Unraveling Emotional Change with Dr. Antonio Pascual-Leone

Welcome back!

Dan is joined once again by Dr. Antonio Pascual-Leone, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Windsor, Canada.

In this episode, Dr. Pascual-Leone emphasizes the importance of empirical research over hunches in developing therapeutic approaches. He covers the non-linear process of writing a book, the five principles of emotion change, and the significance of reducing intensity, noticing feelings, and expressing emotions. Then, Dan and Dr. Pascual-Leone discuss the complexity of emotional experiences and the need for context in applying emotional strategies.

Special Guest: Dr. Antonio Pascual-Leone

Antonio's new book: Principles of Emotion Change

Listen to Antonio on Hidden Brain

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:10 Why write a book on Emotion Change
• 10:15 Defining Emotion Change in Psychotherapy
• 13:00 The Five Principles of Emotion Change
• 17:45 Reducing Emotional Intensity
• 23:30 Contextual Use of Avoidance & Emotion Regulation
• 29:00 Noticing the Feeling (Affect Labeling)
• 36:30 How Labeling Emotion Affects Change

Transcript

0:00

[Music] In psychotherapy, understanding emotion is crucial. It shapes the reasons clients come to therapy, how clients engage with therapy, and influences the outcomes of their treatment. But how can therapists effectively navigate these complex emotional landscapes? That's where my guest comes in. He's a leading expert in the field of emotion and emotion psychotherapy, and has just published the book, Principles of Emotion Change, What Works and When, In psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Links are in the description. He was also the subject of an episode of the podcast and radio show Hidden Brain, which I also link in the show notes. But first, if you're new here, I'm your host Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to psychotherapy and applied psychology, where I dive deep with leading researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way. If you enjoy the show, do me a huge favor and subscribe on your podcast player, or if you're watching on YouTube, hit the like and subscribe button. So one of the best ways to help us keep these conversations going. This episode starts with my guest answering my question about why he decided to write a book about emotion change. So without further ado, here's my very special guest, Dr. Antonio Pesquale, the owner. There's a little story. Look, I don't want to write a book. I just wanted to read a book. There's a lot of work. I just wanted to read a book. I thought, you know, it would be good if somebody summarized all the research on how emotion actually changes. Because this probably a finite number of ways that emotion changes, probably. And there's all these perspectives, like meaning treatment perspectives on emotion and what it should do. But those are actually based mostly on hunches. Right? So therapeutic approaches, all of them. And I'm not saying this is bad, but the reality is a therapeutic approach, pick one, it started with somebody, some person saying, you know, I think this is helpful. And then they build a treatment around it, right? They make up interventions with whatever they think would be helpful. And it's a more of a cognitive style, or it's more of a person-centered style, or it's more of a, you know, bird's eye view interpretive style. Like there are different approaches, right? But they're based on the pioneer of that treatment approach is hunch on what works. And that doesn't mean it's not empirical. Because then later, if you know, the hunches that were crappy, those are treatments we've never heard of. And then it's empirically supported. Here's the thing though. Those treatment approaches aren't, and then there's a theory of how the emotion changes. That isn't research so much. That would be the process research from a particular treatment perspective. But if you read process research from a treatment perspective, it comes with an assumption of this is how the person operates, right? This is what this is how humans function. And these theories, treatment theories, are not based in their origin on models of human functioning. They're based on hunches about what helps people change. You know, and so really, if you really want to know how people change, I think if you're really going to, two dot, oh, we're going to develop the psychotherapy theory. I'm not developing an approach to psychotherapy, but I'm sort of saying, you know, if we really wanted to efficiently change people, help people change rather, you'd need to work with a theory of the organism, right? This is like developing teaching techniques in schools based on piagetian theory, which is based on how kids learn. That would be the analog, right? Instead, treatment approaches are very different. Sometimes they're overlapping and they're based on a vision of what might be helpful, but not necessarily why that has come afterwards. Anyway, that's the answer to my first issue, which was I wanted to read a book. So I did what you do when you want to read a book. I went to the library. And that book doesn't exist. And then so I thought I had a really great idea and I thought I'll do what people do and I'll write an edited book. I'll get other people to write the book that I deeply want to read. And I came up with a plan and I wrote to APA and I made a proposal and they said, this looks really good, but nobody wants to read an edited book these days. That was news to me. Really? Well, that's not quite what they said. They said edited books tend not to do as well because it's the baby of the editor, but it's not the baby of any contributor, just you know what I mean? And they tend to be seconds for the contributors sometimes. And they're certainly not always coordinated because, and this is something I was worried about because I was like, if you want to do this, I was thinking to myself, I was like, okay, I'll try to do an edited book, but the problem is every treatment approach says they do everything, right? So how do you-- They absolutely absolutely do. Yeah, you know, you talk to cognitive people and they're like, oh yeah, of course we work with emotion and they do. It's very, very different. And you talk to the emotion-focused people and they like, oh, we don't work with beliefs, but of course they do. And so and so forth, I talk to the psychodynamic people and they say everything's the relationship, and it's, yeah, it's true, but the person inside also has to metabolize in some way. So they didn't want that kind of book, and then the editors said, why don't you write it? And I thought, okay, sure. It's pretty gutsy. I'll write it myself. I won't have to negotiate with anybody. And it's going to take a while. So I said, I'm the two years. They said, can you write any year? I said, no, I need two years. Twelve years later. I'm finished. So it's been a mammoth project. There's like 800 references in it. You know, like I reviewed everything that I could get my hands on. So this is what, so one of the things that you talk about in the first chapter is sort of your process of writing it. How you sort of kind of wrote it rather than linearly. You didn't write it necessarily linearly and how you did. Could you talk a little bit about that process? I think it's a little bit like if you're familiar with qualitative research, say grounded theory, but whatever, qualitative research where you're reading raw data, transcript or what, and trying to categorize meaning into chunks. And then it's like, oh, well, this is kind of like this. And that chunk gets bigger and bigger. And these are different categorizing different units of meaning into larger and larger pieces. And some of them get so larger like, oh, these are actually two separate sub components of a larger. So in some ways, it was like that. I started with some, you know, with some ideas, a priori, a little bit, but they were tentative to be explored. Like awareness is a thing. I'm working with narrative. That's a thing. Expression seems important. But like when you start to unpack it, there are things about, say, expression and increasing arousal that contribute a lot to emotional awareness. For example, if you turn up the volume on what you're feeling, you increase arousal, then you end up with more awareness. So it's like, oh, but these are actually different. Awareness is still a different fundamentally different process than just increasing arousal. You know, so it's kind of, you know, and I was trying to, you know, emotion regulation is a great one because, and so I dedicated chapter to that, mostly exploring how it's somewhat, it was good that we have this, but it's kind of outdated at this point, I think. It's problematic. It's just a mon, basically any way of working with emotion that leads eventually to feeling better is now considered emotion regulation. The problem is if everything, literally everything is emotion regulation, then it turns out nothing is emotion regulation. Like, we've had a real concept creep when it comes to this idea of emotion regulation, whereas just like, you read emotion reggae, it's like, oh, that's what you mean? But these people are saying, but it's just everything. It's just everything. Yeah, yeah. There has been a really cool shift in the field, in our field. I mean, psychotherapy, where like the APA guidelines, you know, they have these tasks for us, for us is to come up with guidelines for the treatment of a particular disorder, guidelines for treating depression, treating trauma and so on and so forth. And, you know, for the first time, they had a committee to begin exploring the possibility. That's how they do it, right? Of guidelines for working with emotion regulation. I think that's a really, really good start, because, you know, and the idea is somehow, whatever emotion regulation is, cuts across all the different disorders. So now, we would be talking about guidelines to work with emotion. How do you work with emotion, right? I think, in its inception, it's a really good idea. I think, are you on the task force? No, I'm not. It's finished. They came up with, you know, they come up with a definition, but I think it's actually got hamstrung. I think there's some very famous people on that task force, but, you know, if you look at the definition, it's like literally everything is down regulation. Excuse me, is emotion regulation. I think, you know, and then they give examples. So it could be up regulation, it could be down regulation, it could be left and right. Cognitive reframing, exposure, all of these things lead to emotion regulation. You know, in theory, but in practice, whenever you talk about down regulation, in theory, it could be up regulation as well, but in practice, it's almost always down regulation. Nobody uses a cognitive reframe to upregulate. I mean, maybe some special situations, but they're very special. So, like what's true in the theory, you know, the definition doesn't play out in practice, all the interventions. And they actually list a bunch of, for example, this, for example, and all the examples are about reducing arousal. I think reducing arousal is a way of working with emotion, and it appears in kind of my, one of my principles. But the other ways of working with emotion are qualitatively different, you know, and they're doing very different things, and their leverage to different classes of interventions, and they correlate with different parts of the brain. Yeah. So, I mean, these are different processes. I think we need to move beyond working with emotion. That's, it's awesome that we have that, but now we need more sophistication. So before we get into the specifics of it, one more big picture. So, so, so you organize this book into five principles of emotion change. That's what I came up with. A bunch of, a bunch of chapters, and then like a bunch, like several chapters fall within each of these five principles. So the principles are just for a quick overview, reduce intensity, notice the feeling, feel more, express more, order the sequence of emotions and put feeling into context. So here's my, my question, which is you start, you touched on it. So these five principles are, you know, they're not wholly distinct, right? So, you had to make decisions about how to, how to categorize these things. And so I'm just curious, if you could talk a little bit about your thinking, your, your process in terms of creating those categories. They're not wholly distinct in the sense that, you know, people are dynamic and they may deploy more than one at the same time. And they may operate synergistically with each other, also, right? But they are distinct in that they are, you know, so I had a number of kind of, different literature lines of inquiry, phenomenological change process research, neuroscience, you know, if things look different to, they feel different to the client, you have different neural substrates that are supported by them. You have, you know, different kinds of interventions. It's not the same intervention does two different, you see what I mean? I mean, some interventions are very complex, but they can, you know, and you can leverage one more than the other and so on, so forth. You know, so, so this is a way one could easily say five principles, why not three? Or more often why not seven? Why not 15? Why not 22? Because everybody's got a pet construct they can add on there. So my answer to that would be, do you use different interventions for it? Is it correlated with different process research? Right? Like, can you measure it? So some of these constructs be by this like there's no way to measure it or we're measuring it the same way as we're measuring the other constructs. So like maybe they're not different constructs, right? Do they leverage different parts of the brain? The brain's very dynamic and is everything's at once, but it's coordinated. So there's research where you can sort of show these is operating. Let me give you a quick example. I mean, there are ideas like mentalization. It's an interesting idea, right? And I'm not saying it's a lot of this depends on the the level of analysis that you actually want to use. So what's the end user? And I'll talk about that in a second, but for example, affect labeling, finding the right words, paying attention to the feeling that's coming up and labeling the feeling, uses different parts of the brain, then say, getting the gist of the story. Yeah? So the narrative and kind of feeling out the narrative uses uses different parts of the brain than finding the than attending to the feeling. Although both of those would fall on a continuum that is considered mentalization or, right? I'm not picking on mentalization. I was already saying this is true for emotion regulation. It comes up in a game and a game. So that's an argument to say, no, no, no, this is one principle. That's another principle. Let's keep them separate. You could of course chop things up. They'll take the last one, call it narrative reflection. And there I'm talking about cognitive reframes among other things. I'm talking about psychodynamic autobiographical interpretations or insights the person might have. Those are very different functionally, of course. But you know, they're all leveraging similar thing. They have to do a scope. One of them is like, let's look at the situation you're in and reframe it. And another is like, let's look at the bigger narrative your your life story and reframe that, right? So there's a similar that's they're different in terms of scale, the scope that they address. But the the mechanisms that they operate by seem to have a lot of similarities. Right. So so there's another kind of, you know, and I think also so I mentioned end user, the end user is going to be yeah, researchers, but clinicians, right? And I think it's not useful to have 72 mechanisms. That's not useful. I need as few as possible. The constraint is to have as few principles as possible that do justice to the reality. And I came up with five. So why don't we go through them? And this is what I'm thinking. So we'll start with the first one which is reducing intensity. And then maybe you could give a, so I have a few questions for each, just sort of broad questions. But why don't you start us off by explaining what you mean by the principle of reducing intensity? So you know, I already mentioned about emotion regulation and one of the problems with it, you know, an illustration just of that, for example, is mindfulness, which is great as an intervention and great as a, but what mechanism does it work by? Because it works. Well, it works by a ton of different mechanisms. And if you look at factor analyses and so on so forth, it's, it's works. It's correlated with all sorts of things. So it's an intervention. It's not a mechanism, right? So let's go looking at the actual mechanisms. And, and I think, you know, when if we're going to call some define down regulation more narrowly, there are some problems with emotion regulation. I could talk about that. One of them is the scope. And another also mentioned is it could be anything, but it's usually down regulation. I think we would do well to make it more narrow and say, let's even like degrees of emotion regulation scale. It's kind of doing, the fact analyses on that show that it's actually doing a couple of things and really it's probably, it would be great to have a measure that was like a measure on how good are you at calming down? Because that's an important thing to do, right? And if you go to some treatment approaches like, emotion focused or there's there's not a lot of interventions to calm the person down. But every clinician would agree there's a time and a place for that. Your client is on the edge of the building. And like this is not time to make meaning, it's time to calm down, right? Step away from the edge, yeah? So, you know, the first principle is define more narrowly and it's down regulation. Cut it turned down the volume. Yeah. So in that you talk about two approaches to down regulating emotion. So one of them being meaning making and one of them being reducing intensity. So yeah, so how do we, so you go ahead? So yeah, so you know, and that's kind of like trying to disentangle from the emotion regulation literature because I know that's where people are, and I'm saying we need something more sophisticated. I'm just pointing out, you know, if you look at emotion regulation, broadly defined, sometimes it's about reducing intensity. Let me give the analogy of there's a song on the radio. And you can just turn down the volume. It's the same song. It's just less intense. Yeah, you can just sue the emotion. You could also change the song, like change channel on the radio or whatever, right? So that's going to be a different kind of process, right? And so if you start moving to meaning making to down regulate emotion, it's actually a different process. We've conflated that and it's useful to tease these apart. So I'm saying, look, let's just stick with turning down the volume. Meaning making is important, but it, you know, there's meaning making in terms of emotional awareness, there's meaning making in terms of narrative, there's meaning making, so we could define meaning making a lot of ways. So I try to, I do, I kind of bracket out, I say, look, down regulation occurs through at least three major ways, three mechanisms. One is adaptive avoidance. Sometimes it's good to just, you know, there's a lot of research, newer ways of thinking about avoidance, often thought of as being quite bad because we're talking about anxiety disorders, but you know, if you have an anger problem, avoiding the situation is probably good idea at key moments, right? In moments of crisis, and if you look at interventions from dialectical behavior therapy, or, right, it's like disengaged, that's a good strategy to manage a crisis, right? One, the other, habituation, right? So that's a real process. How does it work? Yeah, it's not as obvious as it might seem, right? But there is something to, through exposure, just becoming, it becomes less evocative. I'm putting it making it simply, right? You get used to it, you habituate, and arousal goes down. And the third would be skills. There are actually behavioral skills for coping, right? And we know that people who learn those skills are better at calming themselves down. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was, and talking about this avoidance thing, because often, you know, when we're trained, there is a major focus on avoidance bad. Yeah. How have you come to think about, you gave the example of a crisis, but generally speaking, how have you come to think about, when do we start to think avoidance is problematic versus when it's adaptive? You know, Marshall Linahen does a great job at pointing out, you know, this is for crises, right? So if you're chronically avoiding something, you know, if it becomes your habitual pattern, I'm talking about avoiding, then this isn't a good time to, it's not effective, right? What we're looking for is moments when people are, sorry, I lost you on my screen here. We're looking for moments of crisis, moments of crisis. I think the way of thinking about it would sort of be like, there are key moments when you need to down-regulate. Maybe it's a performance situation, right? We did an interesting study on, you know, avoidance, here I'm going to illustrate this for you, right? And you know, a lot of the research on motion regulation, now they're saying, context matters. Of course it matters. You can't just say, oh, these way, these strategies are healthy, these strategies are unhealthy or adaptive or maladaptive, although you get literature that does that. You know, context matters quite a lot. So one of the problems with, I'm sure you know, there are these studies that kind of do even metanalyses and sort of say, these strategies are correlated with, with psychopathology and these strategies seem not to be and so on so forth, but context matters. And then it's those samples are all drawn from unhelp from people who are struggling. So, you know, they might not have the range. So a study we did, first we compared a clinical sample to student sample, right? And sort of showing that one of the differences is they both have down regulation strategies that they use, but the clinical sample didn't have as many meaning-making strategies, right? So, you know, it's not like the healthy sample isn't using down regulation strategies, right? Or avoidance strategies. They're using those too, but it's that they have more than one tool on their belt. As I said, one of the problems, you know, is the population that you're sampling from. So I decided let's go to really high functioning people, varsity athletes. So we collected data from varsity athletes and we gave them scenarios. We sort of said, you know, you feel it's before a game or competition and try to think of a time. This is like vignette style, try to think of something. When you didn't feel well emotionally for whatever reason. And what did you do to make yourself feel better? And then we give the mother sort of a scenario. And it's like it's after a game or after competition and you don't feel well emotionally or whatever. What did you do to make yourself feel better? So these are healthy people and they're going to use presumably to have a range of strategies. And now they're now it's conceivable that they're going to be discerning by situation and of course they are. Varsity athletes before a game or competition never engage in meaning making. It's not time. You're about to get on the gymnastics bar and do a loop to loop and spin around and you're anxious. You're going to land on your head or humiliate yourself or or fail or whatever. This is not time to explore who I am. It's time to put your headphones on, distract yourself, just go get in the zone, right? So like you get a lot of really basic behavioral strategies for regulating behavioral strategies are one size fits all. They're like tube socks, right? I mean a couple hot chocolate works well no matter who you are. Soft music like has nothing to do with the meaning of your distress. Let's move to you know but after the game if it's because I didn't do well or I fumbled we lost the game or whatever participants are reporting a lot more meaning making strategies searching for you know and maybe questioning themselves or looking for you know this is kind of these very different emotion regulation strategies right? So it is important to bracket and say the down regulation. What are those right? So I hope I'm answering your question a little bit. Has to do with context, has to do with are you in a performance situation? Has to do with the urgency of the is are you in a crisis or not? Right? It's not time to make meaning if you are thinking of killing yourself. It's not a meaning making it's an existential situation but it's not existential meaning making is definitely not what we want. You need to call back right now that's what you need. Right? So or a nice warm bath. Yeah so yeah I'm thinking about what you're saying and you know I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense which is one it's problematic if you are always going to down regulating. If that is your default and you don't have you know you don't have that their tool in your tool belt and it's probably you know and it's also and sort of similarly right that like context matters right? What is the situation and based on what is adaptive for this given situation what should I do here? And so that's right so that's our decision. So when we're seeing clients who are default they're always they're not not even always but they're often going to it and they're going to it at times when it's not helping them when it's getting in the way of living the life they want to live right when it's leading to just persistent distress and just practically you can say wait there's an opportunity here to make meaning. Sure. We should move in that direction that's how we can think about is it is that about right? Absolutely yeah yeah you know if somebody moving on if somebody has a phobia of snakes habituation is the way to go exposure and habituation right? But it's like we have this very rigid sort of way of engaging responding and it's it's very situation specific right? So okay so the next section you go into notice the feeling and you talk in there about affect labeling among other things yeah among yes of course you sure yeah but affect labeling tends to be the language used by behavioral therapists cognitive behavioral therapists experiencing tends to be the language used by experiential or motion-focused therapists some psychodynamics therapists so you know there's some different if down regulation turning down the volume as a thing then another principle as you've said is going to be emotional awareness further emotional engagement and you know beyond affect labeling you could do more complicated sort of symbolizing your experience in a portrait of what it's like to be me I'm not taking about a narrative background but just like what it's like to be inside me right now which is going to be more than just finding a word it's a different process it's fundamentally different way of engaging and uses different parts of the brain and there are different interventions as compared to say down regulating so I one of it just we'll get into more but the with affect labeling I think that this is just this this idea of it like like how does such a what appears to be such a benign process how does that work like how is that how is it that is helpful you know so there's a couple issues one when you label something it makes it a thing you have a point of reference now you know and that that reduces uncertainty and it is you know so there's resources a couple of different bodies of resources research showing that when you label affect it reduces arousal in the amygdala it reduces arousal physiologically we might have to come back to a piece because it depends how you get people to label their affect okay but if you do it in a structured sort of way it will reduce arousal right it reduces uncertainty it also creates it makes it a thing it makes it a reference point yeah so it gives you a sense in direction emotional awareness gives you a sense of direction when you become aware of what you're feeling or what you need then that sets you under trajectory right so if you're asking how does labeling how you feel lead to change one of the answers is well first labeling how you feel reduces the distress you know what I mean by analogy think of a pain physical pain I'm making an analogy but you'll see you know somebody hurts their arm they fall down it's an athlete let's make an athlete it's a high stake so they you know they fall down and they're freaking out and part of it is they don't know if it's broken or not broken or what happened the uncertainty makes it worse makes it more distressing yeah as soon as you know what the diagnosis is or the situation it still hurts physically but there's less emotional distress right it's like I had so it reduces uncertainty this other thing though about making a point of reference and creating a sense of direction is sort of like if you know what you need then now you're on a hunt you have a sense of direction you go after it right maybe you don't go after but you know what you know where the path is right emotional awareness is tied to knowing what your preferences are emotional awareness is tied to clarity of actionable behaviors if we want to use that kind of language right so um one of the interesting keep going keep going well one of the interesting things is you know and experiential therapists starting with Rogers and and Gendlin and moving forward right have been talking about this since since the 60s right the idea that somehow labeling how you're feeling actually changes people right it helps just having a therapist follow you and right so person centered therapy isn't a placebo it's actually a therapy with the same with the same very very similar effect sizes to more much more structured therapies um but it turns out that behavioral therapy I'm talking about exposure based therapy say for racnephobia so works better if you use affect labeling so randomized contrition you have somebody who's like getting doing systematic exposure to a tarantula or somebody and just traditionally it's just the exposure it's not about what it means it's not about labeling the feeling or you have the same p a different randomized group a different group do the same behavioral exposure but they're required to label affect so every time that they do the engagement with the box of the tarantula is getting closer and closer they have to say what are they feeling my heart rates like this it's really scary eventually at the end they have to actually touch it and they're like I can feel its hairy legs and it's disgusting and I don't want you had to pick you had to pick a racnephobia you had to pick you couldn't pick anything else could you it's a good one well that's the study you know so I'm actually I'm not fabricating there's a study on that there's study on public speaking you know where exposure based interventions work but they work better if you also now are having the person label their experience affect labeling is the kind of language that's being used there but it's the same process so so this appears across treatment approaches one thing that is different across treatment approaches you know as so part of thing is how different treatments leverage you have five principles but they will be leveraged differently championed differently by different treatment approaches you see what I'm saying so you know if you have a feeling and you want to label like what I it's like I have this since it's like and the person is searching right um that's a task it's a task it's a it's it emerged just now just suddenly but I am searching for the right work right it's a task analogous to finish this thought record that's a different task but that's a task a very obvious that it's a task because I give you piece of paper right but here it emerges spontaneous therapists says so what was going on for you the kind says I don't know it's like and they pause and they look at the ceiling they've engaged that's a task this is an affect labeling task there are two ways at least that you can engage in that task you could treat the feeling you have also therapists can do it can treat the feeling you have as a static experience and you're going to label it like you're looking in the glass bubble and you're going to say oh so it's this feeling and the person labels the feeling and and we're done right so think closed-ended questions right or you could do affect labeling as if the target the feeling the person has is dynamic unclear and continually unfolding so there's never a final answer I wouldn't use a closed-ended question there I use an open and exploratory question so I I guess it's I don't know maybe it's like this or it's it's like that does that fit or what and I'm delete dot dot dot question mark and you know the way the therapist engages leaves it open-ended okay this plays out in experiments so you know the people have studied affect label summarized and they find that there's some very inconsistent findings and at least in the in the reviews they raise as a research questions like it's a mystery why there's inconsistent findings I'm suggesting that what I just explained is the explanation for those inconsistent findings so sometimes affect labeling will reduce physiological arousal something like if you use a galvanized skin response the person finds the right public speaking they find the right word it's like I feel like this and it reduces arousal sometimes it increases arousal you've seen that before when somebody finds just the right word and then they cry and they get more emotional and if you're doing say a person center experiential poach then that becomes the son of cycle of deepening and deepening yeah so in experiments where they wanted to study affect labeling from a more kind of which is I think this is great right the behavioral kind of perspective on it has brought new ways of thinking about it and so you could structure and create paradigms their inconsistent findings turns out because I'm reviewing all this stuff right if you look at all it's it's related to how this experiment is designed if I ask you to label how you're feeling and I give you a drop down menu and you have to just pick the one that might be a long menu but you pick the one it reduces arousal but if you if I ask you to label affect then I don't give you thing and I and you have to self generate you you begin the search you find that word but it's not a perfect word because there is no perfect word because the feeling genlin would tell us as soon as you label it and you have a fit the feeling itself changes you know it's like the the the meaning evolves once you label how it feels you go to the next level of meaning right and so it continually unfolds so even in experiments if you ask people to endorse kind of on a label that matches how they feel this is kind of like if we jump to therapy now I ask the question I'm like so oh I see I respond to the client I say oh I see so so that left you feeling ashamed kind of sad and ashamed right and they go right and I go oh you want to really stack the deck I go oh okay I pull out a pen and paper I write it down now it's that is clearly the final answer we move on for people to down regulate the person in contrast the experiments if we have people self generate there's a search in the therapy room that kind of positive exploring I go so I guess you must have been like this and they go yeah I guess and I say stay with that it seems important as if to suggest we're not finished right it increases the raffle so that's an example where the way you label will actually could could increase a rouse and it's you know so the task is in the eye of the beholder right so what is the client trying to do is I engage or they try to deepen right so let me yeah let me just just to make sure I got this so so check me where I'm wrong here so I'm thinking that right so if it's just pick one right pick pick pick an affect term to describe your experience versus journal about your experience like find the right word yeah and like more of a narrative exploration that there's going to be a deepening that I'm going to have a different relationship versus just pick a thing yes mostly yes right I think like if you say right and narrative then then then we probably are starting to include other things like plot and characters and motivations and it becomes like this larger piece if we just say search for the right word you know and if it changes then update it with a newer word right the funny thing is I could ask how you're feeling right now and then I could ask how you're feeling now that you've said how you feel and your second answer is different right because it's dynamic and continually unfolding so you know the journaling also has this finality to it which which frames the task a different way it's a different task right when you hand in your answer that is obviously your final answer on how you feel so you know that plays out an experiment it plays out in terms of interventions and affect labeling is used differently leveraged by different treatment approaches to different ends although the process the parts of the brain that are being activated are similar right and across the board it's finding the right words for your experience predict outcome so this is another thread of literature that I'm always looking at across treatment approaches what's the evidence that doing this produce predicts change ideally mediates change ideally has a longitudinal mediation of change and indeed affect labeling has that so you talk about one things you write is you say new awareness is not discovery it's creation so this is like the you go oh I feel like this I think we it's I don't want to get into epistemology right but like how do you know what you know right and it's when people realize is you know I guess I'm I'm making it up from a client it's like I guess I feel resentful of so-and-so my colleague or whatever you know when they realize that was that always there so like a classic you know modernist perception of knowledge is like it was always there and what you did this is the old psychoanalytic what you did is kind of peel back the curtain or the carpet and reveal the truth underneath this is similar to the idea of my true self as if somehow your true self was hidden underneath all this other stuff and I'm going to find myself you know now I'm moving to self we'll think about that more in terms of narrative but you know that idea right um Michelangelo carves a statue uh out of a giant block of marble and if you're going to say it was already there and we found it then you would basically be saying the statues inside the block of marble and all Michelangelo has to do is remove the excess pieces to reveal the structure within well things up right I mean I think um the constructivist perspective and knowing what we know uh about how we know stuff also how the brain works in terms of acquisition of knowledge is there's a construction and reconstruction if you think of how memory works there's no filing cabinet and it's like aha oh yeah I remember it now I remember it now unfortunately memory doesn't work like that there's no filing cabinet where the memory is can be retrieved the memory is continually reconstructed um that means that when you label it you reconstruct it differently the next time right so memory reconsolidation starts to touch on all of these principles of change here's the first place right down regulation less so although to some degree affect label emotional awareness as you start to explore new emotions related to a content area it changes how you feel about the content area the the original memory is not is not independent right it colors it taints the subsequent recollections of that experience so where do where do un where do unmet needs fit into all this I think you can you can think of unmet needs as um a core aspect of emotion negative emotion I should say right um positive emotions are about the experience of having your needs met negative emotions are always about unmet needs right um in the there are lots of different kinds of needs where of course talking about existential needs which would include interpersonal needs we're not talking about I feel like I need to cheeseburger right now um right so you can think of um emotion a core feature of primary emotion is about unmet needs uh for talking about negative emotion right this is you know and we go back to basic emotion science the reason why we have emotions is because they're densely packaged units of information that you can feel faster than you can think and you are organized around what do I need right now so articulating the need that is um embodied in an emotional experience preverably embodied an emotional experience you're I'm not saying it was hidden I'm saying you were you're doing it but you don't have a label for it yet now we label it it's like what I needed I wasn't um I had a client an example the client says like I didn't need company I needed in the client says I needed the love that only a parent could give that's pretty specific right and it's like that's it and it's that way I kind of go yeah that that's a specific thing right um and and of course one of the interesting things about emotion and needs is once you label what you need it creates a sense of trajectory right a sense of direction which starts to move us to the next thing which is how are we going to increase the arousal on that that becomes a different principle right so why don't we go into the feel more express more principle so what do you mean by that by feel more express more well you know I was trying to um I end up using the term expressive arousal rather than expression rather than increasing arousal it's expressive arousal um this the label you know but for labeling these sort of um um parts of the book these principles I I wanted to use words that were more um apply this is instruction this is what you would do yeah this is why let me give let me give a real quick a real a real quick shout so that I think that for folks who read this book that you know that you do a very nice job of and seems pretty intentional to me of making it as a reducing jargon right in any discipline it's very easy either they're just jargon shows up for good reason and I feel like this book is really particularly since it's an APA book and it's very you know scientifically based and over that it is it is it is very approachable and I guess one of the things just as a quick aside did you did you think about writing this as more like a pop culture book I did that ever crossed your mind I guess because it just it felt so you know usually APA books are just dense and so you know like they're just you know kind of like you know your page and you start to not off and this is just not that you know this does your much more applied and like a normal human being can get into it that's so I was just sort of wondering like hi I could see this you know like you know did you think about doing this as like an airport book I think down the road that's a possibility right um that's a possibility I you know I have other ambitions uh as a researcher and scientist and one of them just impact the public uh I think we know a lot of stuff and it has to trickle down um but this book uh from the beginning it was like a let's sort out this pile of this mass right using the same label for all sorts not affect label but same describing same mechanism by saying everybody does everything so what's actually going on right um you know this study calls it emotional awareness this study studies calling it something else they're using different measures for them so it was to sort it out um and so it was you know the reason why the book took so long was not because I had my feet up um it was literally um I co-authored changing topics just illustration I co-authored a treatment manual Sandra Pavio on complex trauma um it was I'm not saying it was easy to write but it was relative terms it was much easier to write you're doing a treatment you study the treatment now just write down what you're doing just write it down that's a treatment manual all treatment manuals are written like that so it's much easier to write a treatment manual about a treatment that already exists than you've done then to invent a general theory based on the literature so like that qualitative kind of reading different studies from different treatment approaches and kind of come up with a synthesis that resolves internal contradictions that's what I tried to do and I think that I did a good job um you know that was much harder there was a time in those 12 years where I had a sabbatical and I was like I'm gonna I'm just gonna finish this now finally I got the time to write and I had this very uncomfortable experience I've been halfway through my sabbatical and it was like I was driving a really crap little car down the highway and I was like and like my my car just wouldn't go fast enough you know and it was it was so I realized it wasn't an issue of time it was a issue an issue of engine power like I couldn't think fast enough it takes time to put Humpty Dumpty together if that's what you're doing I'm not just writing down what I know I'm inventing it right right I think that's where almost the Humpty Dumpty metaphor metaphor falls apart because you were that it applies to is there is a Humpty Dumpty to put together right you're creating the architect right right yeah right oh so so so okay so let's get to the so this is the few more express more are getting to the expressive arousal yeah um so um is a really interesting one because arousal is so salient that's a wrap on the first part of our conversation as noted at the top of the show be much appreciated if you spread the word to anyone else who you think might enjoy it until next time