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

Dr. Ralph Adolphs, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at Caltech and a leading expert on the science of human emotions. We discuss how emotions shape our attention and decision-making, whether emotions are truly “stored” in the body, and whether facial expressions are truly reliable signals of emotion. We also cover tools for improving emotional regulation, including cognitive reappraisal and deliberate cold exposure. This episode provides a modern scientific explanation of how emotions are created and regulated in the brain and body, their many impacts on other aspects of brain function, and practical tools for improving emotional wellbeing and processing.

Articles

• Investigating Emotions as Functional States Distinct From Feelings (Emotion Review)
• Motivational and emotional controls of cognition (Psychological Review)
• Sustained experience of emotion after loss of memory in patients with amnesia (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)
• Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala (Nature)
• On the dimensionality of odor space (eLife)
• The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear (Current Biology)
• Constants across cultures in the face and emotion (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
• Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements (Psychological Science in the Public Interest)
• Are owners' reports of their dogs' 'guilty look' influenced by the dogs' action and evidence of the misdeed? (Behavioural Processes)
• Assessing personality using zero-shot generative AI scoring of brief open-ended text (Nature Human Behaviour)
• Dynamic facial expressions of emotion transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time (Current Biology)
• Fear and panic in humans with bilateral amygdala damage (Nature Neuroscience)
• Bodily maps of emotions across child development (Developmental Science)
• What is an emotion? (Mind)
• Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants (Nature Communications)
• A Bayesian model of category-specific emotional brain responses (PLOS Computational Biology)
• Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)
• Aesthetic preference for art can be predicted from a mixture of low- and high-level visual features (Nature Human Behaviour)
• Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)
• Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)

Books

• What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories by Paul E. Griffiths
• The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis by Ralph Adolphs, David J. Anderson
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
• The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith

Other Resources

• MoMA
• American Kennel Club — Meet the Breeds

Huberman Lab Episodes Mentioned

• Dr. David Anderson: The Biology of Aggression, Mating & Arousal
• How to Expand Your Consciousness | Dr. Christof Koch
• How to Set & Achieve Massive Goals | Alex Honnold
• Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner
• Rick Rubin: How to Access Your Creativity
• How to Make Yourself Unbreakable | DJ Shipley
• Science-Based Meditation Tools to Improve Your Brain & Health | Dr. Richard Davidson

People Mentioned

• David Anderson: Professor of Biology, Caltech
• Joseph LeDoux: Professor Emeritus of Neural Science, New York University
• Paul Ekman: Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, San Francisco
• Lisa Feldman Barrett: Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University
• Herbert Simon: social scientist, Nobel laureate
• Antonio Damasio: Professor of Neuroscience, University of Southern California
• William James: established Harvard’s psychology department
• James Gross: Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
• Justin Feinstein: clinical neuropsychologist
• Wim Hof: extreme athlete, known as The Iceman
• Eddie Chang: Professor of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco
• George Floyd: police brutality victim
• Botond Roska: Professor of Vision Research, University of Basel
• Philippe Schyns : Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Glasgow
• Rachael Jack : Professor, Area Lead of Computational Biology, Vanderbilt University
• Doris Tsao: Professor of Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley