Emotions 2.0: What's Better than Being Happy?

Many of us go to great lengths to be happy. But is our singular focus on feeling good actually making us miserable? This week, psychologist Jordi Quoidbach explores what happens when we try to live in an emotional monoculture, and makes a case for letting it all in — the ups ... and the downs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1863, a terrible plague descended on the famed vineyards of France. Tiny sap-sucking insects attacked the roots and leaves of grapevines.

• 0:16Shankar Vedantam?

  The pests destroyed thousands of acres.

• 0:21Shankar Vedantam?

  What turned a problem into a calamity was that French vineyards were mainly planted with a monoculture, a single species of grape that had little natural resistance to the insect hordes.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  It turns out that there are other kinds of species, for example, in the US that were not so affected that developed natural resistance to that pest. But that was not the case of the French vineyard.

• 0:47Shankar Vedantam?

  This is researcher Jordi Quadba. He said the destruction continued for years and threatened the very existence of the French wine industry. Eventually, though, French winemakers found a solution,

• 1:01Shankar Vedantam?

  adding diversity to the grapevines under cultivation.

• 1:07Shankar Vedantam?

  They started grafting their native vines onto American plants, which had evolved to resist the insects. By increasing the biological variety of the plants, the French wine industry rose again.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  To me, the takeaway of this story is that by introducing more diversity,

• 1:31Speaker 01

  you're actually making your environment more resilient and more likely to succeed in the long run.

• 1:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, we extend this idea from ecology to the world of psychology. Specifically, we examine the effects of having a variety of emotions in our daily lives.

• 2:04Shankar Vedantam?

  This episode is part of our Emotions 2.0 series. We've previously explored the power of collective emotions, the complicated psychology of pride, and the benefits of mixed emotions. If you missed any of those episodes, please listen to them in this podcast feed.

• 2:25Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, many of us go to great lengths to be happy, reading books, devouring podcasts, even joining cults that promise to set us on the path to joy and fulfillment. But is our singular focus on positive emotions actually good for us? Or does it set us up for calamity?

• 3:01Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:32Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:04Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Look on the bright side. Accentuate the positive. See the glass as half-full, not half-empty. From billboard signs to T-shirts with inspirational messages, our culture has many ways of telling us to banish negative emotions from our lives. At one level, this makes perfect sense. Being sad and upset are unpleasant feelings. As humans, we are wired to seek the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. At the Asadi Business and Law School in Barcelona, Spain, psychologist Jordi Quadbach has spent many years studying what happens when we try to live in an emotional monoculture. Jordi Quoidbach, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Thank you, Shankar. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 5:26Shankar Vedantam?

  A number of years ago, Jordi, you were hit with some powerful emotions around the time that you and your wife were starting a family. I understand that you had long wanted to be a dad?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, my partner, she got pregnant and we were both excited about it. And sadly, you know, around three months, she had a miscarriage. So we were both devastated by the news. But at the same time, it turns out that on the following day, we had been invited to visit close friends of ours that just had a baby. And so we were invited to meet the baby and have dinner with them.

• 6:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if you can describe for me what that evening was like when you went over. You're carrying this very heavy news in your own hearts, but you're also there to celebrate a very happy moment in the lives of your friends. What was that like, that evening?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  It was very difficult because, I mean, we had just lost, maybe not a baby, but at least, you know, the prospect of a baby. And we're there to celebrate their newborn. And so we didn't want to ruin their fun and their joy. And so we just tried very hard to change our emotions and to be excited for them.

• 6:52Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, did you bring up at all with your friends what had happened to you and your partner?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  So we didn't bring it up. We felt that bringing this sad story on a happy day for them would just

• 7:07Speaker 01

  would just thought that it would ruin the mood. I think we did a really good job at suppressing these emotions to try to be excited for our friends.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And that took a toll.

• 7:22Shankar Vedantam?

  And I'm assuming you were actually genuinely happy for your friends. I mean, that was also true. I mean, you must have been very happy that your friends had this newborn in their lives.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were very excited. And the newborn was absolutely cute and delightful. It's hard not to feel warm, fuzzy feelings when you have, you know, a newborn in your arms. So it was so paradoxical what we were experiencing.

• 7:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi noticed that as he and his partner suppressed their feelings, it changed the way they behaved.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  I think it prevented us from being fully present that evening.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  You know, every time a negative thought would pop into my head, I would need to sort of step out of the present moment and exert some mental effort to bollock it down. So there was definitely like a short term sort of negative effect of suppressing or sadness, sorrow. But I think there was also a longer term consequence of that because it turns out that on the following day, again, we could not fully experience our sadness because we had this trip planned to Japan with a group of friends. And, you know, everybody was super excited to go to Japan and we didn't want to ruin the fun again for everyone. So we did not share that experience and we went on a two week vacation.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  And we didn't talk about what happened for two weeks.

• 8:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So you didn't tell the friends that you were on vacation with what had happened?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  So we didn't tell them what had happened, but it also didn't almost talk about the event between ourselves, me and my partner. It's like we're just trying to ignore our feelings so that we could enjoy our vacation. And I recall that during the trip, the mood between me and my partner was not that great. So we're able to showcase your friends, you know, excitement and for the Japanese adventures. But we had a lot of like tiny little conflicts and, you know, passive aggressive interaction during the trip. And in the following month, we didn't talk about having another shot at having a baby.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  It's almost like because we did not allow ourselves to experience the emotions. And in a way, that was now maybe too late to have these emotions. It was a month later. We couldn't fully process the event. And I think it took me and her probably three, four months before we started talking about it.

• 10:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So more recently, Jordi, a friend of yours came to you with some painful feelings of his own. Can you tell me what he was distressed about?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yes, a good friend of mine, who had moved out of love for his girlfriend to Spain and had a recent kid, a newborn, got dumped out of the blue. And he didn't really know why his partner left him. He was suspecting that she had met someone else. That was sort of the only thing that made sense for him. And so he was very suspicious, very jealous. And he talked about this, you know, suspicion and sort of jealousy in Greenland.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And my reaction was sadly the typical sort of bro reaction, trying to say like, look, you know, it's probably not a big deal. She'll probably be back. Don't worry about it. Don't stress about it. There's no reason to be jealous and so forth. And I even sort of caught myself pulling my phone and showing my friend this brand new dating app that my students were talking about, right? Trying to say, hey, plenty of fish in the sea. And then he sort of hit me. I was not at all listening to his emotions. And I was trying to provide solutions that he didn't ask me for.

• 11:41Shankar Vedantam?

  And I'm wondering, Jordi, if you can just articulate what you were trying to do for your friend when you were trying to turn him out of this this blue mood and turn him to more cheerful thoughts? What were you trying to do?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I was naturally trying to make him feel better. I thought that if he could just ignore his jealousy, rationalize his jealousy away and look at the bright side, you know, all the potential mates are there for him. That would make him feel better and solve the situation.

• 12:21Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, did it have the same effect on him that you thought it was going to have?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  It didn't. I think he might have gotten frustrated. And, you know, he came back repeating the same suspicion, the same jealousy and so forth. So I don't think we were like really connecting to each other.

• 12:43Shankar Vedantam?

  So this makes me think about the 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That movie also wrestles with similar themes. In the movie, a character named Joel, who's played by Jim Carrey, is consumed by painful emotions after breaking up with his girlfriend Clementine, who's played by Kate Winslet. That's when he hears a doctor describe a potential treatment for his grief.

• 13:09Speaker 02

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• 13:30Shankar Vedantam?

  So Joel goes through with the procedure, and I think a lot of people watching the movie might imagine that they too would choose to erase painful memories if they had the choice. Why do you think this fictional scenario is so compelling to us, Jordi?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the premise of the movie because it really resonates with the natural tendency we have, which is to avoid emotional pain, right? And this is a very extreme version of it, but I think in everyday life, we do this kind of procedure all the time. We drink sometimes too much because we don't want to feel anxiety or sadness. We avoid asking for a raise, even though we should probably ask for it because we don't want to experience fear. And so there's many, many ways in which we avoid experiencing unpleasant emotions. And at the end of the day, I think this avoidance creates even more problems.

• 14:33Shankar Vedantam?

  You raised a really interesting point just now, Jordi, which is that we all, in some ways, have our own internal surgical techniques to remove these unpleasant emotions. We're not using scalpel and lasers, but we have these mechanisms to push these unpleasant feelings away.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  We do, and I think, you know, most of the time, that's a healthy way to deal with unpleasant feelings, right? So if I'm stressed before an interview with you, Shankar, I might watch a fun movie to sort of distract myself from these unpleasant feelings, and it's probably adaptive. I think the problem is when we chronically start avoiding unpleasant feelings. As I said, you know, it could be by drinking. It would be by avoiding situations altogether. And that's where you start to see that the avoidance, experiential avoidance, as therapists call it, starts to create even bigger problems than the emotion itself.

• 15:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi and his partner thought the best thing to do with their sadness was to push it away. When a friend brought painful feelings to Jordi, he thought the way to help was to highlight the positive. The characters in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind went so far as to completely erase negative emotions from their memories. When we come back, the value of what psychologists call emotional diversity. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 16:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:58Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:44Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 17:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Given the choice, most of us would rather feel good than feel bad. But could there be a reason to invite in all kinds of emotions into our lives?

• 18:00Shankar Vedantam?

  At Asade Business and Law School in Barcelona, Spain, psychologist Jordi Quoidbach studies what happens when we stop trying to keep unhappiness from entering our lives.

• 18:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi, farmers and ecologists have long known about the value of biodiversity in nature. I understand that you have borrowed this concept from biology and applied it to the study of human emotion. Tell me about the idea of emotional diversity.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  So emotional diversity, or emo-diversity as we call it, is the richness and relative abundance of the emotions that we experience every day. And this really comes from research in biology and ecology showing that more diverse environments, both in terms of how many different kinds of species there is, but also how evenly distributed these species are in the environment, tend to be more resilient. So I started looking at the way we could capture this diversity and this idea of richness and balance of emotion. And it turns out that there are thousands of papers in ecology that do that.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  And there are formulas and models to capture biodiversity, which you can apply to emotions. You can see, you know, how many emotions or what is the intensity of the most dominant emotions in a person's life? Are people experiencing a wide range of emotions? Or is their experience concentrated on a couple feelings?

• 19:38Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm fascinated by the idea that you're not just using the metaphor of biological diversity, you're actually borrowing from the science of biological diversity here.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we borrowed the tools of ecologists. There are actually many different ways to compute diversity. And some ecologists would focus on richness. That is, how many different types of species can I encounter when I sample a forest for two days?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And that could be, you know, the number of distinct emotions that a person experiences. But other ecologists might be more concerned about the relative balance or abundance of emotions, right? It doesn't matter if there's like 10 different species, if 95% of the individuals in the ecosystem are from one species in particular.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  And so you can start looking at these two facets of diversity, and I think that leads to also interesting insights when it comes to our emotional life.

• 20:56Shankar Vedantam?

  So you and your colleagues have used these measures to study a large number of volunteers, and you find that having a greater range of emotions can produce tangible effects. What is the effect of emotional diversity or emo diversity on physical health, Jordi?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  So we got access to the Belgian social security data. And it turns out that every year, the Belgian government sends a survey asking people all kinds of questions about their health habits, their medical consumption and so forth. And they also included a measure of emotions. And what we found was that, you know, beyond the average level of positive or negative emotions that people experience, the richness and sort of the evenness of their emotional lives also predicted their health. And in particular, we found very tangible relationships between emo diversity

• 21:55Speaker 01

  and often people went to the doctor. The average consumption of drugs and prescriptions that they had that year, the number of days they spent at the hospital. So this was not self-reported health. This was data that was quantified by the insurance company and the Belgian government.

• 22:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand, Jordi, that your research has examined the effects of emotional diversity on mental health. What have you found?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  So for mental health, we found similar effects. We find that people with more diverse emotional lives tend to report lower levels of depression. One thing that really surprised us in the results is that it's not only experiencing a broad range of positive emotions, but it was also the case for negative emotions alone. So negative emotion diversity was also a predictor of mental health. In other words, imagine that you experienced like three hours of negative emotions this week. Well, it seems that it might be better off for you to experience one hour of sadness,

• 23:03Speaker 01

  one hour of anxiety, and one hour of anger than three hours of one of this emotion alone, right? Three hours of sadness or three hours of anger only.

• 23:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Besides these effects on physical and mental health, you've also examined how the experience of emotional diversity shapes how people make decisions. Tell me about this research. That's fascinating.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  This is very recent work from my lab, and we find that people who experience greater emotion diversity tend to make better decisions. So for example, if we recruit participants and we ask them to report a current choice that they were facing, a decision they needed to make in the next couple of days. And people wrote about all kinds of things, from, you know, what elective to choose to their choice of roommate, their choice of romantic partners, and so forth. And then in one condition, we said, what's the main emotion that you're experiencing here? And give us three reasons why you feel that way. In the other condition, the high emotion diversity condition, you said like, what are three distinct emotions that you experienced while considering this decision?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And then we let them be for two weeks, and we called them back. And we say, what did you end up deciding? And how satisfied are you with your decision? People we had asked to contemplate many emotions were actually more satisfied with what they ended up choosing. And it's not only personal choices. We've replicated these findings with objective measures of decision-making qualities. So you can see how biased they are in terms of confirmation bias. And it turns out that when people are asked to write down three distinct emotions that they feel when considering a decision, they end up being less biased.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And we also find that people with higher emotional diversity tend to be more satisfied with their lives, also suggesting that they might be making better choices.

• 25:18Shankar Vedantam?

  I'd like to look at some of the reasons why emotional diversity might have these benefits. In nature, Geordi, in ecology, we know that diverse environments are a source of resilience. Do we find the same thing in our psychological lives?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  That's one intriguing possibility, right? It could be that having a diverse emotional life prevents one single emotion from dominating our mental life. So if you're feeling sad and angry, it might be less pleasant, but that anger might prevent you from spiraling down into inaction and depression. And I think the same analogy goes maybe for positive emotions. So we know that we're extremely prone to adapt to positive things that happen into our lives. But if our positive emotions are diverse, you go on that vacation and you experience gratitude

• 26:17Speaker 01

  and amusement and awe and all kinds of positive feelings and love. This might also make it more resilient to adonic adaptation of emotions.

• 26:36Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, if you're having a range of different positive emotions, you're less likely to get used to any one of those positive emotions. And if you're having presumably a mix of positive and negative emotions, you know, your plane is delayed and that's a source of frustration. But when you get to your destination, it's really awe inspiring. The fact that you are stuck on the plane, on the tarmac for three hours, now makes the mountain even more beautiful because you had to pay a price to actually get there.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  That's exactly the idea. And interestingly, we're doing some field research right now with high end restaurants in Norway. And we're experimenting with inducing emotions during the meal. So this is a crazy restaurant where they have a planetarium dome-like ceiling. And so you can project movies that induce some sort of emotions while people are having dinner. Just to give you an example, you might eat chicken sewers and at the same time, they're projecting a chicken slaughter factory, which is, you know, very disturbing. And what we found was that if all the sceneries and videos are pleasant, people have a great meal, but they're much less likely to sort of remember it and talk about it

• 27:47Speaker 01

  and want to repeat the experience than if we inject negative emotions into the experience and like a disgusting scene in a seven or eight course meal.

• 27:57Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, there's a connection here almost with cuisine itself, right? So imagine a dish that has only salt in it or a dish that has only pepper in it. That's going to be a much more boring dish than a dish, in fact, that has a variety of different tastes in it. And in some ways, it makes sense that a range of different emotions actually as we're eating can actually heighten the richness of our meals.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.

• 28:34Shankar Vedantam?

  What's the connection between emotional diversity and authenticity, Jordi?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, another possibility is that emo diversity is almost like a byproduct of adaptive personality traits. So people who are open to experience, they're open to feelings, they're authentic, they have some sort of self-awareness of what's going on in their lives, might be more keen on reporting a broader range of emotions. That's interesting, but to me, that doesn't fully explain why when we get people to think about different emotions that they're experiencing in a situation, we see effects on their decision-making and they're making better decisions.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  So another possibility, and that's my personal maybe favorite, is that emotions are messengers, right? Emotions really are information about what's going on in our lives and what we should do next. And by experiencing a broader range of emotion, we have more flexibility in choosing what to do next and we choose wiser. So to give you an example, right? If I'm feeling extremely proud of myself, yeah, I just achieved something at work,

• 30:00Speaker 01

  pride might motivate me to work even harder, to take on a new project, to achieve even more. If I'm feeling grateful, that might be the opposite, right? When I give credit to other people and my gratitude might motivate me to, you know, express my thanks to other people. In both cases, if I only have one emotion, I might work myself too hard and exhaust myself down the line, or I might always sort of put myself in the background, never take a chance to, you know, maybe take the lead on a project and take credit for the work that I do. But if I experienced the two, my response might be more adapted and flexible, right? I might take on new challenges while acknowledging the team, if you see what I mean.

• 30:58Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I love the metaphor of emotions as messengers, Jordi. And I'm thinking about somebody who might be a president or a prime minister. And you're sitting in your office and messengers are coming to you from different parts of your country with messages about what's happening in your country. But you're the kind of president or prime minister who doesn't want to hear negative news. And so you kill all of those messengers and you only listen to the people who are telling you how great everything is. That can make you feel good in the present, but it has a real risk because at this point now, you're completely blindsided to any problems that you're having in your country. And that might make your reign somewhat short-lived.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  That's an excellent analogy, and I want to take it one step further. So it's not only just like listening to the positive news and not the negative messenger, but it's also, are you always listening to the same messenger among the ones that bring you positive news? Are you listening to everyone?

• 31:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi, you also said that another reason emotional diversity might be beneficial is that well differentiated emotional states can give us more precise information about the world. What do you mean by this?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Well, imagine that, you know, something bad happens, maybe at work. A colleague made a comment and you're not feeling great about it. If you're just feeling bad, it doesn't really tell you much about how you should react, right? But if you pause and you ask yourself, okay, I'm feeling bad, but how bad? Like, what is it? Am I irritated? Am I, you know, sad? Am I envious of that colleague? Like, what is it? Now, depending on the answer and the specific feeling, you have options to respond. If it's frustration, you might confront the person.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  If it's sadness, you might do something that cheers you up, you know? You have more flexibility.

• 32:55Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, and it's interesting, I think, when we talk about our emotions, we often have this tendency to lump all of the positive emotions and all of the negative emotions into one bucket. You know, someone asks you how you're doing, you say, I feel great, or you say, I'm not feeling great. And of course, what you lose with that is that you're actually collapsing probably a dozen different emotions into one bucket without actually looking to see what specific messages am I getting from the different emotions?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, take fear and anger. They've been studied quite a bit in judgment and decision making. They have opposite effect on or tendencies to act, right? So if you're experiencing fear, you might be more risk averse, you are more cautious in your estimate. If you're experiencing anger, you tend to take more risk. You tend to be more confident in your judgment. So they're both unpleasant emotions, but they have completely different action tendencies. And I think by being able to sort of explore with a lot of precision what we're experiencing, we know have a better, we have better material to make a decision.

• 34:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Our emotions aren't just there to be felt. The reasons we have emotions in the first place is that they are designed to shape our behavior.

• 34:21Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to use emotions, both good and bad, to help us move toward what we most want in life.

• 34:30Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 34:47Shankar Vedantam?

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• 35:30Shankar Vedantam?

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• 35:48Speaker 03

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• 36:19Shankar Vedantam?

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• 36:57Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When someone comes to you with a tale of woe and wants to share why they are sad, is your first impulse to hear them out or to fix the problem to make them less sad?

• 37:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Many of us with the best of intentions try to make our partners and friends feel less sad. But psychologist Jordi Quadbach says we may be making a mistake.

• 37:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi, you say that rather than suppress or deny our negative feelings, we should use these emotions as sources of information. Now, one way to do this is to examine the different strains that our emotions come in to identify multiple distinct emotions. Back in your grad school days, I understand that a friend of yours once helped you to do this. Can you tell me that story, Jordi?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So, back in grad school, I had what I thought was the brilliant idea to use the university internet to advertise one of my studies. So I sent an email to the mailing list asking for volunteers to participate in my survey. Now, that mailing list went to everyone, from the dean to the head of departments to the janitor, 5,000 workers at the university. And I published my survey, but it wasn't working. I could not get any sort of confirmation message that the email was sent. So I clicked, pressed again and again and again. And I did it probably like nine or 10 times before I gave up.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  I went to bed and the next morning, I opened my inbox and there were like 300 and something angry emails from professors, top executives in the school, you know, complaining about me harassing them and being really nasty about it. And I felt terrible.

• 39:01Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, all the messages actually did go out?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  All the messages did go out. And so 5,000 people working at the universities at all level had received 10 messages of me asking them to participate in my survey. And I was this, you know, young grad student. It felt horrible.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  And you know, some of these messages were nasty. I remember one top medical professor sending me 10 angry messages in a row. Oh, my God. Just sort of as a payback. And so I started spending hours and hours that day replying to every single angry email, apologizing, trying to explain that I didn't do it on purpose and I was so sorry to waste their time and so forth. And I was feeling extremely guilty and that guilt was sort of motivating me to try to repair my mistake by apologizing over and over to all of these emails.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Now, later that night, I went for dinner with a friend who's a psychiatrist and I was telling him the story and he did the math. He's like, Jordy, you know, there's 5,000 people roughly working at the university. You got over 300 emails of people complaining. That's about the prevalence of psychopath in the general population. So, you know.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  And it sort of hit me.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  It's like, these people emailing me, they're emailing a poor grad student to insult him because they wasted five seconds to, you know, put my messages in their trash box. It didn't make any sense. And so I think I went from guilt to experiencing mainly anger towards these professors. And that changed everything because guilt motivated me to apologize and spend hours, you know, engaging with some of these people, would reply back, still angry and so forth. But no anger, you know, was motivating me to do something else, which is like, screw these people.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  So I wrote a short email to the director apologizing, promising I would never use the mailing list again to recruit participants and turned off my computer for a week and life went on. There was no negative consequences and probably if I had engaged with all these angry people one by one, the negative consequences would have lasted much longer.

• 41:41Shankar Vedantam?

  So this is a really powerful example from your life, Jordi. But I'm wondering, what advice would you have for listeners in terms of how they can identify the different emotions they might be experiencing in any given situation? Or even perhaps the different emotions they might be justified in experiencing in any given situation?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So I think we can ask ourselves two powerful questions. The first one is, what flavor of emotion am I experiencing right now? Right? I'm feeling bad. What flavor of bad? Well, I'm annoyed. OK, what flavor of annoyed? Well, I'm irritated.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  All right. Then the second question is, what else am I experiencing? Is this just irritation? Well, no, I'm also a little bit proud of what I did. And I guess I'm irritated I'm not being recognized for what I did. OK, so now we have more information to work with. No, I went from feeling bad to having two feelings, you know, pride and annoyance. And I can act on these feelings probably in a more flexible and adaptive way than if I just stuck with, you know, I'm not feeling good.

• 43:08Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I once took a drawing class many years ago. And the instructor told us that the most important thing in drawing was to be able to see what it is that we were actually drawing, that most of us look at a tree and we see a tree. But a tree, of course, is not just a tree. You know, it's a set of physical structures. It has shape, but it also has light. It has texture. It has color. And your ability to see the tree in all of its granularity really predicts whether you can actually draw the tree. And in many cases, the reason we don't draw as well as we could is we're not seeing the world with the granularity with which we could see the world. So part of becoming an artist actually involves getting better sight, if you will. And I think what I'm hearing you say

• 43:51Shankar Vedantam?

  is that part of being emotionally healthier is to actually have the same kind of sight when it comes to our emotional lives.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  You know, one thing is to have a wide range of emotion. That's breath. But I think we also want some depth into our emotion. And we want to be able to be very, very granular, very precise in the way we experience things so that we can have, you know, more information on what's the best course of action. Emotions prepare us for action, right? So anger prepares you to fight the wrongdoing and, you know, to stand for your rights. Fear prepares you to be cautious and take a step back. Sadness prepares you to sort of, again, slow down and reflect.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And so if we're able to experience different emotions, then we also experience the different action tendencies that goes with these emotions. And they might be offsetting each other, right? Anger might take us too far. Sadness might take us too far. But combined, it's kind of a wisdom of the crowd if you think about information, right? Each individual emotion might be biased, but together, when we sort of average the information they bring, it's pretty accurate.

• 45:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi says that one way to develop our capacity for emotional granularity is to expand our vocabulary of feeling words. This might include borrowing words from other languages. One of his favorites is the phrase mono noaware, which he picked up while in Japan. It's a term, he says, that captures the feeling we have when looking at something beautiful but fleeting, like the blooms on a cherry tree in the spring.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  So imagine watching the cherry blossom and it lasts only for a few days. This sort of... Realization that, you know, the world is constantly changing and that there's beauty in the change. And that that concept, actually, now that I have a word for it, makes me pay a lot more attention to my walks into the park in autumn and the leaves and so forth, because now I have an emotion word for it. Yeah. There's another emotion word from Dutch, and I'm gonna butcher the name, but "uitwind," which is this feeling of being refreshed and that your worries are being

• 46:30Speaker 01

  blown away by strong wind and rain. Oh. So that's really an emotion that resonates with me. And as a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I was on my bicycle when a thunderstorm hit and it was pouring rain and the battery died. So I was soaked wet with this super heavy bike uphill and I was about to think that this was the worst day ever, when a little voice in my head is like, oh, this is, this is really "uitwind," you know, like I have the wind, the rain on my face. And that changed my experience.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  I went from being pissed to being like, hey, I'm being completely refreshed by the storm. Yeah. So I think learning new emotion concepts can really change the way we appraise situations.

• 47:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Your research has also found that interacting with a diverse group of people can have effects on our emotional states. Tell me about this work, Jordi.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  So in this study, we tracked people again with smartphones. And we asked them who they were interacting with and what was their mood. And what we find was that the diversity of social interactions that people had. Right. So if you think about having five hours of social interaction, are you spending these five hours with only a couple of people? Are you spending these hours with different categories of people? Relatives, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and so forth. And controlling for the sheer amount of time we spend socializing, which is good for our happiness. We also found that the diversity of our social portfolio predicted higher well being. And part of the reason, again, at least, you know,

• 48:29Speaker 01

  when we look at the statistical sort of data, is that a more diverse set of friends and social relationship might bring us a more diverse set of emotion as well. So people with more diverse social portfolios also report more emotion diversity in everyday life.

• 48:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. So in other words, you could have a conversation with a work colleague and maybe that conversation is frustrating because you're working on something difficult. But you have a conversation then with a friend and you recall a happy time from your childhood. And going through these different social relationships in some ways is allowing you to dip into different kinds of emotions.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's not just social interactions. Other research from other labs showed that the diversity of activities that we engage in every day is also directly linked to the diversity of emotion we experience, right? So the more different kind of things that you do in everyday life, the more likely you are to experience different flavors of emotion.

• 49:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Some years ago, Jordi got to see firsthand the benefits of emotional diversity. He had been recruited by French television to run a live experiment where he tried to make six unhappy people happier through verified scientific techniques.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Well, I was extremely stressed. I'd never been on TV. But I made it. They gave me the part. And so I moved to France for two months to shoot the show. And it was a disaster. I was extremely self-conscious of my Belgian accent. The Parisian cast crew made comments all the time. They made me redo the takes because I was not pronouncing the Parisian way some of the words. And I was very, very anxious. And my coping strategy was to work harder. And so I was alone in my hotel room, you know, every night, practicing the lines that we're going to say, thinking about ways to make

• 50:25Speaker 01

  psychological intervention visually appealing on TV, you know. Turns out that filming people meditating for half an hour is not very exciting television.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  So I was very stressed about trying to make this show a success and not look foolish on television. And I worked myself harder and harder every day. It didn't really help, to be honest. I was still anxious on set, still to do retakes after retakes. And then at some point, my partner visited me. So she was in New York and she visited me in France, sort of out of the blue, and she had planned a little surprise romantic getaway in a nearby village. So I was really torn because on the one hand, I wanted to work even more. Like, I knew I wasn't great on set. On the other hand, she had planned that surprise and there's no way I could tell her that I needed to work that weekend.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  So reluctantly, I went. And we had a lovely weekend, lovely sceneries, good wine. That was great.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  When I came back on the following Monday on set, I was anxious because I had not prepared. I had not rehearsed the way I would typically rehearse. And I shot the scene, ready to hear complaints from the director. But then the director looked at me and said, Jordi, you nailed it. This was fantastic. And the crew also thought it was great. And they're like, something has changed, Jordi. And of course, being Parisian French, they made dirty jokes and speculated it was due to my romantic activities over the weekend. I think that was not really it. I think what I'd done is that I'd replenished my emotional bank account, in a way. I'd added some happiness back.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And no, that gave me the energy to deliver the lines better, to think more creatively about how to set up the scene and so forth.

• 52:34Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, Jordi, I'm thinking about this idea that I think comes from Buddhism, which is the idea that when an emotion appears in our hearts, we should almost treat it like a guest who's appearing at our house. And according to this idea, when anger shows up at your house, instead of closing the door to anger and saying, I don't want you, go away, you actually open the door to your anger and invite the anger in as you would invite in an honored guest. And you would sit the guest down, and you would tell the guest, good to see you, thank you for visiting my home. Tell me what you have in mind, what do you have to share? And in some ways, that metaphor of thinking about our emotions as honored guests,

• 53:18Shankar Vedantam?

  I feel meshes really well with the idea that you are talking about here, which is in some ways, being curious about the emotions that visit us, not just simply being reactive to them, but being curious about them, allows us to understand what the emotions are actually trying to tell us.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  I love that idea, Shankar. And I would add that not only you treat a guest right, and you listen to them, and you treat them nicely, but also a guest is not a permanent resident. You know that the guest at some point will leave. And so you listen to the guest, but at the end of the day, you choose how you want to react, rather than according the emotion too much weight.

• 54:03Shankar Vedantam?

  I love that so much, Jordi, because I feel like the two things we often end up doing when negative emotions appear is we either try and shut the door to the negative emotion and say, "Don't enter my house," or we open the door and allow the emotion in some ways to sweep us off and assume that the guest now owns the house and runs our life. And in some ways, you're saying that both of those in some ways are maladaptive.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And if we push the analogy a bit further, the more guests you have at the party, you know, the less attention you're going to pay to one individual guest. You're taking care of everyone, and it's great. And you're having lots of interesting ideas from everyone. But the more guests you have at your party, the less likely there are two, you know, take over.

• 55:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Jordi Quoidbach is a psychologist at Asade Business and Law School in Barcelona, Spain. Jordi, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sharer. It was my pleasure.

• 55:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow-up questions for Jordi Quoidbach about how we respond to our emotions? If you'd be willing to share your question with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a quiet space and record a voice memo on your phone. You can email it to us at [email protected]. That email address again is [email protected].

• 55:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 56:02Shankar Vedantam?

  If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to check out all the episodes in our Emotions 2.0 series. You can find them right here in this podcast feed or at our website, hiddenbrain.org. Next week on the show, we conclude our series with a look at the white-hot emotion of rage.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  I just started screaming. A full-on, high-pitched, blood-curdling screech of a scream.

• 56:33Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 56:54Shankar Vedantam?

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