Exercising your emotions

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

Sometimes you find yourself listening to a podcast and coming close to tears - it’s just that good. Or sometimes you’re struggling not to laugh out loud on public transport. Or maybe whatever you just heard makes you want to rip out your headphones and stomp on the ground in anger. As our guest today tells us, the key to your personality may lie in whether or not you follow through on these intense expressions of emotion.

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

Andi Horvath

Peter, I was walking around 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 this public lecture.

Peter Koval
[Laughs]

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

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

So we probably need to recognise their usefulness and their value, as well as of course try to keep them under control 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’re questioning this, then what?

Peter Koval
Over the last couple of decades in particular, although, this goes back further in psychology, there’s been a shift to thinking about the importance of emotional flexibility, rather than stability, and what that really entails is the ability to respond to the events in different environments that we’re exposed to with appropriate emotions. Also then, on the other hand, to be able to manage and modify those emotional responses. So not let them necessarily get out of control or become overwhelming, but at the same time, be responsive to changes in the environment, and I guess to use the information that emotions convey 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, as psychologists 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 'emotional stability', as it’s been traditionally used in psychology, which has been as a synonym 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 term was adopted was that some maybe thought this is - I don’t have any evidence for this being historically accurate - but I suspect that it may have been to do with the fact that the term neuroticism had a kind of pejorative sound to it.

Certainly part of the concept of neuroticism was this idea that people's emotions are unstable and out of control, so I think that as a more positive-sounding term, some psychologists adopted emotional stability as describing the other end of the spectrum of neuroticism. We then assumed that people who are low on neuroticism have emotions 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 the dynamics of people's emotions, and their self-reported levels of neuroticism, and other kinds of characteristics as well.

But to go back to your original question, how we define emotional stability, so it’s often been defined in terms 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 overwhelm me, I'm not easily stressed out”. These are the kinds of questions or items that people would endorse in order to score high on emotional stability, or low on neuroticism.

But as it turns out, when we look more carefully at how people's emotions change in daily life, or in the lab indeed, we find that people who score high on neuroticism may actually be more 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, and this is really good news. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and imagine some of the listeners are like me, however, in the workplace you kind of have to be a robot. Everyone has tipping points, but managing those tipping points are important in the workplace, so you don’t create dysfunctionality. But when you’re talking about neuroticism, and you’re not talking about extreme bipolar disorder, 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 often carried a lot of baggage, and was much earlier in - psychology and psychiatry used to refer to certain kinds of mental illness, and it is still related to greater risk or vulnerability for mental illness, but it refers these days - the term neuroticism refers to one of the five basic dimensions of human personality.

So everybody can be characterised as falling somewhere on the continuum of low to high neuroticism, and people who score high on neuroticism don’t necessarily have any mental illness or psychological problems that would be clinically diagnosed. They might, but that’s not necessarily the case.

What really characterises them I think is people who score high on neuroticism tend to experience intense emotions, particularly negative ones, and that intensity of emotion can sometimes lead people who score high on neuroticism to actually believe that their emotions are unstable. I don’t think we’ve quite worked out why that is the case, but what we know is that in fact it may be the opposite, that people who score high on neuroticism may have intense negative emotions, which actually linger on and last longer. So by some measures they tend to actually be 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 psychologists call it.

Peter Koval
That’s right.

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

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

So emotional rigidity is the other side of the coin, which is to say, the inability to disengage from emotions, 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 neutral baseline, or an emotional home base, if you like.

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

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

So they brought them into the lab and asked them to have an argument, and they filmed the couple having an argument, and had people code their behaviour, or their emotional expressions from those videos. What they found was surprising, which was that couples in which one or both of the individuals had emotions that were inflexible - meaning that they tended to get stuck in a particular emotional state and not respond to what was going on in the discussion, and how it was unfolding and developing - actually tended to have worse marital outcomes. So they termed this emotional inertia, which is actually a term that my supervisor with whom I did my PhD, also used to describe the process - we were studying very similar kinds of processes.

So this idea is that if your emotions 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 changes in the environment, and you’re unable to modify your emotions in line with the situation that you’re confronted with.

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

Peter Koval
That’s right. Yeah. He said that the key to success is emotional stability, and I 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 of leadership you want to rely on a certain individual responding to you. But in actual fact, you’re seeing flaws in that way of being.

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

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

It’s that ability to shift our emotions to meet the situation, or demands, or to match the situation, which I think is really crucial for wellbeing and for functioning.

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

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

But on the other hand, I think what positive psychology did was bring to light the fact that humans actually in general, the majority of us function well most of the time, and how do we do that? 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 thankful for, and it’s important that this positive psychology movement came about.

But I think that it’s been maybe taken a little bit at face value by popular culture and so on, that this may imply that we should seek to feel good all the time, and that there’s nothing more to life than feeling happy. When in fact I don’t think that’s really what positive psychologists were claiming in the first place, they were trying to just shed some light on and move the focus of psychology onto the positive aspects of human psychology and human experience, but without necessarily denying that the negative parts of our experience are still valid. I think that maybe that train ran away with itself in a way in popular culture, and it has had some negative side effects as a result.

Andi Horvath
So what are we moving towards now? Emotional acceptance, emotional adaptability, mindfulness comes to mind?

Peter Koval
Yeah, so I think that there is some interesting work in clinical psychology, looking at approaches such as mindfulness-based therapies, as well as acceptance and commitment therapy, which is a related form of thinking about unpleasant thoughts and emotions, which really yeah, as you say, advocate not trying to push away or change things that we - experiences that we might find distressing, but rather changing our approach or attitude towards them, and our relationship towards them. They use terms like de-centring, or diffusing, so separating yourself from the experience, and allowing it to happen, allowing it to unfold.

Actually, that seems to take the edge off unpleasant experiences, and potentially limit their duration, without trying to deny them, or without trying to ignore or stop them in their tracks.

Andi Horvath
Tell me about misconceptions that people have about psychology and the psychological sciences.

Peter Koval
Well, I think we could be here for a very long time because it seems to me that there are about as many misconceptions as there are facts in psychology. One of the problems with psychology is that we are all folk psychologists, and so there are two sets of findings that you have in psychology, some that conform to our lay beliefs and expectations, which people then dismiss as being, “well we knew that all along, why did you need to show that?” And others which do the opposite, and go against our intuitions, which people also dismiss as being impossible, or “this can't possibly be true because it goes against everything I feel and know from my own experience.”

So I think it is difficult sometimes to separate fact from fiction, and psychology has also gone through as many sciences in the last decade or so, a bit of a soul-searching exercise, actually looking at the way that we do research. So it’s a complex question because I think we ourselves, as academic psychologists, have started doubting some of our previous findings, and are they actually robust, do they replicate, and so on. But I think a lot of the misconceptions come from the fact that although we have an experience of what it’s like to be human, and to interact with other people, this doesn’t always map on in a one-to-one fashion with what’s actually happening in our interactions, or even in our own experience. We know that the way we remember things, and the way that we experience things in the moment don’t necessarily match up. So I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions.

Andi Horvath
So what got you into this field? Most of us toy with going into psychology because I think our inner neurotics just want to know more information about ourselves. So what inspired you?

Peter Koval
I think I had a similar story to that exactly. I would consider myself to be high neuroticism as well, and I would say that that probably motivated me to try to understand more about other people. But really, part of that quest was to understand myself and my own experience.

But what got me interested in specifically studying emotions was actually meeting the person who became my PhD supervisor, and realising that what I'd learnt about emotions in my undergraduate psychology course was really only a very small part of the story, and that actually there was so many questions about emotions that hadn’t been answered. So I think I had this image of emotions as being these fairly fixed universal programs that we are born with in a sense, and that have universal facial expressions, for example, this is coming from work that was made famous by Paul Ekman, who probably kick-started the modern psychology research on emotion, one of the few people who did research in emotion in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when nobody was studying it.

But it turns out that there were many, many questions, and still are, about emotions that really hadn’t been answered, and I was quite surprised to know that, that we didn’t understand emotions, which seemed to be these really fundamental building blocks of psychology.

Andi Horvath
What have you discovered on your journey that’s really been exciting, that’s new, compared to when you started?

Peter Koval
One of the things I discovered, which I think people know in the back of their minds when they psychology in general, and emotion in particular, is just the vast individual differences there are between people.

So we can show people films, for example, or images in the lab, and ask them and record their emotional response to those, and although we tend to focus on the things that are reliable among all different people, in terms of everyone seems to feel more sad when they’ve watched this particular film, than when they watch a different happy film. When we start to look at the differences, or when we look at individual patterns, we see that there are just absolutely vast differences between people. That also then generalises to changes over time across different situations. So the same individual can feel utterly different in one situation than in the next.

So that’s what really got me interested in studying emotion, was that one of the fundamental properties of emotions theoretically was that they fluctuate and change over time, but that there hadn’t really been much work on describing those fluctuations, and trying to understand the patterns in emotional change and fluctuations. So that was what inspired me to get into this area.

Andi Horvath
Okay professor, time for you to profess.

Peter Koval
[Laughs]

Andi Horvath
Next time we’re in public and we see someone, I don’t know, overjoyed or bursting into tears, or having an emotional response, what would you like us to think about?

Peter Koval
I think that we should recognise that we’ve all had those experiences, or we know somebody who’s had intense emotional experiences, and that they’re a normal part of what it means to be a human. That’s probably the first thing I would think about.

I think the second thing would be to realise that emotion, both the internal experience the person may be having, and also their outward expression, actually conveys useful information to us, and that we can use. So as an observer of somebody having an emotion, that tells you a lot about what’s going on, and it actually is really at the heart of our social interactions with other people.

We’re constantly reading other people's emotions. So when somebody has a very overt and obvious emotional expression, we should be grateful that we don’t have to invest a great deal of energy and resources to try to decode some ambiguous emotional expression, which is what we’re often faced with. I think we should be grateful that, okay, now at least it seems to me that I understand or know how this person might be feeling, and have some kind of understanding about the basic features of the situation that is in front of us. To the person as well, that emotion signifies something, it tells the person and the people around them that something important is happening, something that impinges on their wellbeing, or that’s relevant to some of their major concerns and goals, it’s just happened, or is in the process of unfolding. Those moments are important to understand I think.

Andi Horvath
Peter, I saw someone wearing a badge the other day that said “cheerful despair”, and I thought that summed up emotional flexibility.

Peter Koval
I haven't seen that one. Cheerful despair, I'm not quite sure I know what the connotations of that are. But I think the ability to experience both despair and joy at the appropriate times, and for the appropriate durations, and with appropriate intensity, there are many question marks that come along with…

Andi Horvath
With intensity.

Peter Koval
…all those kind of caveats. I think this is something that Aristotle also observed many, many years ago, that emotions are not necessarily good or bad, that it very much depends on the appropriateness of the emotion to the context, and its intensity and duration being the right type and kind for the situation.

Andi Horvath
One last question, culturally some emotions are seen as no-no in public, whereas, in other contexts those emotions are simply fine, that’s where they belong. Does that make things more complicated?

Peter Koval
It definitely does. I think we have evidence that in Australia and in the US, for example, we live in cultures where it’s less acceptable, many people believe that it’s less acceptable to experience and express unpleasant emotions like sadness or anxiety. I'm referring to work done actually by a colleague here at the School of Psychological Sciences, Brock Bastian, who's studied peoples’ social expectancies as he terms it, about what emotions are appropriate to experience and express in our culture. So in Australia people tend to report that they think other people expect them not to experience these unpleasant, negative emotions, whereas, this is less the case in some cultures in East Asia, for example, such as Japan.

We know that this actually impacts people's wellbeing as well, so it’s inevitable that at some point we are going to experience sadness and anxiety, and frustration and stress, to the extent that we believe that’s not acceptable in our culture, it just makes for a more difficult experience because in addition to feeling stressed or sad, or anxious, we also may feel shamed or alone if we think that others around us reject our experiences as inauthentic or inappropriate.

So I think we do need to work on changing our culture to be a little bit more accepting, warts and all. I have myself been in other cultures that I feel are more open to the negative sides of emotional experience. So I'm thinking of time that I've spent in the Czech Republic where it’s quite acceptable for people in business dealings, for instance, to answer the question, “how are you”, in the negative, which would be almost unheard of in Australia. So if somebody asks you how you’re going, saying anything other than “fine”, or “not too bad”, is very jarring in an Australian context, and would be rather unexpected. In Czech Republic it’s less so, in my experience - I don’t know of any research comparing these two particular nations - but I've witnessed people talking to others, who they’re not very familiar with, and saying “look, I'm actually not very well right now, here are a few things that are bothering me at the moment”. I think that openness to acknowledging that sometimes things don’t go well for us, and it’s okay to have accompanying unpleasant, stressful emotions that go along with those experiences is okay.

Andi Horvath
May we all go forth in our little balls of emotions, and adapt to the environment in the best possible [laughs] way. It’s a wonder we can get anything done, but I suppose emotions also drive us to do things.

Peter Koval
Yes, they definitely do.

Andi Horvath
Professor Peter Koval, thank you.

Peter Koval
Thanks very much for having me.

Chris Hatzis
Thanks to Dr Peter Koval, lecturer at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on May 29, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, the University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes or Whooshka, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.