We have evolved as emotion machines. We have 43 muscles in our face whose only purpose is to show emotions[1]. Our visual cortex is designed to recognize the emotions[2] we see in other people’s faces which is also why we see a smile in a series of punctuation marks 🙂 (Has anyone else ever tormented their dog with a carved pumpkin? Anyone??) This innate ability to recognize emotion is how we separated friend from foe when we lived in caves.
We can also recognize emotions in animals, as demonstrated in this viral video of a chimpanzee expressing “awe” and “wonder” at having seen the blue sky for the first time after living in captivity for its entire 28 years of life.
We have an innate response to emotions including Anger (fight) or Fear (flight). This automatic response is how we survived the threat of predators when we lived in caves. We don’t live in caves any longer. This innate, automatic response does not help us in meetings or at dinner with the family.
We can hack this automatic response with three steps, easy to write but difficult to perform:
- Name the emotion: Identifying the emotion we are experiencing is the first step towards gaining control over our automatic responses. By recognizing the emotion, we can detach ourselves from it and observe it objectively.
- Query the emotion: Once we identify the emotion, it’s essential to understand its trigger and underlying cause. By investigating the emotion further, we can gain insight into why we are feeling a particular way and evaluate its validity in the given situation.
- Consciously choose our response: Armed with knowledge about our emotional state, we can deliberately choose our response instead of succumbing to automatic reactions. This conscious decision-making process allows us to respond constructively rather than destructively, leading to better outcomes.
Why It Matters
The automatic responses to emotion are real. When we sense Anger, our physiological response is in our hands as we prepare to fight. When we sense Fear, our physiological response is in our legs as we prepare to flight. We have evolved to make responses automatically based on emotions. This is still useful. If we sense fear and take an evasive action to avoid a car crash, our automatic reaction was constructive and has done its job.
But, Will Smith allowed his rage to work through him which got him banned from the Oscars for 10 years. This was not a constructive choice. Will has not spoken about how he was feeling during this, but my guess is he had in his mind the idea that he was going to regret his action, but he was in the grip of the emotion and could not stop.
By contrast, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger chose a constructive response to the fear he felt when US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after it hit a flock of geese. Sully chose to take control of the airplane and landed it safely on the Hudson River 3 minutes and 33 seconds after it lost its engines. He has spoken about how he was feeling during this which I will explore below.
What Is an emotion?
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, an emotion is “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event[3].” Emotions are of a short duration.
What Is a mood?
APA says a mood is “a disposition to respond emotionally in a particular way that may last for hours, days, or even weeks, perhaps at a low level and without the person knowing what prompted the state. Moods differ from emotions in lacking an object; for example, the emotion of anger can be aroused by an insult, but an angry mood may arise when one does not know what one is angry about or what elicited the anger.[4]”
A mood is an emotional filter. That is, when we are in a mood, there are only certain emotions available to us. If we are in an elated mood, the emotion happiness is available to us. If we are in an irritable mood, happiness is not available, but anger and frustration are.
Therefore, our emotional response to an event is limited by our mood. In an optimistic mood we may respond to rain with thankfulness for the coming flowers, and the bees harvest of pollen and the honey we’ll receive. If we are in an irritable mood, that same rain on that same day may result in frustration.
Moods can be caused by many things including hormones, hunger, and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Paul Ekman postulates that moods can be caused by a very strong emotional response. For example, news of a death can cause a strong feeling of sadness that may put us in a somber mood for a long time. In that somber mood we may be more prone to feeling sadness.
Moods can be caused by the density of a particular emotion – if someone is making us laugh over and over again, we’d say there is a high density of the emotion happiness, and this can trigger an elated mood and we’re more prone to feeling even more happiness[5].
How Does Awareness Help?
We are constantly making choices, some conscious, some unconscious. Having awareness of our emotional state can help us understand the choices we perceive as available to us because both moods and emotions filter our perception of the world.
Sully’s Application of the Three Steps
1. Name the emotion
Fear – n. a basic, intense emotion aroused by the detection of imminent threat, involving an immediate alarm reaction that mobilizes the organism by triggering a set of physiological changes[6].
Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger describes awareness of his emotional state in an interview with INC about how he saved the lives of 155 passengers by safely landing US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River:
“And then the thrust loss was sudden, complete, symmetrical, bilaterally, both engines at once. It felt as if the bottom had fallen out of our world. And my body responded immediately in a very normal human way to this sudden life-threatening stress. I was aware of that as it happened. I could feel my pulse shoot up, my blood pressure spike, my perceptual field narrow in tunnel vision because of my stress.”
2. Query the emotion
Trigger: The airplane Sully is captaining has lost both engines. He is feeling fear for his own life, and fear for the 154 passengers and crew in his care.
3. Consciously choose our response
Choose a constructive response that can lessen the impact of the emotion rather than a destructive response which increases the impact of the emotion. This is hacking our innate response!
Sully describes a dozen decisions he had to make in the 3 minutes and 33 seconds between birdstrike and emergency landing. The first constructive response he made was “fighting to save every life to the very end” over choosing to become a victim of his emotion, to let his fear evolve in to desperation, panic, or terror, which would have rendered him helpless. He took control of the plane from his co-pilot, he chose jump–start a checklist and turn on the engine ignition and start the APU, he made a distress call, he declined three infeasible options from Air Traffic Control – LaGuardia, Teterboro, Newark – he made an announcement with words and a tone of voice that would have the best chance at preventing panic in the cabin. His tens of thousands of hours of flying over his whole life had prepared him for this moment.
How did he do this?
As he described above, his awareness of his physiological changes, the pulse shooting up and blood pressure spike, allowed him to choose a constructive response before he was in the grip of emotion. He was able to use his fear – fear of losing the lives of the 154 people who depended on him and the fear of losing his own life, and channel it in to a legendary feat worthy of a Tom Hanks reenactment.
Starter List of Emotions
The first list of emotions I found was from Fred Kofman’s book Conscious Business. I’ve seen many other short lists, but Fred’s always seemed the most pragmatic to me. Here it is:
- Sadness – We feel sad when something bad happens.
- Fear – We feel fear when we think something bad may happen in the future.
- Anger – We feel anger when we are blocked, or when someone causes you sadness or fear.
- Guilt – We feel guilt when we violate our own values and cause someone sadness, anger, or fear.
- Happiness – We feel happiness when something good happens.
- Enthusiasm – We feel enthusiasm when we believe something good may happen.
- Gratitude – We feel gratitude toward the source of our happiness, especially when someone goes out of their way for us[7].
Put this in to practice
You are now armed with a simple, three-part framework for emotional intelligence and a starter list of emotions. When you feel anger, or frustration, try to find a beat before you respond. If we can simply hack our innate automatic response and buy time bewteen emotion and response, we’re better off.
Oh – and bask in joy.
- Name the emotion: Identifying the emotion we are experiencing is the first step towards gaining control over our automatic responses. By recognizing the emotion, we can detach ourselves from it and observe it objectively.
- Query the emotion: Once we identify the emotion, it’s essential to understand its trigger and underlying cause. By investigating the emotion further, we can gain insight into why we are feeling a particular way and evaluate its validity in the given situation.
- Consciously choose our response: Armed with knowledge about our emotional state, we can deliberately choose our response instead of succumbing to automatic reactions. This conscious decision-making process allows us to respond constructively rather than destructively, leading to better outcomes.
Further Reading
Free:
The Dalai Lama and Drs Paul and Eve Ekman built the Atlas of Emotions, an “interactive tool that builds your vocabulary of emotions and illuminates your emotional world.
Not free (but, libraries!):
Fred Kofman built the most pragmatic Emotional Intelligence framework I’ve seen in Conscious Business.
Daniel Goleman popularized the phrase “Emotional Intelligence” in his brilliant book of the same title.
Brené Brown defines a list of 87 emotions grouped by 13 vignettes in her book Atlas of the Heart. The vignette “Places we go when it’s beyond us”, for example, is where I learned the language of “awe” and “wonder” I used in the chimpanzee section above. I didn’t really know what these meant before this book.
[1] Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton And Company, 1899. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1227/1227-h/1227-h.htm.
[2] Hubel, David H. “Evolution of Ideas on the Primary Visual Cortex, 1955–1978: A Biased Historical Account.” Bioscience Reports 2, no. 7 (July 1, 1982): 435–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01115245.
[3] “APA Dictionary of Psychology.” Accessed July 9, 2023. https://dictionary.apa.org/emotion.
[4] “APA Dictionary of Psychology.” Accessed July 9, 2023. https://dictionary.apa.org/mood.
[5] Ekman, Paul. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. 1st ed. New York: Times Books, 2003.
[6] “APA Dictionary of Psychology.” Accessed July 9, 2023. https://dictionary.apa.org/fear.
[7] Kofman, Fred. Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2013.
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