Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs

See Andrew Huberman live in New York, Los Angeles & San Francisco:

I see somebody come up behind me. They can see I’m trying to park. They can move over. No, they come right up behind me, go on the horn, and you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right? >> Well, after the ice bath, it’s flat.

So, there was an immediate automatic downregulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. It’s an experiment of one. I’m not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there’s a there’s a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions that they can become kind of automatically regulated. You don’t have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent.

And that’s that’s the place where where you where you want to get. Hey everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I’m pleased to share that I’ll be hosting three live events very soon. The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th. The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theater on October 8th.

And the third live event is in San Francisco at the Masonic on October 28th. At each of these events, I’ll be discussing topics from the book and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to hubbermanlab. com/events and use the code protocols to get early access. Again, that’s hubbermanlab.

com/events and use the code protocols to get early access to tickets. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dr.

Ralph Adolfs. Dr. Ralph Adolfs is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and biology at Caltech University and a world expert in the neurobiology of emotions. Today, we discuss what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in our brain and body, and why some emotions seem to recruit our behavior and decision-m and some simply don’t. We also discuss where and how emotions are mapped in the body.

and we dispel common myths about the brain body storage of emotions from our past, which is a very commonly discussed topic that frankly, as you’ll learn today, many, if not most people get wrong. We also discuss why some people are able to observe but not react to their emotions and what tools may assist in helping you build better emotion regulation. As you’ll soon realize, Dr. Adolf is uniquely positioned to explain the real neuroscience and psychology of emotions and how to put that information to use. Today’s conversation therefore ought to be valuable for people of every age and profession and for anyone interested in improving their emotional life and understanding of others.

And now for my conversation with Dr. Ralph Adolfs. Dr. Ralph Adolfs. Welcome.

Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here. >> Longtime admirer of your work because you’re one of the few people who has studied these things we call emotions, brain states, cognition, and much more in humans. There have been others in the field of neuroscience of course, but I would argue few people have combined a real grounding in neuroscircuits with an interest in what most people think of as a psychological set of issues in a way that also takes into account the animal data and really the broadest picture of this thing that we call emotions. I’m just going to start with a statement of gratitude.

Thank you for doing that because it’s so easy for people to stimulate a brain area, see an animal or a human behave or speak in a certain way and say, “Oh, this is the brain region for this. ” And you’ve long been pushing back on that. >> It’s a tall order, you know, and one impetus for the work that I’ve been doing in the book that I co-wrote with David Anderson, the book uh that I have forthcoming with Princeton University Press, is precisely to do what you just said is to kind of integrate and pull together uh findings and emotion from animal studies, findings from social psychology. Typically, those people in those fields don’t talk to one another. They do very different studies, very different methodologies.

And so trying to integrate across disciplines that are that far apart to really try and get a get a sense for what are emotions in a sense that would satisfy psychologists and lay people about human emotions but they would also speak to the mechanisms that you can study in mice for example or flies as David Anderson does. >> So how do you think about emotions and how do they relate to brain and bodily states? The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain or differently in an octopus nervous system or in an AI which we should talk about. Um and so the way to situate them is to think of control of behavior in response to particular types of environmental challenges.

So at the sort of simplest level, you would have reflexes. You know, I put my hand out on a hot stove or you tap the patellar tendon on my knee and there’s like a very rigid behavior that’s adaptive that’s very rigid, but just for that particular circumstance, I withdraw my hand. That’s a reflex. At the opposite end, you would have, you know, goal-directed general valition and planning everything, you know, the stuff we do all the time that’s extremely flexible. And so if you have a bear or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that’s intermediate between those two extremes.

I can’t have a reflex for a bear if it’s far away or if it’s close or if it’s a rattlesnake or or or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that’s more flexible, which emotions are. So that’s the sort of big picture that emotions are functional states that have particular features or operating characteristics for dealing with certain types of environmental challenges like running away from a bear. I mean first of all I think the question what is an emotion is a good and a valid question. It’s not an illposed question.

You occasionally run into the view that [snorts] well emotions don’t really exist or we don’t really you can’t really say anything about them. question is just ill-posed or meaningless. I don’t think that’s the case. Paul Griffith’s philosopher wrote a book some years ago, I think 97 or so, what emotions really are, uh, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don’t really exist, you know, and you could see how people come to that conclusion if you survey all the different theories that are out there, Joe Leoo or Lisa Feldman Barrett or Paul Ecman, they look pretty different. And so you might come away with the impression, look, even the experts can’t agree on what emotions are.

The words we have for emotions predate modern science. So it’s just a confused concept. I don’t think that’s the case. I think I mean there’s room for revision, but I think everybody kind of knows what emotions are and I think it deserves a straight answer that science should provide. I think the question is well posed enough to admit of an answer and then how could you start getting to an answer.

So let’s just start sort of from the simplest case would be to list some examples. So you could say well you know emotions are anger, fear, disgust. You could list specific examples that are uncontentious I would hope where pretty much everybody agrees. Okay, these are examples of emotions right? You could do the