, hijack our functionality. 

Peter Koval 
That’s right. Yep.

Andi Horvath 
Okay, so give us the punchline. If not emotional stability, and you’requestioning this, then what?

Peter Koval 
Over the last couple of decades in particular, although, this goes back furtherin psychology, there’s been a shift to thinking about the importance ofemotional flexibility, rather than stability, and what that really entails isthe ability to respond to the events in different environments that we’reexposed to with appropriate emotions. Also then, on the other hand, to be ableto manage and modify those emotional responses. So not let them necessarily getout of control or become overwhelming, but at the same time, be responsive tochanges in the environment, and I guess to use the information that emotionsconvey to help us, and to our advantage, which we all do naturally.

Andi Horvath 
So we can't escape our emotions, let’s define our terms. How do you, aspsychologists or scientists that examine this area, define emotional stability?

Peter Koval 
That’s a very good question, And I think in some ways the term 'emotionalstability', as it’s been traditionally used in psychology, which has been as asynonym for - well, the opposite of neuroticism, an antonym for neuroticism -is a bit of a misnomer in some ways, because perhaps the reason why the termwas adopted was that some maybe thought this is - I don’t have any evidence forthis being historically accurate - but I suspect that it may have been to dowith the fact that the term neuroticism had a kind of pejorative sound to it. 

Certainly part of the concept ofneuroticism was this idea that people's emotions are unstable and out ofcontrol, so I think that as a more positive-sounding term, some psychologistsadopted emotional stability as describing the other end of the spectrum ofneuroticism. We then assumed that people who are low on neuroticism haveemotions that actually are literally stable and don’t change much over time.There was quite a lot of research, trying to identify links between how thedynamics of people's emotions, and their self-reported levels of neuroticism,and other kinds of characteristics as well.

But to go back to your originalquestion, how we define emotional stability, so it’s often been defined interms of people's self-reported experience of, “my emotions don’t change much,they’re quite stable, I'm able to manage my emotions well, they don’t overwhelmme, I'm not easily stressed out”. These are the kinds of questions or itemsthat people would endorse in order to score high on emotional stability, or lowon neuroticism. 

But as it turns out, when welook more carefully at how people's emotions change in daily life, or in thelab indeed, we find that people who score high on neuroticism may actually bemore emotionally stable on some measures, and that’s kind of counterintuitive.

Andi Horvath 
Right now I'm clapping in the air because I'm a self-confessed neurotic, andthis is really good news. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and imagine some of thelisteners are like me, however, in the workplace you kind of have to be arobot. Everyone has tipping points, but managing those tipping points areimportant in the workplace, so you don’t create dysfunctionality. But whenyou’re talking about neuroticism, and you’re not talking about extreme bipolardisorder, are you?

Peter Koval 
No. So neuroticism is really one of the basic dimensions of human personality,and I think that goes back to what I said earlier, that the term has oftencarried a lot of baggage, and was much earlier in - psychology and psychiatryused to refer to certain kinds of mental illness, and it is still related togreater risk or vulnerability for mental illness, but it refers these days -the term neuroticism refers to one of the five basic dimensions of humanpersonality. 

So everybody can be characterisedas falling somewhere on the continuum of low to high neuroticism, and peoplewho score high on neuroticism don’t necessarily have any mental illness orpsychological problems that would be clinically diagnosed. They might, butthat’s not necessarily the case.

What really characterises them Ithink is people who score high on neuroticism tend to experience intenseemotions, particularly negative ones, and that intensity of emotion cansometimes lead people who score high on neuroticism to actually believe thattheir emotions are unstable. I don’t think we’ve quite worked out why that isthe case, but what we know is that in fact it may be the opposite, that peoplewho score high on neuroticism may have intense negative emotions, whichactually linger on and last longer. So by some measures they tend to actuallybe more emotionally stable, or I would probably use the term inflexible.

Andi Horvath 
Oh, because they’re locked in that negative bias, as I heard you psychologistscall it.

Peter Koval 
That’s right.

Andi Horvath 
So in actual fact, emotional flexibility means you can go in and out of thoseemotions, not hang on to a term I've heard you use, Peter, which is emotionalrigidity.

Peter Koval 
Exactly. So I think you described it well. The ability to go in and out ofemotions when necessary, and when the context demands, or when your own goalsdemand that you do change the way you feel and the way you behave emotionally. 

So emotional rigidity is theother side of the coin, which is to say, the inability to disengage fromemotions, or the tendency to get stuck in a particular emotional trajectory,which just continues in a direction, and can't be pulled back towards a neutralbaseline, or an emotional home base, if you like.

Andi Horvath 
Peter, share with us some of these experiments that psychologists do, that giveus insights into how our psychological health works. What’s captured yourimagination?

Peter Koval 
I guess some of the really interesting work that captured my attention, which Ionly actually discovered after having started working on this myself, and haddone some research and experiments myself on emotional flexibility, wasactually work done a couple of decades ago by John Gottman and his colleagues,on married couples. 

So they brought them into thelab and asked them to have an argument, and they filmed the couple having anargument, and had people code their behaviour, or their emotional expressionsfrom those videos. What they found was surprising, which was that couples inwhich one or both of the individuals had emotions that were inflexible -meaning that they tended to get stuck in a particular emotional state and notrespond to what was going on in the discussion, and how it was unfolding anddeveloping - actually tended to have worse marital outcomes. So they termedthis emotional inertia, which is actually a term that my supervisor with whom Idid my PhD, also used to describe the process - we were studying very similarkinds of processes.

So this idea is that if youremotions are inert or inflexible, and they tend to have a life of their own,and be self-perpetuating, this may mean that you’re unable to adapt to changesin the environment, and you’re unable to modify your emotions in line with thesituation that you’re confronted with.

Andi Horvath 
So we have this emotional flexibility, and we want to stay away from rigiditybecause that creates that inertia from moving on, and yet there’s still thisculture-wide requirement for emotional flatlining. Even Warren Buffett I thinkis quoted saying…

Peter Koval 
That’s right. Yeah. He said that the key to success is emotional stability, andI think others have made similar kinds of claims.

Andi Horvath 
It’s like being the same person in every room, because I guess in terms ofleadership you want to rely on a certain individual responding to you. But inactual fact, you’re seeing flaws in that way of being.

Peter Koval 
Absolutely, and I'm sure that if we studied Warren Buffett and otherhigh-functioning people we’d find that their emotions do fluctuate from onesituation to the next quite a lot. Even in some cases perhaps make themselvesexperience negative emotions, so increase their experience of negative emotionsin certain circumstances when they need to. There are some really interestingresearchers doing work on that specific question, of when we might actuallywant to make ourselves feel worse, and how that can be useful. 

So for example, when trying toempathise with a friend who’s suffered some sort of misfortune, or who’s lost aloved one, and so on, it would be very bad for the relationship, and ingeneral, pretty undesirable to maintain your pre-existing level of happiness,for example, that you might have had before you went into that interaction. SoI'm sure that most high-functioning people would naturally and spontaneouslytry to empathise with their friend, and in doing so actually potentially makethemselves feel temporarily worse. 

It’s that ability to shift ouremotions to meet the situation, or demands, or to match the situation, which Ithink is really crucial for wellbeing and for functioning.

Andi Horvath 
You’re sort of advocating an emotional adaptability, or to the context you’rein, or the environment you’re in. How has the movement of positive psychology,or even gratitude, influenced our psychological well-being, because it soundslike we need to move on from those?

Peter Koval 
I think we have a lot to be grateful for, to the positive psychology movementbecause we did for a very long time, in psychology, focus almost exclusively onhuman suffering, human failings, human misery, which made for a rather dark andalmost morbid - people still sign up in droves to abnormal psychology classesbecause there is something fascinating about studying all the myriad ways inwhich humans suffer, and the ways that life is full of torment. 

But on the other hand, I thinkwhat positive psychology did was bring to light the fact that humans actuallyin general, the majority of us function well most of the time, and how do we dothat? What strengths and virtues do we possess, that allow us to function well,and that we could try to cultivate. So I think we do have a lot to be thankfulfor, and it’s important that this positive psychology movement came about. 

But I think that it’s been maybetaken a little bit at face value by popular culture and so on, that this mayimply that we should seek to feel good all the time, and that there’s nothingmore to life than feeling happy. When in fact I don’t think that’s really whatpositive psychologists were claiming in the first place, they were trying tojust shed some light on and move the focus of psychology onto the positiveaspects of human psychology and human experience, but without necessarilydenying that the negative parts of our experience are still valid. I think t hatmaybe that train ran away with itself in a way in popular culture, and it hashad some negative side effects as a result.

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