The Atlas of Emotions with Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Eve Ekman

this program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UC TV programs my name is Shelley Adler I am the interim director for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine I'm also the director of education there and I am so delighted to be able to have the OSHA Center hosting this fantastic program for you tonight I get to inter introduce a what I think of as an intergenerational dynamic duo the the doctors Ekman I'll start with dr. Paul Ekman first and let you know that he is a professor emeritus of psychology here at UCSF where he works in the field of nonverbal behavior including both facial expressions and gestures he's the co-discoverer of micro expressions and for end of you and I can't imagine that many who aren't familiar with that term micro expressions are very brief facial expressions that only lasts a fraction of a second and they occur when a person is concealing a feeling or an emotion whether it's deliberate or or unconscious because dr. eggman is a true mind-body researcher he actually mapped all 43 muscle groups that are used in facial expressions 43 his work has afforded him a unique opportunity to work with a whole range of different types of people and different organizations for example he's trained many law enforcement agencies to detect deception and in fact there is a TV show that many of you probably know about that ran from around 2009 to 2011 called lie to me it was based on his work he also is another one of my favorite fun facts about dr. eggman was one of the content consultants for the Pixar movie inside out and see that gets the biggest now that's impressive 43 expressions muscle groups whatever Oh on I wrote a parent's guide to that film that you can use if you're showing it to your children but the kinds of things you might want emphasize terrific terrific and as we're going to learn in the presentation tonight the Dalai Lama commissioned dr. Eggman to design a project that explores the philosophical underpinnings of eastern and western approaches to emotions now shifting to the next generation it's my pleasure to introduce dr. Eve Eckman who is a research fellow at the Osher Center we have a NIH fellowship in integrative medicine research that Eve is participating in and I have the pleasure of being her mentor for that although all credit goes to her for her wonderful work and what she is doing is conducting research in the areas of meaning empathy and burnout and her work was inspired by the fact that she was a medical social worker at San Francisco excuse me Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital it takes a little while to get the the new name out dr. Eggman dr. Eve Eckman is also a teacher trainer for something called cultivating emotional balance and that's an emotion regulation and meditation program that's based in both Western science and contemplative practice the program was designed by the elder Ekman I guess I will use that phrase and also a Buddhist scholar many of you probably know Alan Wallace and and dr. Eve Ekman has adapted it for care providers in different settings including medicine education and criminal justice and I want to say a couple of things about our program tonight before the official hand off to our presenters we'll have a presentation for about half the time and then for the second half you see that there are microphones set up please feel free when we transition in the center of the program to line up and get questions ready so that will be the time for more interactive discussion so at this time it gives me tremendous pleasure to introduce dr. Eggman and dr. Eggman so we are very happy to be here this evening especially being hosted by the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine which embodies a lot of the values that we brought into this Atlas and we're just looking forward to giving you a tour of how we got here and the ideas that relate to this emotion Atlas what we hope you can take away this evening so we are going to give ourselves a little bit more of a thorough introduction what led us to the discoveries or ideas or relevant research that led to the Atlas of emotion both from my dad's experience and my own we're going to talk about what is the foundation of science from which this Atlas is built on the Dalai Lama who you've heard funded this project was explicit that he wanted it to be as closely based to what we have evidence for as possible the unfortunate news is what we have evidence for is very limited and we will be very clear about what we know and very clear about the great deal we still don't know we're then going to talk about how this Atlas could potentially help you developing emotional awareness and why that might be useful and we're going to give you a live tour of the Atlas on the internet and we will talk a little bit about future research ideas some of my own studies adapting the Atlas and where we hope to go in the future dr. eggman senior nothing to add your you are up for the first slide here Oh I spent my whole career at UCSF theoretically at Langley Porter but actually I rented some houses that then the university got ownership of and on Fifth Avenue I had three houses I kept hoping for the hotel but it never came the but seriously though I did research on studying expression and gesture I think in 18 countries and spent about half of every year out of the country I'm a traveling lots of fun particularly what someone else is paying for it and traveling used to be pretty hassle-free and planes weren't crowded in fact even in economy class they used to have at the back of the plane an area where you could sit around a table with other passengers play cards have conversation fare Emile it was very civilized really nice to travel change world a lot of more people are travelling at less expense the but my earliest work and the work I became best known for was establishing that there are somewhere between five and seven emotions that have a universal expression in the face they also have a universal vocal signature but that has not been as well-defined and my work was on the face not on the voice I had a colleague who I expected we do the voice part of it you only did part but if you see an expression and you don't hear it at the same time it means some type of management's occurring because these are dual systems and the fact that it is a dual system of any of you have children means that you don't have to sit watching your infant all the time they'll call you when they need your help and parents soon learn to distinguish is the distinctive sound of hunger frustration disappointment fear they all have a different facial signature a different vocal signature it's hard to believe but when I started this work back in the late 50s early 60s there was no tool for measuring the face so there was no way to actually do science with facial expression and took me eight years to develop the tool that's now widely used so there's even an automated version of it that Apple just bought not from me and they won't say what they're doing with it I try to find out but my hunch is they bought it just so no one else would have it and they're going to do nothing with it except sit on it but I don't know its proprietary as they say the so getting the evidence for universals and expression well incidentally although I now distinguish 16 different types of enjoyment that are as different from each other as anger ease from fear let's just give you one example relief is enjoyable okay and so is tactile stimulation two totally different enjoyable emotions that are triggered in this fashion so once we had a tool the facial action coding system we could then really do science and most of the science I did was looking for what I called leakage for signs that betrayed a deception that was occurring why that well you don't have to teach anybody how to recognize a motion if no one's trying to conceal it it's obvious we know from the age of two to three everybody knows how to do it like very few people I tested over 15,000 people in all walks of life literally all professions and none of them could tell the difference between a fake and a real expression we have a tool on internet that teaches you how to do that in an hour and anyone can use it well more than a half million people have I just wanted to point out that these images here are my dad in the 70s and what you see is a couple of the muscle groups of the 43 and the way that he was looking at the face which is just such an incredibly well articulated tool all of these muscle groups involved in every expression me like this me smiling my anger all these different muscle groups occurring and in order for him to do this he had to give a was it electro-stimulation a little bit of pain well you do into a muscle and I you have to do it most of the time because like you we both have better than average or voluntary control over the facial muscles I'll just give you one example I used to do at my daughter's birthday parties to entertain her friends it was a hit it still is not everybody can do that and I think it's just important to note here that we're talking about the signal of expression and how this puts us along the path of understanding the experience of emotion expression as well but I've got to interject that one of the unexpected findings we actually is finally made the front page of the New York Times without killing anybody the is that the face is not just a display system it's a generation system so if I was I could tell you right now what to do voluntarily with your face that would get turn on the physiology of anger or disgust or sadness or fear just like that now the funny part is turning on the physiology of enjoyment is much harder to do voluntarily there are better ways to do it than by moving your facial muscles I like that and next we're going to just talk a little bit about my dad's work since he left these hallowed halls here of UCSF and really translated a lot of basic science to tools to help people he mentioned already the microexpression training tool this is a way we can identify micro expressions in the face though I warn you here and now that once you learn these skills you do not unlearn them and sometimes people enjoy when you point that out and sometimes they do not I may not always like what you see yeah but it opens your eyes and you can you could only avoid it if you really kept your eyes closed or wore a mask and what we see in people's faces may or may not actually relate to us so someone is speaking they show a micro disgust it could have to do with something that happened much earlier in the day or remembered past so we're giving you the caveats and also inviting you to check this out for yourself so the images you see on the top here are stills from the microexpression training tool and then there's also ways that this has been used in national security and applied for people who want to not just rely on racial profiling but also use the content of what's happening in the face to detect threat which is incredibly important just to move just interject for a moment please it's important to remember that emotions don't tell you their trigger so when you see someone afraid or angry it may be because of you or what you just said but it may not be the trigger ISM you have to find out what the trigger is and don't jump to the conclusion that you know without checking it this another image that we have here is from one of the many meetings that my dad had with his Holiness the Dalai Lama prior to the Atlas of emotion to discuss emotion to discuss its implications and we'll look at a brief video clip that will help give you the framework for why try to create an atlas of emotion which is a very difficult thing to do and maybe if we knew how hard we would not have started but maybe we would have tried anyway because it was a good deal of fun and the way my dad met the Dalai Lama was at a mind and life meeting in Dharamsala near 2000 this brought together scientists who were all on the topic of destructive emotions many of you have probably read the book by Daniel Goleman destructive emotions and there was an ongoing dialogue among different scientists and scholars around how we can navigate these emotions which terror apart from one another now of course I maintain that emotions are not inherently destructive depends how you enact it you can enact it in a constructive or a destructive fashion if emotions were destructive they wouldn't have been preserved over the course of our evolution the key thing to understand about emotions is that they solve problems without thought at the moment they're based on what's been useful in the past in our evolutionary past and in your personal past well it depends how screwed up your personal past was whether your emotional reactions are going to be appropriate or completely inappropriate but they happened quickly and take over the whole system and without usually your being aware of it is until afterwards that you realize you were emotional you have this expression I love this expression I lost my head as if you could that explains it where did your head go now you are unaware of what you were doing and that's the nature of emotion is that you don't do it with awareness unless you engage in practices that I hope you're going to be discussing yes yes which brings us to cultivating emotional balance and I'll describe that a bit more later but we're I'm very happy to have some cultivating emotional balance students in the audience yay and we just finished up a course at Osher Center where we had a public course mostly cultivating emotional balance has been taught by me in the hospitals with residents and training but it was wonderful to have a course just open to the public just recently ended and in addition to cultivating emotional balance which came to life at the mind and life meeting at the very end of these two weeks it was the Dalai Lama my dad a number of other scientists who you would probably all know Richard Davidson mark Greenberg and then some Buddhist scholars and theoreticians as well including Alan Wallace and they decided that they should take these important ideas around emotion and create a training that was secular and approachable but could truly provide some skills and to the people could use in the everyday life but we didn't decide that actually it was the Dalai Lama who said is this just going to be good talk or is something going to happen the result of this meeting and when he was said this he was looking right in my eyes so I thought okay we will make something happen will translate we'll try to put together a meditative framework with a scientific emotion framework and that's what cultivating emotional balance is yeah we did succeed took a couple years to develop and the research study was also at UCSF Margaret Kemeny was the PI so we're we have a lot of UCSF legacy in the cultivating emotional balance global compassion I wanted to mention here all of these resources are available in my dad's web site including something like 20 brief webinars with the Dalai Lama we'll see a snippet of one as well as a lot of training tools that are free and some that cost as well but there's just a wealth of information so to give you a little more background on myself and my own work as Shelley said I was at the z-s fgh the saris Co general emergency room in for about six years as a medical social worker which is an awesome time to exercise my compassion and try to learn how to avoid burnout and the experience there led me back to school of wanting to know how to support compassion how to sustain that empathy even one every single day there's such high calls for your distress there's so many people who are suffering so much difficulty so little time to process and I was very fortunate that the first cultivating emotional balance teacher training was happening as I was in my PhD program at Berkeley and I went hoping to be an observer and see my dad and Alan teach the first round of CEB teachers how to do this training that they had found so beneficial I arrived and unfortunately my dad's health I didn't allow him to come so they got junior doctor eggman or not even doctor at that point and luckily had just come to the ER so I could manage everybody's distress in disappointment and after teaching that first year I just fell in love with the materials in the course and the way to really draw people out of their everyday experience and slow down to understand that often when we remember an incident of our emotions it's we're ember it as I was angry all day and I was mad and I'm sad and I was probably afraid when in fact there are these discrete episodes of emotion throughout our day that lead to one another and when we slow down and we investigate there trigger there felt experience and our responses that starts to help us slow down the present develop that emotional awareness where we have choice over these responses whether or not those responses are destructive or constructive it's by no means easy but it's actually quite simple so that's that's a little bit about Zeb and I've adapted this to work in the medical setting I've been really fortunate to work with family community medicine pediatrics and internal medicine so far in developing a training for the residents that I deliver over the course of the year and give them a mini CEB often just a little dose throughout their very difficult schedule many of these residents are struggling with not only learning to be doctors for the first time but intense hierarchies very minimal free time so they're often pretty much stressed to the maximum amount of stress without time to recover and be able to use self-care tools so I think that working with this population is probably the hardest I could imagine the officers in the juvenile jail are much easier they had more free time that was my dissertation study and but they also are such great need to have our healers as I'm sure many of you in the room here are healers in one form or another to have them be able to feel whole understand their emotions really have that empathy it's critically important so it's been wonderful to be at the Osher Center and supported to do this work and make this hopefully part of a core curriculum for people in training to help others I will tell you a little bit more about emo track after we look at the app this so I'm going to show you a short video here that I think will give you an understanding of the foundation of why the Dalai Lama was interested in an atlas of emotion the Dalai Lama said that in the 21st century we must find out how to achieve a calm mind and our approach must be secular miking you this is our target gone mind the cause is a calm mind directly so religion with peace of mind and calm mind I think the two the files including dream come mind you see it can maintain one compassion to the force I don't think so occasionally occasional is the practical level when some disturbing mosquito come there are sometimes you did little happy next are acted half but still you see that that of action is you can take while your mind very calm yes I think there is a distinction you're making between a continuous state a calm mind yes and a capacity that can be called forth when an event requires it by compassion compassion isn't there continuously but when you see suffering or anticipate suffering then the compassion emerges and if I understood you correctly yesterday I'm not sure I did but if I did then if you have a calm mind it is more likely that the compression will emerge when called for yes but that also yes combined you can see things more realistically more objectively more rigidly oh we will disable of but now is a miser approaches now question how to develop calm mind the hero of pasta girl or destroyer or combined is fear suspicion hatred and greed too much ambition these things are the the destroyer Oh combined want to watch more it's available online I just wanted to give you just a little bit of a flavor of the level of conversations that were happening and going on and the import of which the discussion is happening how do we have this calm mind how do we help people avoid fear anger too much ambition I don't I don't know if that's a term at ucsf I think might be a new emotional territory I think you can see from that little excerpt and there are I think about 20 of them that you are available on my website you can just look at them one or more why calmness is important to the Dalai Lama and why really a neat we can't use our intelligence our enormous capacity for symbolic representation of experiences that we had in the past that we want to reconsider or ones we might have in the future that we want to plan plan we can't do that if we're not in a calm state of mind and there are many things that interfere with it but one of them is being unaware of emotions that you're feeling and that's what got him interested in emotion and that's where we got our connection so one of the quotes that the Dalai Lama was said to have been making for years and years before my dad approached him to get the funding for this project was that we we have to find a calm mind in the same way that when we found a new world we needed a map we needed to understand and see this if I asked you prior to the atlas of emotion what does an emotion look like you would pantomime a face you would show us what a signal of an emotion looks like when I asked you maybe what it felt like or what triggered it or what it led to to be much more struggle we don't have emojis for that right there's a different level of understanding to truly look into the emotion as a process as an unfolding over time so we're next going to describe the first step that my dad took when His Holiness agreed to fund this project and the first step was to find out what scientists actually agree on which if there's any scientist in the room you can understand why this is a real foolhardy undertaking but an important one there's a great deal of debate and different ideas in the field of emotion like almost any field and psyche all gee and it was important to have some sort of basis for what people write here and now understand and agree upon and represent that with as much fidelity as possible it turns out there about there were 248 people two years ago who define themselves as emotion scientists that's a lot of people and most of them in the english-speaking world but not completely a number in Japan some in China in other countries as well European countries and the I did a male survey which I had to keep shorter than I would have liked because I wanted I know that the longer the survey the less likely it is people will do it so but I was able to get a pretty good 60 percent response rate from the 248 emotion scientists and find out what they agree to what they agreed had been firmly established what they agreed there was compelling evidence where that was the way the question was phrased and to my disappointment it's only five emotions I say might disappoint because Arthur Clerk are many more than five but the evidence isn't compelling yet for more than five and the judgment of scientists to study emotion and so that's what the Atlas focused on following the the Dalai Lama actually believes in the value of science more than I do I mean you know we can't answer everything with science but he partly I think it's he exhibits it's got to be secular again and again he emphasizes don't tie this to Buddhism make this secular his most recent book so I really recommend it's a paperback beyond religion it's a secular ethics wonderful attempt to provide an ethical framework with no basis in any religion he points out the religions have been the basis for most of the wars that we've had in the raw and still have so you've got to have an ethical framework without it so we have here the agreed upon emotions and also check out our Atlas which has a lot of information on what we were and were not able to include just based on the evidence which we currently have there also was questions about whether or not there are Universal triggers to emotion reliably what makes people sad what makes them feel afraid and angry so there was moderate agreement here over fifty percent that there's a physiology a felt experience that is different when we are having an emotional episode that there are biologically discrete separate emotions meaning anger is not fear fear is not sadness joy is not anger right that these are actually district' distinct experiences that we're having interestingly we have less agreement on the social factors in biological this is mostly for the emotion researchers in the room if you really want to get into the details we will get technical and specific with you the idea here is do we believe that emotions are coming out of our contextual environments are they innate there's a lot of debate around these specific issues so moving on we our second step after having information was having the very good ability to find Stayman which is a design firm and we're going to be very lucky to have Eric join us here for questions and we have also other lead designers in the room from stamen they took on this question of can we make a visual map of emotion with very little hesitation which is a good sign and they also like us probably did not realize how difficult this undertaking would be how do we visually represent but not miss portray what we know how do we show that indeed fear has these different states but we don't know if they're related to anger in any way or not so every time you make a visual choice you are leading people down a path and you want them to learn from it and you do not want to show them something that is misrepresentative even if it's more attractive to look at so we had a lot of these design questions alongside wanting to really truly help people understand what is known but not deceive them every week for about two years even I and there are certain box headed statement of sitting in the corner there be joining us up here's soon we met every week for almost two years trying to figure out how can we use graphics to give us insight into our emotions how can we map them did I almost everybody wanted to get to the new world we needed a map we want to get to a calm state of mind make a map well that's easier said than done as the song goes how do you do it and yet the process of creating the map of answering the questions that he kept raising about how to do it how it should be shown they me think about emotions in a way I hadn't thought of up until that after fifty years of studying emotion new questions emerged in order to represent it visually questions about seeing more than one emotion at the same time if you look at any one of my books you'll find a separate chapter out fear another one on anger another one I discussed but that's not I have emotions will actually work so we want to be able to see a whole variety of them which will get to show you some of ye came up now in fact that's what graphic so lets you do so we want to give you just a little tour of this atlas so you know where to go back to we start here with these continents of these different emotions and what they each represent is a family of emotion so what emotion do you guys want to see I enjoyed it was the first one I heard will go with enjoyment so with enjoyment we have a basic definition and then we then go into these states of enjoyment just as my dad describe the difference between feeling something like pride or relief and with each of these different experiences we also are looking at what is the range you can be a little relieved like oh god I made the bus great or super relieved like your test results came back and you don't have cancer right enormous relief so there's a huge range of certain emotions whereas ecstasy you're not gonna have like a little bit of ecstasy right this is a is a high range of motion next we can look at the different likely actions so with ecstasy there's a couple options here indulge savor maintain whereas we might have a different experience for amusement or relief we are also different not only in what makes us emotional but how we respond to our experience of emotions that we couldn't put everyone will feel relief and they will exclaim with joy just absolutely not true even you today might have that experience whereas tomorrow you might have a different response so this is truly developing your language learning these different ways that you can communicate about experience of emotion but it's not prescriptive and it doesn't tell you how to feel or what exactly you're feeling in the moment this next aspect probably the most complex but the one that brings together our experience of emotion it shows us that emotions have triggers that these triggers can be both Universal something we all feel or something that's learned one person has a trigger to excitement with badminton surely not everyone and what is really interesting here is that we see these triggers are mediated by this perception by what goes on in terms of how we experience the world by no means do any of us experience the world in the same way we have our history we have our stories we have all of our family our social for everything that has led up to how we see the world today influences what we become emotional about and how we respond emotionally so then here you see once again though these different states that are arising from our triggers to our motion and different actions and in this site we can look what is this like for anger what is this like for fear similarly we can look at the different states for fear so I would be really excited to keep showing you this but it's online we are excited for your ideas financial support and otherwise to make more happen with this atlas I joke because someone came up and said we want to use this for more research and training we would say you betcha it was very very difficult to make this Atlas possible just in terms of our own time and resources and we were so lucky to have stamen help us we are very excited for it to be shared for you to use it in the way that really fits for you if there is an application you have in mind to work with kids to work with elders we want to hear about it and we would love to see how you might be able to implement this one of the ideas we've had of how this could work for couples or for families in just the people I've been sharing it with at the hospital I've heard that it works well with adolescents who are somewhat reluctant to share their emotions this might be a fun way to do it and just lastly as a researcher I'm going to have to plug my my current study which is taking that Atlas of emotion and thinking about how we might apply this to our everyday life so we look at the Atlas we recognize our experience of emotion but throughout our day what is triggering us how does it make us feel and what do we do I did a small pilot with residents last year and in Pediatrics and for ten days they tracked their emotions over the course of those ten days I was surprised to find that half of their emotions were enjoyable my hypothesis or theory that's shared by others in the field is just this awareness of our daily emotion might give us more richness and texture to what's happening those same residents who reported that half of their emotional experiences everyday we're enjoyable also had high levels of burnout there's something different about our experience of daily emotion versus what might be our more chronic overriding theme there's so much more we can learn so much more we can understand so if you are a resident or no residence at UCSF please get in touch with me and for the general public you can also email this and probably sometime towards the end of next year or maybe middle we'll be releasing it also to the public for a research study potentially so that's a little bit on emo track we really want to thank Eric and the whole stayman all-star team some of whom are in the audience here I really want to thank Shelley and all my awesome colleagues at oh sure and the Paul Ekman group who were instrumental in supporting a lot of the work of making the Atlas happen and my funding for being here and being able to do this work is from the t32 and I also have received funding to help emo track happen through the Academy of graduate medical educators and the resource allocation program at UCSF so thank you for your attention now I have to point out that putting on the silly Mickey Mouse hops with the dali lama's idea along he he's just having a good time the last thing he cares about other people will think it's ridiculous or silly he was having fun they insisted that I put well join up I want to invite folks to please get ready to ask your questions now if you want to approach the microphones this is a wonderful opportunity to have some I guess it's not really one on one but many on one interactions with our guests and and if do you want to introduce our introduced he is the director and founder of stamen design in San Francisco and was a awesome collaborator in visualizing and creating this Atlas we're lucky to have him here I wish I could say that I did an international search to find him but just as the idea that we needed to create a map came up there was an article in The New York Times about stamen and said he was San Francisco my god fell right into my lap hmm destiny yesterday the thing that surprises me about your Atlas is when you show an emotion like enjoyment or fear and show it broken down into a lot of sub emotions or for whatever that you had strung out across the horizontal axis there the implication is that all these different sub emotions if I can call them that differ from each other on a single dimension like intensity or something okay really if you just take take fear I don't have a thing in front of me but you that there are and I should say that what I'm saying now only some psychologists would agree with right because now it's adding to an area where there hasn't been yet enough research but certainly most people think that there's a variation in the strength of the emotion but that there are different states of each emotion so that terror is not just stronger than apprehension but it's fundamentally different although it shares enough properties with its another extreme panic panic that's also a member of the fear family I like to think of these things as families of related states that share enough in terms of to some extent what triggers them to some extent their physiology their autonomic and central nervous system signatures some extent likely actions to some extent I update because we are all so different but they're more similar to each other than they are to a irritation or fury to them to members of the anger family so each of these emotions is a family of related states that differ not just in intensity but in their very nature but have enough in common that it makes sense to think of them as belonging to the same I can use the metaphor continent or same overall category of emotion and this is not a idea that's unique to us I mean you can go way back the history of psychology you can go to bunt and bit earlier than one Charles Darwin in distinguishing these different modules of emotion thank you I wonder if there's a way of giving more adequate to graphic representation to this that doesn't mislead us into seeing them as just bring along a single dimension well that's what we've tried to do in the Atlas and I think if you go on any browser put in outlets of emotion it comes up and you'll see it and you can explore it and I think you'll find we've done exactly what you're asking for that you may object afterwards hates too complicated can't you make it a little simpler now they're really emotions it's amazing how complex our emotional life is and how unattended it generally is it's not what we know the most about ourselves and yet I do believe it is what drives most of what we do is to avoid certain emotions and to experience others that idea is not unique to me that was sylvan tompkins but he said because of emotions we may never have sex because of emotions we may starve ourselves to death the force of emotions we may take our own life that the fundamental drives are puny compared to the power of emotions which override them they are what drives life I think he was absolutely right first of all Darwin did a great deal with surveys and and you've obviously done a great deal as well but I I wonder a couple of things one is why not include surprise and contempt they would only be a little bit more and you would get a lot more back secondly why not use instead of a survey of experts why not look at research in the field that has more heft as opposed to opinion to construct the Alice I believe I didn't miss many research reports that were quantitative I didn't look at the qualitative research but I think I pretty much when we created the Atlas I think I there wasn't a major study published in the last 40 years that I hadn't read not that vas-y wouldn't have taken me a year to do it or let alone six months but there are few hundred and I think are we used every bit of information we could find but we have we only focused on those that the scientific community believed there's compelling evidence for chog the islands is something that should change over time as we have more research as we learn more about our motions as the Atlas itself provokes people to do research to challenge or enlarge it it should grow with time because it nowhere near maps our emotional life just the part that's been best explored so think of it as you would have any map it's not a map of the world until you've gone around the whole world we haven't gone around the whole world of emotion well we have put into the atlas is the part of the emotion world that's been so far explored lots more to do many more dissertations to be made many more grants to be funded high well thanks out for the hard work on the atlas first so my first question is I find exciting that you delivered this as a website some kind of curious what was the thought behind that as opposed to like a book for instance or like other types of media and a related question is that what kind of role do you think technology can play in this in this goal of you know the helping people develop a calm mind because we often think about technology as like very distracting and so I think this is a good counter example and I'm kind of curious if you have other thoughts as to how it could be used for that more I would like to ask Eric I had a great conversation with Leslie Jonas who introduced us the Ignite about a book project and we'd love to pursue that and I think it could be really really fantastic I the other thing I think is that technology is things that were invented after you're 30 years old and so that for some of us the technology of the web is quite distracting thing and for others it's completely a native language I mean that if I understand it right though the idea was to get it out in front of as many people as possible and to make it free that was like a key part of part of the the remit from the Dalai Lama so we came up with a format that was you know available for as many people as could could use it just to add to that the putting it on the web rather than into a book I mean I have written 15 books by the time I give it to a publisher till the time it appears has never been less than two years I can put something on the web and it's there the next day and then I can change it the day after that there's much more flexible system that doesn't mean that we don't intend to also do a book because you can do different things with a book then you can do on a website so they each have their advantages health and I do think using technology to support a calm mind is a it's a sticky subject I believe that whenever we look into this platform as a way to feel comfort or a way to feel less alone or unlikely to find it no matter where we're looking but if we can use this as a mirror looking inward and I know this sounds very out there but I believe there's a way for us to tune in through this platform that we're so accustomed to so again using the tools that are available as opposed to outward as a way hopefully to gaze inward I do also want to call out sorry I do also want to call out my colleague Nicolette Hayes who's over there who did the the bulk of the lines the bulk of the work on that on the design of the project the the thing really came together for us I think as a design artifact when Nicolette made a book too for Yves to take to show the Dalai Lama and that was a kind of interesting moment right I mean we'd spent so much time on the digital version and getting it trying to get it right and all these things like and and all these things happen digitally but it really only crystallized I think we spent two years with it and then finally we knew enough and knew enough what not to say to actually make a book and that was a sort of a key kind of kind of moment in the whole process yeah the other hand we should tell the story about the what he said about his use of technology like so that we showed this to the Dalai Lama in Anaheim on a computer and we tried to get him to use the mouse you know I've I tried to teach the Dalai Lama how to use of a mouse and he said um technology is from our next buddy okay so thank you for the question yeah hi when it came to visualizing emotion how did you all decide on colors and shapes and do they actually represent the emotions themselves boys question sure yeah yeah we actually went through and documented it because we were concerned that if we published an atlas of emotions with the same colors for emotions as they used in inside out that Pixar movie that they would sue us for a derivative work or you know but that was all Nicolette and it just seemed to make sense you know and I and we really made the decision pretty early on that this was going to be in for for a Western audience because red has a very different Association in China than it does here and we kind of decided that we were never going to be able to make something that was universal across you know every culture with with these kinds of decisions so you know red seem to make sense Franco I think I mean it was a design decision that Nicolette made and we all agreed with and we were you know delighted to note when the when that movie came out that we had made the same design choices that they had so there's something about whether its cultural or just in the air or however that that works out I think the more in some ways the more interesting question is about the shapes of emotions and if you go to the Ala see well you'll see that you know anger is quite spiky and Happiness is kind of jumpy and disgust is like a pile of poop you know there's a kind of this idea that you could kind of bring an emotional resonance through design choices to representing individual emotions and color was kind of one of those one of those one of those aspects so it was a design scene thank you yeah um well sorry about that uh my question is sort of around kind of at a practical personal practice level like what how would you articulate like the value proposition of bothering to like distinguish the various really subtle flavors of like like terror and horror I saw we're right next to each other or right or some of the other subtle flavors of any of them yeah like that the value proposition you need to work on that more researchers were like but what does it mean I think that the value proposition in the subtlety is anything that can train us to pay attention to our emotions at a subtler level is going to be our greatest advantage so as my dad was saying we are designed kind of hardwired head-to-toe to not think as our emotions arise to be really caught in the experience and where that leads us in terms of response so when we think about developing emotional awareness what we're doing is actually bringing something quite unnatural into the picture this attention to what is happening in the moment and to keep ourselves excited for that experience we kind of train ourselves in the subtlety what does it feel like when I panic is that different than when I'm anxious and one of the things I really tend to teach a lot in cultivating emotional balance is a familiar is a ssin with the embodied experience of our emotion all of us have some capacity to feel our emotions in our body some people are much better than others but I think all of us can increase that awareness right and that awareness indeed in the moment might be the thing that helps us understand what we're experiencing before we react whether or not it's terror or panic may not matter in terms of you know why was why was a tear fight and not panicked but helping us kind of reconstruct what occurred especially in a distressing or regrettable emotional episode we can start to familiarize ourself when I'm panicked I actually feel really tight here or when I'm feeling more something like horror or terror I might find that my stomach is jumpy so we're giving ourselves these cues and clues just to develop awareness not because we have the solution for terror versus panic versus we may and we may develop that over time but how would we even know if we didn't know what emotion were experiencing and importantly what is triggering those emotions and those are not easy tasks because they go contrary in my belief to how emotions evolved which was to deal with problems without awareness and I always said well if you can think about how you felt afterwards that's kindergarten that's the first step if you can think about it during it now you're in high school and if you can think about it as it's being triggered now you're in college so they're very hard steps because you're going against I believe and I have to say I believe because I don't know not a all emotion scientists would agree with me that just awareness is not built into the package just the opposite so you have to work to develop the habits that will allow you to be aware of how you're feeling as you're feeling it and only then will you have choice there are two things we most like to had to choose any emotion what we become emotional about and how we behave when we are emotional you can't get either one of them without awareness that awareness of the past but a mayor awareness of the current awareness of the impulse as it arises before it's been acted on that my last psychotherapy supervisor refers was in 1957 but I was a intern at Langley Porter my supervisor said if you can introduce a few seconds between impulse and action you will have given your patients charts and that's what they want well he knew nothing of Buddhism it's exactly the same kind of thinking but you know we're looking at the same species we shouldn't be surprised that from very different angles and viewpoints and backgrounds you come up with some of the same observations and suggestions thank you all so much you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 223,712

Keywords: Eve Ekman, Paul Ekman, Dalai Lama, Atlas of Emotions, universal emotions

Id: AaDzUFL9CLE

Length: 59min 15sec (3555 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2016