Mindfulness: How to Call Off the Emotional Attack Dogs | Paul Ekman | Big Think

Mindfulness: How to Call Off the Emotional Attack Dogs

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Nature didn't give us any tools to control our emotions. That is why psychologist Paul Ekman says you need to keep a diary of your emotions, writing what you are experiencing in great detail.

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PAUL EKMAN:

Paul Ekman is the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement.

His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master’s thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit.

In 1971, he received a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health; that Award has been renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and 1997. His research was supported by fellowships, grants and awards from the National Institute of Mental Health for over forty years.

Articles reporting on Dr. Ekman’s work have appeared in Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today, The New Yorker and others, both American and foreign. Numerous articles about his work have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and other national newspapers.

He has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah, Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers’ The Truth About Lying.

Ekman is co-author of Emotion in the Human Face (1971), Unmasking the Face (1975), Facial Action Coding System (1978), editor of Darwin and Facial Expression (1973), co-editor of Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (1982), Approaches to Emotion (1984), The Nature of Emotion (1994), What the Face Reveals (1997), and author of Face of Man (1980), Telling Lies (1985, paperback, 1986, second edition, 1992, third edition, 2001, 4th edition 2008), Why Kids Lie (1989, paperback 1991), Emotions Revealed, (2003), New Edition (2009) Telling Lies, Dalai Lama-Emotional Awareness (2008) and New Edition Emotions Revealed (2007) . He is the editor of the third edition (1998) and the fourth edition (2009) of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998). He has published more than 100 articles.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Ekman: There are two things that people want to be able to do to improve their emotional life. You want to be able to choose what you become emotional about and when you become emotional. That’s number one. And the second is you want to be able to choose how you act when you are emotional.

Well, nature didn’t want you to do either. So it didn’t give you any tools. So if you’re going to learn how to do this, it’s going to be hard work, and it isn’t going to be the kind of learning like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you learn to ride a bicycle you can stay off it for ten years and get right back on it and ride. What I’m going to tell you now, if you don’t do every day, you’ll fall off. You got to practice it all the time. It’s like being a concert pianist. It doesn’t stick unless you practice it.

So let’s take problem number one, having more choice about what you become emotional about. And that’s--the only reason we want that is because sometimes we become emotional about things that we don’t think merit becoming emotional, or we act in a way that we don’t approve of afterwards. That’s the number two problem.

The first step is to keep a diary of when you become emotional. Now you won’t know in advance but you’ll surely know when it’s over that you just had an emotional episode. Write it down in detail. Do this for a month. Then go through it and look for what are the themes that are causing your emotions. If it isn’t apparent to you, get a friend to look at it, but it should be very apparent to you when you read through this diary.

And you should be able to identify three or four redundant things that have again and again getting you to act emotionally...

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