#33. So Emotional - Assoc. Prof. Gina Grimshaw

Associate Professor Gina Grimshaw leads the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Victoria University of Wellington. She joins to talk about emotions and her research on how emotional states affect cognitive processes like attention, language, and executive control. Gina also gives us an intro into multiple aspects of emotions such as the association of emotions with colors and why artificial intelligence is poor at detecting emotions. 

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Transcript

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Bye! Uh, all right. Cool. Are we ready then? Uh, we're ready. All right. Oh, okay. Welcome back to the Smooth Brain Society. Today's episode is going to be about emotions. Oh, that's the main topic. And our guest today is Associate Professor Gina Grimshaw. Gina initially has had an undergraduate degree in biochemistry. the University of Toronto, but afterwards got a PhD in psychology from the University of Waterloo and is currently at Victoria University of Wellington where she is the director of the Cognitive and Effective Neuroscience Lab. And she has lectured me before as an undergrad and her lectures were incredibly interesting, so I've been after her to come on for the past year, I think, and she's finally agreed. So yeah. Welcome, Gina. Oh, thank you very much. And I am actually, I wasn't avoiding you for a year. It was just a matter of getting our timing right. So I'm really happy to be here and participate in your very cool podcast. Thank you. And as always, for those who are new here, how it works is me and a co-host both come on. We have no real idea about Gina's research. To be fair, I do have quite a bit of an idea of Gina's research. So it's not as fair, but I have wrote in my girlfriend, Maria, to be my co-host today. I'll let her introduce herself. So go on. Yeah. So hi. I'm the real newbie here. I'm Maria. I'm a software engineer in banking. And yeah, I'm actually all new to Gina's research. So. All right, perfect. So again, if you've heard the podcast, you know how it starts. We generally ask for a little bit of background of how you got into your field of research and what your key research areas are. So Gina, take it away. All right. So it's a little bit of a meandering path. So when I was studying to... do my PhD in psychology, I was in an area of psychology called cognitive psychology. So the psychology of how people think. I won't tell you what decade it was in, but it was in the last millennium. And at the time, cognitive psychology was very much focused on how we understand the mind and the definition of the mind was, you know, attention, perception, not emotion. Emotion was considered to be something different than thinking. Emotion was something that would mess up all of your cognitive experiments. Cognitive psychologists very much wanted to get at the basic underlying processes that control how we think. And I was a little bit of an outlier back then because my original first sort of series of research asymmetry, so how the two sides of the brain process information in different ways. So we all know a whole lot of myths about the left brain and the right brain, but there is something to the fact that they do process information in two different ways. And so my original work was on studying tone of voice. So whether you're angry or happy or sad, just thinking of that as a source of information in your voice. and how that integrated with what you were actually saying. So from a brain perspective, when you are speaking, your left hemisphere is heavily involved in understanding what someone is saying, while the right hemisphere is actually really well specialized for picking up that changing patterns, which is where the tone of voice comes from. And we call that emotional prosody. And so that was what I originally studied, and it was kind of a loud because it was really about language, it wasn't really about emotion. And so then I went on, continued doing this type of research, and I realized that in fact, emotion interacts with every single aspect of cognition. It affects our language, it affects what we pay attention to, it affects what we see, it affects what we remember, and so... over this period of time while my career has been changing, the entire field has been changing. And so now emotion is considered to be sort of one of the hottest topics in psychology and one of the hottest topics in cognitive science. So that we cannot understand the mind unless we also include the fact that minds are continually engaged in emotional processing. So that was kind of my way in. I still am a cognitive psychologist. I'm interested in studying attention, but I study attention by thinking about how emotion changes the attentional system. So emotions are super important for our survival because they guide all of these other aspects of cognition to keep us alive, help us achieve rewards, help us avoid dangers, things like that. So now, emotion is really a fundamental aspect of cognitive science. Awesome, nice. So can I then ask what emotions are? I laugh. There are entire, this is a huge debate about what emotions are. And the area of emotion theory, is sort of one of the sort of most hotly contested areas, I think, in psychology. So I can give you a really quick rundown of the different ways people think about emotions. So everyone would agree that an emotion is a sort of temporary state that your body and mind are in together. And so that includes what we call feelings, the subjective aspect of emotion. happiness feels like something, and it feels different than what disgust feels like. So that's the subjective and the conscious aspect of it. Most emotions also involve changes in your physiology. So when you're afraid, your heart beats more rapidly and you sweat. When you're feeling disgust, you get this extra sort of thing happening in your stomach. When you are... attracted to someone, your pupils get larger. So emotion is very much about how the mind makes the body prepared for the situation that it's in. So that's the physiology part of an emotion. And then the third component is the behavior. So emotions are primes for certain types of behavior. So if you think about when you're angry, You get this muscle additional muscle tension, which is preparing you for some form of aggression Hope that you don't have to act on that But it's priming your body to behave in a particular sort of way when we're in a dangerous situation where our body becomes more cautious and we engage in cautious behaviors when we're Anxious or worried about something that might happen. We become particularly tense and very easily startled because we're on the on the lookout for something So those are the behaviors. So everyone would agree emotion is at least those three things. Some people also talk about the cognition as being part of the emotion. So being especially alert or being very open, which you might be in a very positive when you're in a positive emotional state. Where the disagreement comes in is really how emotions are made or how they fit parts of our mind. So going back 130 years or so ago, William James talked about emotions and proposed a theory of emotion that suggested that the feeling comes from what's happening in your body. So we think intuitively, like imagine you saw a scary, I use snake as an example, but I realize that's not a very good New Zealand example because there are no snakes. But if you saw one, you would be really surprised. And a lot of people are afraid of them. And so you imagine the situation when we think about what we think our mind is doing is we see the snake, we're afraid of the snake, and therefore we jump and we run away. And what William James would say is... Actually, you don't need to be afraid of the snake before you jump. Your body is gonna do that anyway, right? So we have this very quick defensive system that's going to kick in, and then your body is going to behave in this really defensive way. And then given the situation, your mind goes, oh, my body is freaking out, and there's a snake over there, and that's what gives rise to the feeling of fear. So what James famously said is, I do not run because I am afraid, I am afraid because I run. So we can think of the body's response to emotional situation as the evolutionarily old thing that protected you in certain situations or made you reach out for rewards in other situations. And then your mind interprets that situation, interprets the feeling in the body plus what's going on in the environment And that's where the emotional feeling comes from. So a lot of people now talk about emotions being constructed, that the emotion that I feel in a particular situation might be different than the emotion you feel in a situation because that construction process is different. So that's how I think of emotions. I think of them as cognitive processes, just like attention and memory. They're the types of cognitive processes that let us know, am I in a good situation or in a bad situation? And is that goodness or badness intense? Or is it just kind of just kind of there? And that gives me some guidance about what the rest of my mind should be doing to help me either avoid a situation or take advantage of a situation. All right, sorry, long answer. No. Um, what would make people process emotions differently? Um, cause you, you just said that we might process them slightly differently. Uh, in terms of experiences. So then I guess, yeah. So how would one person run and therefore is scared why another person run and therefore is enjoying it or is happy? Yes. Um, so. So if we think about emotions as being constructed out of these basic elements, right? So your body is having this particular response in a particular situation, but that response, first of all, is gonna vary from person to person to some extent. So imagine I'm walking down a dark alley. If I compare me doing that to my husband doing that, I am actually in more danger than he is in that situation. or at least I feel more vulnerable in that situation than he does. He's like very big and tall. And, um, and it just sometimes doesn't even occur to him to be afraid in that situation. So the things that trigger emotions or that activate emotions will vary depending on who you are. Um, but, but even on top of that, your whole life history is going to determine how something feels to you. So some people, uh, we see this with students. when they're doing a test may interpret what's happening as this is an opportunity for, you know, for me to sort of rise to some sort of challenge, to demonstrate what I've learned, to achieve something good, because they have some positive feeling about their ability in this situation. But if you have a negative feeling about your ability in this situation, the exact same situation is going to feel entirely different. If you don't feel confident that you can actually succeed, it becomes a terrifying situation. So the way we interpret a situation matters a lot to the actual emotions that you're going to have. So it's not just the case that everyone is going to feel the same emotion in the same situation. Can I ask one? Yeah. So I was listening to you and you were talking about how emotions can affect our physiology. How does it work the other way? How does our physiology affect our emotions? I will give an example, the word hangry. It means anger coming from being hungry. How does that work? Yeah. So the relationship... between the body and our feelings is definitely a two-way one. So when we talk about, so let's imagine a situation where, we'll go back to the snake for just a second, really low-level areas of your brain can trigger that physiological escape type of response. And then your mind interprets that feeling. And so we call that interoception, the ability to feel what's going on inside your body and then create an emotion out of that. And so that the, anything that's sort of in your, we call them your viscera, the internal organs are part of what's called your autonomic nervous system. And that includes your heart. your gut, your intestines, all the internal messy bits. And those are the ones that are most heavily involved in our emotions. And it's a two-way thing. So the situation tells my brain to tell my body how to respond, but my body's response tells my subjective self how to interpret what's going on. People vary a lot in their introspective awareness. So some people are very in tune. with what's going on in their body, and other people are not. And so that's going to lead to different types of emotions in different people if part of the emotion is feeling what your body is feeling. I remember this from, I want to say second year. We were talking about certain things being classified as emotions, but do we really think of them as that? And you kind of touched upon two of them. Maria just said hangry. But would you consider hunger itself to be an emotion and likewise pain itself to be an emotion? And it's not right because you feel it. and it does affect physiological changes, you act upon them just like you would act upon any emotion, like if you're happy, sad, whatever. Yeah. I do, but not so there are four feelings that we get in our body. So there's hunger, thirst, pain, and itch. And some people call those homeostatic They're very basic, very primitive, very protective feelings that we have. But if you think about it, they fit that definition of emotion actually very well, right? So they are a chain, it's homeostasis, which is your brain monitoring what your body's current state is and whether you need to make a change. So when you're hungry, your body is saying you don't have enough energy. When you are, when you're feeling itch. It's often that there's something on your skin that you should probably get rid of. When you're feeling pain, obviously, there's some adjustment you need to make to make whatever is damaging you stop. So each of those are very protective, very basic mechanisms. We see them in all animal species as well. And they have feelings, they arise out of the body, they have feelings attached to them. Hunger feels like something, pain feels like something, and they prime certain types of behaviors. So from an evolutionary point of view, there are some people who have argued that the really complex emotions that humans have today are originally evolved out of that basic fundamental mechanism which drives us to behave in certain ways. And that's... that kind of gives you the building blocks of an emotion system. If you've got hunger, thirst, pain, and itch, now you can start to add on more complexity to those things. So you can feel something different in different types of, for different types of threats. Or you might feel something positive. So those are all very protective, quite negative things, but you might also have more positive versions of those when there are rewards available. I do think of those things as emotions. So when you say hangry, you're thinking about the fact that being hungry makes you emotional, gives you an emotion of anger. But a lot of people would say that hunger itself is kind of an emotion, not a really interesting one, right? I think curiosity is an emotion as well. That's a really interesting one. So that the idea though is that the basic mechanisms are kind of similar. How do emotions connect with our instinct? Because you were talking about curiosity being an emotion, there's also like, being wary of something, does that come out of our instinct to try to survive and stay out of danger? sort of a very common, very root emotion. So the ones that people commonly talk about are happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise as being the sort of basic set of emotions. Now there's a lot of debate. So that was five. Some people have now come up with 11, I've heard. So there's a lot of argument in the field about what the basic emotions are. But then complex emotions are emotions that require something over and above that. So you might take something, when you're talking about wariness, may start with, at its basic core, being somewhat similar to fear, but it's actually a very subtle, very low-level type of fear. And you may, in a situation where you're wary, not know what the thing is you're wary of. So we often talk about that as being anxiety, not in terms of an anxiety disorder, but just the feeling that we all get sometimes when you're in a really uncertain situation and you're not sure if you should be afraid or shouldn't be afraid, you're not sure what's going to happen, and that's when we have anxiety. And so wariness might be a very subtle form of anxiety. When I give the example of curiosity, Curiosity is what some people would call an intellectual emotion. So it's a feeling that we get in situations where there's novelty and there's an opportunity to discover something new or exciting and it still fits that definition of emotion. So it's priming behavior. You know, your heart usually isn't pounding when you're curious. That's not what you need your body to be doing in that situation, but you're very approach oriented, right? In a curious situation, you're reaching out to interact with things. So those complex emotions, there's also a whole set of them that we call social emotions. So guilt, embarrassment, shame, those are emotions that are about our interactions with other people. Humans are phenomenally social. Our social relationships are essential for us. to survive as a thesis and those social emotions If you think about it, you can't have a social emotion until you have the intellectual ability and the social ability to Understand other people's minds or that other people might be judging you so babies do Embarrassing things all the time, but they never feel embarrassed because they're not able to Realize that someone is judging them And so they don't feel that. And so these are emotions that don't emerge until you start to be able to become part of the social world where we realize that other people may be judging us. So even as adults, something might embarrass us if we're in public, but if we did it in private, we wouldn't worry about it. So again, it's not that the situa- it's the situ- it's the social aspect of the situation that makes us feel shame or guilt, so- or embarrassment in those situations. So the range of emotions, there are really, you know, starting from those basic six, there are hundreds of emotions. Different cultures also have different words for different emotions that are important in some cultures, but not in other cultures. I do not know which point to latch onto first. Maybe I'll latch onto the very last one, which you spoke about cultures and different cultures, uh, would you say having different words for emotions, identifying different emotions. Are there any salient cultural differences which you can point to, or which you know of between how emotions are expressed? And I guess that also comes down to how certain emotions are accepted if you show them as well, right? Yes. Yeah, so I will say I am not a cultural psychologist, so my understanding is very much from how I think of an emotion and how that might interact with culture, so that's my caveat there about this. But certainly different languages have different words for emotions. So language is a way we can... carve up the world into things that matter to us, right? If we distinguish two things with two different words, that suggests to us that we think they're different from each other. The classic example that people cite is that in German, the word Schadenfreude is the feeling of, the sort of good feeling that you get when something bad happens to someone you don't like. Now, As soon as I say that, everyone knows exactly what we mean, right? Um, and, but in German, there's a word for it. Some people would say in German, there's a word for everything and you can just make one up if you need to, uh, but. The fact that German has a word for it doesn't mean that people in other cultures don't also immediately know what that feeling is. We just haven't bothered to give it a word. Um, and so it. maybe isn't as important within our culture as something that deserves a word. I know in Scandinavian languages there are all these lovely words for social emotions that have to do with warmth and togetherness and you know the feeling you get when you all sit together and read books or things like that. So there's a lot of very cool websites floating around with all the different words that exist in different languages. Do you, does that mean that people in other cultures don't feel those things? Well, I think they do feel those things. They just don't have a label for it necessarily when they're feeling it. Um, but the label matters as well. Um, being able to label your emotions and say, Oh, I know what that feeling is. Actually changes a little bit how you experience it. So those emotion words matter quite a bit. Um, you asked about people expressing their emotions. So there are big cultural variations in particularly facial expressions that people make in emotions. So there was some really early work in the 1970s that said those basic emotions are all universal. Everyone has the same sort of telltale signs of happiness or sadness. And that's true if you tell people, if you say to people, show me your sad face. you kind of get things that look the same across everybody. But in many cultures, people don't actually show their sad face whenever they're sad, or they can also show a different face when they're in an actual sad situation or a happy situation. So there's way more flexibility and variability than we used to think that there was when people talked about these basic emotions as being universal, everybody has them. Um, yeah. Can I? Go on. Okay, so the question goes, in society, showing or experiencing emotions or attaching emotions to work or daily life activities, I look down upon, what do you think that is? Sorry, can you repeat that last part about work? Yes, so I believe the question is asking... allowing work or daily life activities to be influenced by emotions, that part is looked down upon. What do you think that is? So that's very much a cultural thing. So the extent to which you're meant to express your emotions or to not express your emotions. So this is a whole other field of emotion research called emotion regulation, which is, you know, you might initially have an angry response to, you know, an email that you've received. And then you regulate that emotion because you realize my anger is not going to actually be useful in this situation and get me what I, what I actually want, which is somebody else to do what I've asked them to do, let's say. So we all have this ability to, to rein our emotions in. and to therefore not express them or to change them into something else. And that's what emotion regulation is all about. So it is, so I think it's a really interesting question because it is currently the case in most business cultures that we're expected not to let those emotions, you know, interfere with the rational decision-making or something like that that's going on. I think that's a big mistake. Right. I think that emotions are an incredibly important part of effective decision making. And so we should maybe not be trying not to be emotional in certain situations. But it is very much a current trend. But in different countries, the those rules about where how much emotion to display or situations in which you could or couldn't display your emotions will be different in different periods of time. Historically, they've also been different. So this is something I find really fascinating. We can talk about different cultures, so different places having different ideas about what emotions are valued. It really is what we're talking about, is what emotions should we be expressing? But there are also times in history where different emotions sort of rose and became sort of very common in public life. So the 1960s in the United States was a time of a great amount of anger and public expressions of anger. We see this now with various types of protests in places in the world, and that anger really brings people together and creates change, right? So we all think, oh, anger, anger's a terrible thing. But that's kind of our current cultural vibe about anger. A lot of people would say that a lot of world, change for the better has arisen out of anger. And so that whole thing about not to be emotional at work, I think is very much a value judgment, is saying that you need to control your emotions in these situations. A lot of people comment on the fact that Americans particularly are very emotionally expressive, very independent type of culture. um, annoyingly polite sometimes, or cheerful. Um, some people, some people say, oh, that's very nice. Some people say that's toxic positivity. Uh, and so it, it really, how you interpret what's expected in your culture can change, um, a lot, depending on the culture that you're in. And that includes workplaces versus home, for example, those are cultures of sorts. Uh, yeah, that is quite true. I myself I'm originally from Eastern Europe. I'm from Romania, which has a sort of a mixed heritage. We we are taught not to express our emotions that much in more formal settings. But our Latin heritage sometimes shows up and I think especially at parties. I was just going to comment the time thing makes a lot of sense. So does age like as a kid. If you're showing, if you're having too much fun when your parents come home after work, then it's not allowed. In some cases, right? So there's levels to things and yeah, I think time is a good way to put it as well. Sorry, Maria, you were asking a question? Yeah. Oh, I wanted to ask a question. So in school, when we were talking about these things, and I guess in biology, we had the, I guess we had the part of anatomy, physiology, and then pathology. So I was going to ask, are there any sort of mental health problems associated with a lack or an overwhelming amount of emotions or certain types of emotions? something to do with emotions. So there's apathy or a blunting of affect that you see in some emotions. There's difficulty controlling emotions in other states. So a lot of these things have to do with not so much the emotions themselves, but the emotion regulation. So the ability to let go of some continuing spiraling self-negative thoughts requires actually some really sort of cognitive effort to control where your thoughts are going. And so a lot of people would say it feels like an emotion problem because you're not moving out of your emotions, but it might be just as much a cognitive problem. So a lot of work in clinical psychology is getting at the roots of where those emotions are coming from. We also know there are different groups of people who have different emotional responses in certain situations. So I do a, I'm involved in a research collaboration with my colleague Hedvig. Isambar, has Hedvig been on the podcast? Yep. She was, yep, she was on, she did actually our second episode. She spoke with psychopathy. Yes. So, yeah. So Hedwig and I have been doing some research on how emotion affects attention. So that's actually most of my research is in that area. Things that are highly negative. So typical paradigm we might do is have people try and do a little perceptual task where they're looking on the screen for a letter and then we flash pictures of emotional things around the screen and we look. at how that disrupts your ability to find the thing. And that tells you you're paying too much attention to the pictures. Sometimes we put EEG on people so that we can also record how those distracting pictures are affecting their certain areas in the brain that are affected in attentional processing and emotional processing. So this is this typical finding that is that if you have negative pictures, we use pictures of mutilated body parts. or erotic images, so couples having sex, those tend to be high arousal, either positive or negative things. And most people are disrupted by both types of images. What we found repeatedly now in three different studies is that people who are high in psychopathy, who are not bothered by the negative images, they just don't process them. And or they process them. They can see them. They can look at it. They can tell you what the picture is of they can tell you Oh, that's not nice but it doesn't disrupt their ongoing processing and This is from HIPPIX point of view one of the interesting things about thinking about How is the mind of someone with who's high in? Psychopathy, which is you know, I mean we think of serial killers, but it's not there's a wide range of psychopathy just in the general population, that people who are higher on it are able to ignore those sorts of things that might attract attention in other people. We also find that people with anxiety might be overly attracted to those things, so be really disrupted by them when other people are actually able to control their attention much better. So the way that the disorder is acting is by affecting something about the attentional system, which interacts with the emotion system. Nice. I wanted to ask, because thank you for segueing yourself into your research work. Because I was saying, like, I need to ask her about her work. We've asked about everything else. So we've spoken right now about. people on extremes, so someone with high anxiety, someone with psychopathy, or with psychopathic traits, and how they perform. What do we see in the general population in terms of attention based on different emotions? How do emotions affect attention? And also, you gave an example of a sort of task which you use. Are there any other methods you use as well to do your research? Yeah, so the... An example that I just gave is sort of a really common paradigm or type of experimental task we use in the lab where you would ask people to do something and then look at how much these distractors that are emotional are impairing their ability. Sometimes we do other types of things where you might look at, put a series called an Imagine sort of like what happens when on TikTok or something, where you see this really rapid series of images that are changing continuously. And you slip into their one picture of a snake or an erotic couple or something highly emotional. And what you find is that for the next couple of images, people miss them. So that the fact that you that that that's a way that we can show that thing grabbed your attention and held your attention and then disrupted your ability to do anything else for a little period of time. One of the things that we're... So these are sort of classic cognitive psychology experiments, then we put emotional things in them so that we can see how emotion is disrupting attention. One of the things that we've been finding in our lab though is that emotional things don't have to grab your attention. So one thing I'm really interested in is to the extent to which we can control our emotions given different sorts of situations. So if we go back to the example I gave before about having a distracting emotional image, either positive or negative appearing somewhere on the screen, if they appear really often, people learn to ignore them. So we have that flexibility to say, oh, there's nothing really interesting going on there. And your sort of brain kicks into a new mode of doing things. We've also found that if you reward people for doing the central tasks, right? So if I take my little look for the letter task and now I pay you for doing well at it, now you can ignore the emotional things because what we've done is we've essentially made the little letters. also emotional, right? Because now they've got reward attached to them. And so we talk, often people talk about emotions as if we're slaves to them. You know, you, you see the snake and you can't help but jump. But if you saw the snake every day and the snake was somebody's pet snake, then eventually you would learn not to do so. So we're actually way more flexible than we thought we were. I have a student who's been working on mindfulness and whether mindfulness is a way that we can ourselves to not be distracted by emotional things. A lot of the idea of mindfulness is that we just accept emotions but not react to them in any particular way. And so he finds some effects that even training people 10 minutes of sort of guided mindfulness meditation prepares them to deal much better with the distractors that might be coming up. So the human mind is way more flexible than we might think when we talk about emotional things triggering or as if you have no control over that. It's not true. So then what about other cognitive processes? I would assume that you said once money was involved in your task, all of a there's a positive emotion test and they did it. Do incentives like this, oh, or do emotions kind of affect other things like decision-making and so on? Yeah, so emotions affect every aspect of cognition. So if you think about memory, if you ask people to reflect on, if I ask you to think of a memory of something that happened two years ago, the things you will remember will be highly emotional. So our emotion makes our memories more vivid, more durable, and so, and that makes a lot of sense, right? Things that cause emotions to arise are likely important. We don't have strong emotional responses to things that are actually just part of your day-to-day life. There's something that's unique or something that's had a lot of reward or punishment attached to it. And so those things become stored better in memory. Still not perfect and infallible, but better in our memory. Decision-making, hugely influenced by emotion. So we can talk about incidental emotions, like if you are shopping and you're sad, you're actually much less likely to buy things than if you're happy. because sadness is about withdrawing and sort of reducing your interaction with the world and so that's going to affect the decisions that you're making. Emotions also weigh into the decision itself, right? So one thing that humans, for example, always think they're going to think about the future emotions that they're going to have as a result of a decision. there's, when making the decision, I was already projecting, how is this going to make me feel in the future? Am I going to feel regret for not doing something? Or am I going to feel regret that I did this thing? Am I going to feel guilt or shame about this thing that I'm doing? So the consequences of our decisions weigh, are very often emotional and they weigh right into how we make, they're part of the you know, that checks the balances that we weigh when we're making a decision is thinking about how is this decision going to make me feel. And then emotions also affect the decision itself is that decision making is about how we maximize our good and minimize our bad, whatever that however we weigh good or bad. So our emotions are going to weigh into that as well. I wanted to ask, have you ever worked with sort of trying to discern between things like apathy or psychopathy and maybe emotional fatigue? Or something that's a result of that emotion being felt continuously for a long period of time? I really don't. So we do lots of things in the lab where people are having emotions for very short periods of time. But I know there are other people who use methods that allow them to track people's emotions in their day-to-day lives. So we sometimes call it experience sampling. You might check in with people every day and see what their emotions are like. So those are sort of different types of methods that people would use to look at that. There's a lot of talk right now about emotional labour. People seem to mean different things when they talk about that. But commonly, it's meant to be, particularly in workplace situations where you might have a lot of emotional labour. Some of you were asking the question before from the audience about workplace and controlling your emotions. And that continual effort of controlling your emotions, controlling other people's emotions, is really hard work. And that's what people call emotional labour. So I'm not involved in doing that research, but I know there are people really working on that more day-to-day emotion as opposed to what I do is the moment you're having an emotion, how does that change how you're thinking? So not long-term consequences. Can I add something to a previous question? Sure. what tasks we use in the lab, and I thought I might segue to our virtual reality work. Of course, go on. Yeah. So all the experiments that I talked about before are situations where we sit people down in front of a computer and we measure their ability to detect some letter or a number or a target while we put these emotional images up. And that's a good way of getting a basic... how your mind attends to things. But it's not really what we mean when we talk about when you're afraid, how do you think? Because people are not actually afraid of little pictures of snakes on the screen. They do have very small fear responses, but they're tiny. They also can't move. And emotion is very much about behavior. And so we're kind of creating this really, really artificial emotion situation. So what we've been doing in our lab for about the past four years is working in virtual reality. And I love working in virtual reality because now what I can do is I can ask the question we really wanna know is when you're afraid or when you're disgusted or when you're feeling awe and wonder at the universe, how does your thinking change? So virtual reality is great for creating those environments. And then we... put people in those environments, and then we actually give them cognitive things to do. And so it's much more like what we, the question we really want to ask about in the real world is when you're feeling fear, how does that, does that help you make decisions? Does that hurt you from making the decisions? Does it make it easier to focus? Does it make it harder to focus? And so I think VR is really... where a lot of emotion research is going to go over the next little while, because it gives us this, what we call ecological validity. It's like closer to the real world. It's not the real world, obviously. But people can have really strong emotional responses in those virtual environments. So we know we're getting closer to what it's like to actually feel those emotions. Yep. That's I won't ask a lot more on virtual reality because we have Chris Maimon coming on for the next recording, which is literally about virtual reality and attention. Of course, you're a member of your lab. So we will leave virtual reality to the side for now. Yeah. But I would like to ask you about some of the other techniques which you guys use. So you did mention EEG. What that is where you look at brain activity. Yeah. What kind of brain activity do you look at in that? So yeah, so for example, for happiness or for sadness or the emotion, what would it look like? So typically what we're doing when we do EEG is, so it's electrodes on the surface of your scalp that are recording. electrical activity within your brain. And what you do is you link that activity up to what's going on at the moment on the screen that the person is looking at. So if we go back to our basic task that we were talking about before, where you're looking for a letter somewhere in the middle of the screen, and then these emotional images pop up, we can look at how the brain changes when the emotional image appears. And there's a couple of different waves that happen when those images appear. There's something called the early posterior negativity or the EPN. So if you imagine sometimes the picture that flashes is just something like, you know, someone sitting in an office typing on their computer, so not a very interesting image, or it's, you know, someone having an amputation of an arm or something like that. pretty distressing image, you get this extra positive boost that happens really, really early, which we believe is the wave that you get when that thing grabs your attention. And then we, so that's called the EPN. And then there's another wave about half a second later, not even half a second, a third of a second later, that's sort of over central areas of the brain, which is a... big wave that's bigger, the more engaged you are with an emotional stimulus. So if it distracts you a little, you're going to get a small wave. If it distracts you a lot, you're going to get a big wave. And so then what we can do is we can use these waves that we look at to then ask a question like, okay, now we're going to do the experiment again, and we're going to reward you, right, with money. What happens to those waves? Do those things still grab your attention? but then you don't engage with them? Or do we interrupt it so that they don't even grab your attention? We're doing the same sort of study right now in our collaborations with Hedwig, where we're looking at people who are high and low in psychopathy. So if we're finding that people who are high in psychopathy are not distracted by those negative images, is that because their brains just don't respond to them as if they're negative? So that would affect that nice early wave? Or is it because it does, but then they don't engage with that thing. So they're able to control their attention a lot better and say, that thing, that thing doesn't matter. Um, and so that's what EEG can do for us that are just sitting in front of a computer pressing buttons, um, cannot do. It can allow us to sort of dig in a little bit and say, what aspect of processing is being affected. by whatever the changes that we're making to the situation. That's very interesting. I also know, because I've been to your lab, that you guys use skin conductance and other facial movements or muscle movement things as well. How do you detect emotions through those? So we use, so this is an area in affective neuroscience called psychophysiology. So this is where you can record things that are happening in the body. just the same way a physiologist might, that can give you some indication of what's going on within that body part of the emotion system. So there's a whole bunch of body parts that are involved in emotions. So one is, remember we were talking about the viscera and the autonomic nervous system. So we record, in all of our studies, we record heart rate. because that will change with emotional states in two ways. So one, when we're actually afraid, we get an increase in our heart rate, but in those experiments where we are just presenting an image, what you get is a decrease in heart rate. And that's what happens whenever you pay attention to something, your heart rate goes down. And so the heart rate gives us some indication about what's going on inside the mind as well. We measure something called skin conductance, which is really how much are you sweating? So when you sweat, all the salt water is released from your sweat glands, and that creates the ability for a little electrical current to move through it more easily. And that's what skin conductance is. But really it's just measuring how much are you sweating. We can also measure by putting little electrodes on the muscles around your face. You can measure smiles, which are these muscles here are activated when we smile. They're called your zygomatic muscles. You also have corrugator muscles up in here, which is when you frown. There you can measure the muscle right in here when you wrinkle up in disgust. to something. So there's a lot of telltale signs in the face that we use to mainly tell us, are we on the right track? Like, are we actually creating disgust in our, what we think is our disgusting virtual reality situation? And then we can also use it as a measure of how strongly people might be feeling those emotions. We can also use the size of your pupils. So we can Use a little eye tracker to track. So when you're emotionally aroused, your pupils dilate and they get big. But when you're thinking hard, they can also dilate. So we use the pupil to help us understand how rewarded someone might be feeling in some of our reward experiments, for example. So the more rewarded you're feeling, the bigger your pupils get. So... These are all telltale things in the body that we use to complement the EEG or the response time stuff that we're measuring in the actual experiment. Nice. That's a lot of stuff which you guys use. Do you have any questions, Maria? I guess out of all this research, does that mean that you can read people's emotions really well? No. And it turns out nobody can read people's emotions really well. So this is in fact, where those debates that we talked about at the beginning, is it used to be sort of thought that you could tell what someone was feeling by, you know, measuring their zygomatic muscles or their pupils or these sorts of things. And you really can't. So you know that if you're making people disgusted, you should see certain telltale signs. But just because you see those telltale signs doesn't mean that's the emotion they're feeling. So for example, people sweat when we show them really negative things, but also when we show them really positive things. Because the sweating is just an arousal system. And You know, you people also sweat when you just show them novel things. And so there we call it, we say it's a problem with the, there's not a one-to-one mapping between what happens in your body and what's happening in your emotions. So when we talked about the variability, like lots of people can be happy and not smile. They might smile if they're in a situation where they really want to convey to other people that they're happy, but if they're just happy, they don't automatically, if you're by yourself and you're feeling happy, are you smiling? Probably not. And so this idea that we can somehow read people's emotions, create an emotion detector is really just not possible. There's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in AI around this, so I do some collaborations with some AI people and for a long time there was a real hope that you would be, we would be able to identify the signatures of an emotion. And then your phone could, you know, tell if you're feeling happy or sad today. Um, and it's, uh, I've noticed now, um, a number of a face recognition systems in AI have taken out the emotion detector. Um, so they use, there used to be a lot of facial recognition systems in, in various AI platforms. And only in the past year, they used to have a little box that you could check and say, give me an emotion for this face. And they've taken that out because the science is really clear that you cannot tell someone's emotions from just their facial expressions. If you had the whole body, you might be able to model some sort of good guess about what their emotion was. But certainly not from the face or from any... sort of simple recording that we can make. I guess we'll just have to use empathy then. Sorry? I guess we'll just have to use empathy and think about how we would feel in that situation. Yeah, so rather than trying to read people's faces. And humans are bad at it, too, actually. So we don't always recognize the emotions that other people are displaying. If you ask 10 different people, if you show them an actual natural photograph of people in emotional situations, you'll get very different answers from people about what the emotions are that those people are expressing. So even humans are not great at it, although empathy is a tremendously important part. If I can think about the situation that you're in, plus all the facial stuff, plus my understanding of the context and how I would feel in that situation, now I start to come to be able to have better awareness of what you might be feeling. That's a really nice observation. Okay, because we've reached about the hour mark, I wanted to ask a couple more questions and then we can wrap up. One was you had mentioned about how emotions... are involved in multiple processes and one which we had spoken about before was in language and emotion and emotional tones of voice and things like that. Could you please elaborate on that and your work on it? Well, so lately I've been doing a lot of things with attention but I still, my roots are in language I guess, my sort of my first foray into these studies so I'm still very And I'll tell you about a recent study that we've done, which is a really different type of research for me. So it's a cross-cultural study. So if I said to you, for example, if I give you an emotion, and I'm gonna ask you what color you think that emotion is associated with, okay? So if I say red, what emotion do you feel? Isn't it? Okay, so something love something intense. Some other people got anger, like people might go with the anger. But if I gave you or if I do it the other way around, so if I say sad, what color comes to mind? Blue. Right? Blue. If I say joy, what color comes to mind? Pink? Oh, nice. So many people say yellow when they do this. So the study that we were involved in is a cross cultural study in 55 different languages about doing what we just did, where you give people emotion words and then ask them what colors they associate with those. So they have like a color wheel and they can pick out what the color is. And the reason the sort of the cross talk between color and emotion is kind of weird, right? Like why would colors have emotions attached to them? Colors are, you know, are about vision and emotions are about feelings. And this is what we call a cross modal correspondence. These are things that our mind does is it uses one system to actually think about another system. Then there are several of them. So there are certain things like high pitches. sound like they're higher up in the world, even though they're not. So that's another example of a cross modal correspondence. So what we did was across these is it true, like when we say blue, sadness is blue. And we talk about people being depressed, feeling blue. Or we can talk about, you know, feeling sunny as is as is as if somehow something that the weather could be an emotion. So this sort of. crosstalk, is that universal? In which case, it might be something sort of fundamental about the mind. Like, maybe we associate red with anger because faces get red when we're angry. Or are they just metaphors that different languages choose to talk about their emotions in different sorts of ways? In which case, you would think that in different countries, you might have very different sorts of metaphors. And so what we found is that across these 55 countries, a certain amount of agreement across those countries that suggests something fundamental. One of the strongest ones is the association of joy with yellow, but there are others. So sadness, black and blue. Love is associated usually with red or pink, but could also be white. depending on, so you get cultural variations. Languages that are similar to each other tend to have similar ones. Countries that share borders tend to have similar ones. So there is something about the culture that shapes it, but there is also something fundamental that underlies it. So one thing that we found with it is trying to look at this, is we looked at the relationship between latitude So how far away people lived from the border and the association between yellow and joy. And what you find is people who live closer to the equator are less likely to call yellow joyous. The further away from the equator you live, the more joyful yellow is to you. Now, of course, we can't say for sure why that is. But I think we could now start to look for other examples of those types of associations, because an obvious interpretation is that in places that have cold, colder weather, and particularly long, dark winters, yellow is a symbol of life-saving goodness of the sun. If you live close to the equator, yellow can kill, the sun can kill you. So the association, the associations that we have might be things that are actually embedded in our evolution, our cultural evolution, which differs not just on the culture and the language we speak, but also where we live. And so we're now trying to look to see if there are other examples of this where these cross-modal correspondences actually make a lot of sense. That's extremely fascinating. It's a really fun study. So I can say, I can even tell you we collected the New Zealand data for it. And New Zealanders have a strong association between sad and blue. One of the strongest in the world actually. I'm not exactly sure why, but there, and what we would like to be doing next is, I know there's some linguists who are looking in So, Tereo Māori, so the language of Māori people in New Zealand may very well have different cultural heritage, and so we've never really teased it apart to look at the difference between English speakers and Māori speakers in New Zealand. Yeah, I was thinking of the loved one made a lot of sense that some people use white while others use red. Because I kind of linked it to wedding dresses and I feel in a lot of Western cultures, the wedding dress is white while in India, generally you wear a bright color like red or orange or something on your wedding day. So that kind of yeah, that kind of. thing in my mind immediately when you said that. And so that might not even be about the language, but about a cultural practice, right, that we wear different colors to portray different emotions. And that just might be a cultural thing. And that's where the association could come from, or at least somewhere the variations could come from. Yeah, makes complete sense. Do any kind of colors hit home Maria in your mind? When you think back to Romania? I thought also, I guess I don't have a strong association between yellow and happiness, I guess because we get a bit more sun than more northern countries. Also, I don't really I know that the image of the sun is a yellow ball of light, but for me, the sun is more white than it is yellow. I don't know about blue, I find blue very calm. I would find grey very not nice. Yeah, so the extent to which these things are embedded in our language is an interesting question. It's one way of also sort of getting at that question about how a way of understanding, do people in different cultures have different emotional experiences? So language might be one way we can think about how to understand someone else's emotions. Our emotions are so deeply personal to us. It's hard to imagine that different people have different emotional experiences. And we can only describe them with our words, really. And so there's a real limitation there, which is true of pretty much all anything that's about conscious experience, right? There's always that barrier between my consciousness and everyone else's consciousness. Yeah, and the ability to express it. Yeah. On that note, would you have any final thoughts or things you'd like to say which we haven't covered? Because I know you have to go soon as well. Yeah, no, I think we've covered a pretty broad range. Just that, you know, I think emotion science is evolving. and it's starting to intersect much more with other disciplines, certainly with artificial intelligence, with linguistics, and I think looking at it not just from a psychology perspective about the feelings that people are having, but thinking about it as this entire really adaptive system that we have is a really good way to think about it. Awesome. Right. OK. With that, I think we can end the main conversation there. The last thing which I do with all my guests is we ask a few general questions, and you need to answer them with whatever comes to mind first, if you're OK with that. I won't ask many. I'll ask about five. All right. Are you ready? Yep. Cool. Cats or dogs? Dogs. Do I have to have a reason? There's everybody obviously. If you do you have one go on. Because dogs obviously dogs. Yeah, definitely a dog person. Yeah. Um, movies or TV shows? Movies. This would be a good one for emotion researcher. If your life was a movie, what genre would it be? Oh, if my life was a movie. Ooh, I would like it. to be a rom-com, but I suspect it's more of a drama. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Spain, I think. I love living in New Zealand, but I have spent some time in Spain and it's magical. Spain is beautiful. And full of happy people. Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah, very culturally happy people. I think it's the siestas we still have in the afternoon. I think it's the afternoon enough, I think it helps. All right, if you were an animal, what animal would you like to be? Okay, my immediate response is octopus. Octopus to me is one of the coolest animals I can think of. And I think I would want to be able to have an understanding of what that feels like. So lots of suggestions that octopus are pretty smart, but have a whole body that works and brain that works an entirely different way to ours. Yeah, they also have multiple hearts down there. I think they do. Or am I mixing that up with another animal? No, you're right. Or a really distributed new decision. Yeah, okay. Oh, excuse me. Yeah. All right. Last couple. So is there are there any sayings or misconceptions or some things out there which really annoy you? Yes. People who talk about thinking with their heart or as if your heart and your mind or your emotions and your rational self are somehow opposed to each other. or somehow contradict each other. So I think it's more the thought that underlies that saying that I find difficult. You know, don't, the idea that you're, don't be so irrational when someone's being emotional. Emotions are very rational. So that, those are probably things I would banish, is people talking about emotions as if they're bad things. Awesome. And the very last thing is if you had one piece of advice to give to all our listeners and us, what would it be? The first is, so if really about that same thing about valuing your emotions, not feeling like they're somehow a hindrance to any type of success. Realizing that in fact they actually help take care of you. They actually, if you listen to them will help you succeed. Obviously there are certain types and times and situations where you can't behave in the emotional way that you might actually instinctively want to. But to generally not consider them to be things to be gotten rid of. Even the bad ones. Nice. Maybe especially the bad ones. I think that's really good advice. But yeah, with that, thank you very much, Gina. Thank you, Maria, for joining. Do you have any final thoughts? Thank you so much. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thanks, Gina. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's good to hear. Everybody's so concerned at the start and then by the end they're like, oh, that was fun. That was nice. So that was good to hear. I was also concerned. But thanks, everyone, for listening as well. And until next time, take care. And, yeah, goodbye.