What To Do With Emotions - Part I
Introducing a framework for what the modern person can do about their ancient emotions.
Dealing with emotions is often hard.
In the following series of articles, we leverage our respective areas of expertise—evolutionary psychology for Rob, clinical work for Josh—to address how people can manage their emotions in the modern age. This first article presents and explains a basic decision tree. The second highlights one kind of mismatch we face in deciding what to do about our emotions: fitness-good vs utility-good. The third discusses another mismatch: between the core assumptions of clinical psychology and evolutionary psychology. The final article weaves everything together and asks, “So what?”
As usual, we proceed from an evolutionary perspective, which assumes that emotions are adaptations, psychological systems that evolved to respond to recurring problems and opportunities in the ancestral environment. Emotions work by measuring and motivating: they are designed to measure something in the internal or external environment and then motivate some appropriate action. Although emotions guided humans to reproductive success over evolutionary time, they are old systems operating in a new world and can have undesirable effects.1
How is a person to navigate their emotions in the modern world? We present the following decision tree:
Step 1: Experience an emotion. Ask: Is the adaptive goal of the emotion relevant to this situation?
We begin with experiencing an emotion. The first question we advise asking is: Is the adaptive goal of this emotion relevant? Let’s use the classic example of someone cutting us off on the highway, prompting road rage. One view of anger, which we endorse, is that the function of anger is to reset others’ “welfare tradeoff ratio,” a fancy way of saying how much people respect us.2 Anger is supposed to increase the respect others have for us. If B harms A, causing A to become angry and harm B back, then B might think twice about harming A again. Crucially, this only makes sense in the context of people with whom we have repeat (as opposed to one-off) interactions. There’s no point in changing the views of those we’ll never see again.
Chasing the driver who cut us off, and subsequently beating them to a pulp, might very well raise their estimation of us. But before even considering the consequences of such an action, we should remember that we want people in our daily lives to respect us, not someone we’ll never see again. Where’s the value in that? So, for this example, at the first decision point, we would have to say No—the adaptive goal of anger is not relevant here because it would be directed at a stranger. With this in mind, our next task would be to resist taking action (Step 2).
Let’s examine a different scenario. Let’s say you have a friend who routinely cancels at the last minute. It would be normal for this pattern to eventually make you angry because the signal, whether intentional or not, is that your time and company aren’t priorities. Keeping in mind the adaptive goal of the emotion, the next question would be: Do you still value this friendship? If you don’t, then acting on the anger is pointless, because you won’t want this person in your daily life moving forward. If you want the friendship to continue, though, then anger can be helpful. The next question would be: How can I direct this anger so that it results in my friend showing me more consideration? (Step 2)
Step 2: Taking Action
Knowing the function of the emotion can be enormously helpful in suggesting effective action. In the friend example, knowing that respect is the core of the issue can, in the first place, eliminate responses that might make the problem worse, e.g., disrespecting your friend back, slandering them to others, accepting the status quo, and so on. Furthermore, it can help the obvious approach—having a conversation with them—be more successful. Don’t ask why your friend is that way. Don’t make a rule that they can never cancel again. Don’t make snide, passive-aggressive remarks. None of those responses address the core problem. The core problem is that when they cancel, you feel that they don’t value you or your time—so say that.
Let’s examine another emotion that is often the cause of people reaching out for therapy: heartbreak. Heartbreak is a form of sadness specific to losing a romantic partner. The purported evolutionary function of sadness is to recover something that is lost—in this case, the romantic partner, or more generally a romantic connection. Thus, we would expect someone’s heartbreak to fully resolve only once they had found a comparable connection, or perhaps after so much time that they’ve forgotten what their former connection felt like. Framing heartbreak in this way calls the more traditional therapeutic responses into question, from “deep dives” into the relationship to assess what went wrong, to recommendations for long periods of singlehood so that the client can “work on themselves,” whatever that means. Instead, the evolutionary function of heartbreak would suggest that what was lost was vitally important, and eventually should be sought after again, if and when possible.3
In reality, of course, heartbreak will likely be more complicated. Comparison is an important ingredient in perception, meaning that if a person has just broken up with someone they thought wonderful, new partners won’t be given much of a chance. There can also be some value to examining past relationships, especially if a pattern exists to them, although confirmation bias makes it likely that a pattern will be found. And finally, it can be helpful to take time away from dating, especially if it serves as a form of distraction from your loss, or blunts the effect of comparison over time. Generally speaking, though, framing heartbreak as ultimately intended to restore something that was cherished charts a much clearer way forward than other clinical interpretations.
Step 2: Not Taking Action
Now, let’s turn to not acting on an emotion and begin with why it’s so damn hard. The long-story-short is that these emotional systems wouldn’t have been very adaptive if they measured but didn’t motivate. The whole reason they are there is to try to get you to do stuff; to respond adaptively.
They wouldn’t have been very powerful, either, if it was easy to reason our way around them. The modules in your head that inhibit emotional reactions (e.g., systems in the prefrontal cortex) are much newer and weaker than the modules that drive emotional action (e.g., the limbic system).4 In some sense, you know that it’s pointless to try to get respect from the driver who cut you off, but what is that knowledge compared to the feeling that you must?
This is where knowing some temptation resistance techniques can be helpful, keeping in mind that even these won’t always be enough.
Temptation Resistance Techniques:
Many readers will probably be familiar with the famous marshmallow task in which children are given a marshmallow and told that if they can wait patiently and resist eating the marshmallow, they will be rewarded with a second one. This line of work and others have led to a robust literature on strategies that can be used to resist temptation.5 This literature is a reasonable place to start because your evolved motivational systems are tempting you into behavior that may not, in the long run, be beneficial. So, here are a few tips to consider.
One technique is tossing the marshmallow on a shelf you can’t reach. This is called a commitment strategy. (Some call it a “pre-commitment” strategy, but that seems redundant. Launch the marshmallow on the shelf, and you’re committed, full stop, no “pre” about it.) Another effective strategy for resisting the temptation is distraction. In the marshmallow task, this might mean carefully interrogating other aspects of the room, one’s fingernails, or whatever else might occupy one’s attention. In the modern context, distraction is easier than ever, as we all carry around devices with the sum total of humanity’s knowledge—and also puppy videos. Did you experience anger because some rando scanned eleven grocery items in the ten-item-max lane? Great time to watch a doggy reunion video.
By the way, distraction gets a bad rap from the clinical community. This is probably a holdover from Freud’s idea of repression. According to Freud, people will ignore or distract themselves from painful psychic material, which is protective in the short-run but damaging in the long. In our opinion, though, not everything is a Big Deal that must be dredged up and processed; often, emotions materialize as a normal result of environmental conditions, and therefore can be ignored until those conditions go away and take the emotion with them. See The Action Words of Emotions for more on this.
Another useful technique for managing emotional temptations is cognitive reappraisal, which involves reframing the situation or interpreting the emotion in a different way. For example, instead of focusing on the incipient yumminess of the marshmallow and the joy of eating it, we might focus our attention on the number of calories contained therein and the inimical effect eating will have on our diet. This change in perspective might make the marshmallow seem a fiendish enemy, rather than the mushy white friend it presents itself to be.
Along similar lines, mental contrasting is a technique that involves visualizing both the positive outcomes of achieving a goal and the obstacles that may stand in the way. In the context of the marshmallow, we can imagine the potential consequences of eating it (e.g., loss of the second marshmallow, the guilt of indulging) and contrast them with the benefits of maintaining self-control (e.g., the second marshmallow, the satisfaction6 of successfully resisting). In the context of the irritating checkout line, while chastising the scoundrel abusing the system might be satisfying, what if they have a blistering comeback?7 Then how will you feel?
In short, psychology has produced a veritable smorgasbord of techniques for resisting temptation. We recommend sampling at the resistance buffet and seeing which ones work best for you. Remember, the first step is framing emotions as posing a temptation to begin with. Anger tempts us to raise others’ estimation of us; guilt tempts us to repair a damaged relationship; fear tempts us to run away. Once you understand that your emotional systems evolved in a world that no longer exists, you’ll be off to a good start in the marshmallow-resistance Olympics.
Step 3: Learning and Prevention
A key aspect to wisdom, and a reason it is easier to come by the older we are, is the opportunity for trial and error. Everyone is capable of noticing what works for them and what doesn’t, and thus, each of us can build a repertoire of working interventions for ourselves over time. In short, we can learn.
Part of what we learn is how to prevent situations that are likely to activate us. Some things are just very difficult to tolerate, manage, or resolve gracefully once they’re underway. For Josh, this is loud noise. For Rob, it’s the guy with 11 items in the express checkout lane. There is going to be individual variation here. Figure out what sets you off, in particular, and consider that oftentimes, the easiest moment of intervention is before something has happened.
Note that the arrows for learning and prevention circle back to the first stage in the flowchart. An iterative process, emotional management should be thought of as a technique or skill. Prevention helps us not experience certain unmanageable emotions in the future. Learning helps us deal with them better when we do. Learning also applies to the final piece of the puzzle: discharging emotion.
Step 3: Emotional Discharge Techniques
Ok, so you haven’t taken the action. A temptation-resistance technique has allowed your prefrontal cortex to win and now your future is better as a result. Bully for you! But you still may be walking around with the lingering emotion, coloring your day, boding ill for future interactions. So, in addition to learning from the success or failure of your resistance technique, you also need to reset your mood.
Here, we’ll list the common allies that you’re probably already expecting: exercise, more distraction, meditation, sleep, meeting the target need in a different way (substitution), or venting to a friend/journal/pillow. But the list is endless. Jerry Seinfeld apparently splashes some cold water on his face. Get creative.
One of the best distractions for many people is spending time with others, mostly because being around others requires so much attention. Before hanging out with friends, we can often be stewing in a negative emotion that, afterwards, feels a million miles away. Sociality is often a great substitute, as well. Let’s say we’re still angry at that driver for cutting us off. We’re angry because, at base, he disrespected us. Well, what better salve than being among friends who love and cherish us, whether we tell them about the incident or not?
Conclusion
An obvious drawback to the decision tree we have presented in this article is that readers won’t always know the adaptive goal of an emotion. So, instead of providing you with a cheat-sheet that you’ll never carry around, we recommend asking the following intuitive question instead: How will you feel in a day? A week? A year? Often, people’s long-term interests track with the evolved function of emotions. In six months, how will you feel about the driver who cut you off? Well, because the driver isn’t in your daily life, you probably won’t even remember them. However, in six months, you’ll still be ruffled by your friend’s tardy habits, unless you say something now.
Speaking of interests, it’s not always clear what they are. Or rather, which ones we should prioritize. In addition to conflicts between short- and long-term interests, there are conflicts between fitness-good and utility-good, as well. In the next article, we explain what those terms mean and how they muddy our decision about what to do with our emotions.
For now, we encourage you to spend some time just thinking about the first step. As you experience emotions in the days following reading this piece, ask yourself what adaptive problem the emotion is there to solve. And please feel free to share any insights this process creates. We’re still learning, too.
References
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization (pp. 85-116).
Delton, A. W., & Robertson, T. E. (2016). How the mind makes welfare tradeoffs: Evolution, computation, and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 7, 12-16.
Sell, A., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2009). Formidability and the logic of human anger. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(35), 15073-15078.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the Banker's Paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. In W. G. Runciman, J. Maynard Smith, & R. I. M. Dunbar (Eds.), Evolution of social behaviour patterns in primates and man.
The general mismatch of proper vs actual domain creates the more specific mismatches we’ll focus on in subsequent articles. See, for example, Cosmides & Tooby (1994).
A “welfare tradeoff ratio” measures how much someone is willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the well-being of another person. We’re using “respect” to capture that idea, which is at its core about costs and benefits. The question is, how big a cost is someone willing to bear to benefit you? A close friend will drive you to the airport even if means missing a date; an acquaintance might not take the time to get you a thoughtful birthday gift; the person cutting you off isn’t willing to wait the extra few seconds to avoid putting you in potential danger. Please see the citations below for technical treatments, especially Tooby & Cosmides (2006) for early work on this idea.
To the extent that therapists dive into the relationship, it could be to ask what was so lovely about it. Then, when the time is right, both therapist and client could use this information to guide the next attempt.
An excellent account of how modular systems in the mind compete with each other is Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite. 😉 As for how therapists can think of and work with the different “levels” of the human brain, see Lucy Holmes’ Wrestling with Destiny, particularly the chapter “Why Talking Cures.”
See, for example: Duckworth, A. L., Gendler, T. S., & Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational strategies for self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 35–55.
A post about satisfaction is coming soon!
True story. One of us (RK) used to work as an operator on the Dumbo (l’éléphant volant!) ride at EuroDisneyland. I admitted a guest and her family through the exit gate, and the guest who didn’t get to ride that cycle raised a cry of objection. When I explained that the person was physically unable to wait in the queue because of a medical condition, the objector became deeply mortified. I wished him a magical day anyway, of course.