The Gallup Organization has been studying human behavior for
decades. Countless interviews with a spectrum of people -- from
world leaders to bank customers -- have illustrated a powerful
principle: Human beings are driven much more by emotion than we
probably realize. Several widely read books by Gallup experts,
among them First, Break All the Rules and Follow This
Path, discuss how to recognize and deploy positive human
emotions in yourself, your employees, and your customers.
The fact is, emotions are the product of a complex process.
To understand the process itself, Gallup researchers have enlisted
the expertise and assistance of Joseph E. LeDoux, Ph.D., a
world-renowned neuroscientist at New York University. Dr. LeDoux
consults with Gallup in its research into human emotion.
Dr. LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain: The
Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and Synaptic
Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, is a pioneer in
research into the neurology of emotion. Since the 1970s, Dr. LeDoux
has explored the physical process of emotion and how emotion
translates into behavior. His study is esoteric and complex, but
his findings are enormously practical. In the following
conversation, he discusses how to calm down angry customers, how to
read the physical characteristics of engagement, and why
salespeople should strive to be as predictable as
possible.
GMJ: You didn't start out in neuroscience
-- your bachelor's degree is in business administration, and your
master's degree is in business. What changed your path?
Dr. LeDoux: Well, I was studying consumer
behavior, consumer protection, and consumer motivation. I was
interested in social psychology and eventually took a course on the
brain mechanisms of learning and motivation. And I fell in love
with the whole idea. I basically dropped all my research interest
in other topics. Then I applied to graduate school and was accepted
at the Ph.D. program in psychobiology at the State University of
Stony Brook, New York.
GMJ: Your research into the brain is a
pioneering effort. So let's start at the beginning. What is an
emotion?
LeDoux: Emotion, like cognition, is a process.
Emotions are processes in the brain that detect and produce
response to significant stimuli. So, there's some kind of stimulus.
The brain detects it, does some emotional processing, then some
more emotional processing, then the brain produces emotional
consciousness. Feelings -- and sometimes people use the word
interchangeably with emotion -- are really the conscious
consequences of emotional processing.
GMJ: What's the difference,
physiologically, between thinking and emotion?
LeDoux: Emotions often have bodily reactions
connected with them -- the reactions of the autonomic nervous
system -- such as increased heart rate, blood pressure, etc.
Rational thoughts are less directly connected to the body. Thoughts
are connected to other thoughts more than they are to physical
response.
GMJ: What has the greater effect on a
person -- emotion or thinking?
LeDoux: Emotion. It's difficult for a thought
to influence an emotion, and the parts of the brain that mediate
each aren't well-connected; the pathways from the emotion systems
to the cognition systems are wider and faster than the pathways
from the cognition systems to the emotion systems. Emotion systems
were in place early in evolution.
GMJ: Why?
LeDoux: Emotions, particularly negative
emotions, are survival-linked. You won't live very long if you
don't have fear reactions. Emotions are not designed to be
controlled. They are designed to control.
GMJ: Can you trick the brain into a
response?
LeDoux: Yes. Our brains can sense something --
and react -- without our conscious awareness. Reaction to
subliminal responses is stronger because you can't protect
yourself. You don't have time to put up filters. Some psychologists
say that the unconscious is most easily influenced when the
consciousness isn't aware the unconscious is being worked on.
GMJ: How much does the unconscious
influence things like purchase decisions?
LeDoux: In truth, most of what we do, we do
unconsciously, and then rationalize the decision consciously after
the fact. This doesn't mean we do everything important without
proper thought. Thought and emotion can both take place outside the
consciousness. Consciousness is just the place where we find out
about what we are thinking and feeling. Often, fortunately, our
conscious and unconscious selves are in sync. If they are too out
of sync, psychopathology is likely to exist.
GMJ: How does emotion work in the brain?
What are the parts of the brain that control emotion or that are
affected by it?
LeDoux: Well, the key part of the brain that
works with negative emotions, which is what I've studied, is the
amygdala. Not that the amygdala does everything alone -- on its own
it's just a piece of meat, and only the amygdala's connection with
other regions makes it become part of the neurosystem that can
actually process information and control behavior.
Another important region is the hippocampus, which is involved
in evaluating context. The hippocampus does that by forming memory
representations from your experiences of different situations
you've encountered, allowing you to judge which context you're in
and apply that memory representation so that the emotional reaction
will be appropriate for that context.
When the amygdala receives contextual information from the
hippocampus, it is better able to respond to a given stimulus in a
given situation. The amygdala and hippocampus normally work
together to determine an emotional response.
GMJ: So the amygdala is the Barney Fife of
the brain. It just reacts -- senselessly.
LeDoux: Sort of. It wants to react to
everything that crosses a certain threshold -- but not everything
will reach the amygdala, because you learn through past experience
that not everything is a threat. But if a given stimulus does cross
the threshold, the output will be different kinds of responses:
behavior, hormones, automatic nervous system, and so forth.
So the amygdala is the hub in the wheel of emotion, and its
spokes are the inputs and the outputs. The hypothalamus and other
lower brainstem areas take the outputs of the amygdala and produce
responses. But the integration of information into full
representation takes place in the sensory cortex and elsewhere in
the brain, in individual brain components -- purely visual ones,
say, or purely auditory -- but it has to get integrated. The
hippocampus takes all that information and provides the amygdala
with the emotional context. Interestingly, under intense stress,
the hippocampus can be shut down, causing you to respond
inappropriately, or out of context. Something like this may be
going on in war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder who
respond to the sound of a backfiring car as if it were an explosion
on a battlefield.
GMJ: Can all emotions be studied this
way?
LeDoux: No. Depression isn't easily studied
like this, because you don't have inputs and outputs to work with.
It's a mood. Anxiety, too, is a prolonged state and not as easily
studied as fear. There are no stimuli that routinely turn it on and
no characteristic responses that identify it. So the
stimulus-response strategy that works so well for fear is not as
useful for these other states.
GMJ: How can a manager move an employee out
of an emotion like anger? Or what if the employee is extremely
overstressed?
LeDoux: It’s hard to change people when
they are aroused. It’s best to try to do so after the fact,
if you can. Send an angry employee home. Wait for a calm time to
introduce new ideas. I know this from my kids -- it’s much
easier to reason with them after they are upset than while they are
upset.
GMJ: Your work has mostly been with fear.
Have you studied positive emotions?
LeDoux: Negative emotions are easier to study
because they are linked to survival -- and are much stronger. The
neurology of positive emotions is much harder to study,
particularly if you are trying to do the kind of detailed brain
research that we’ve done on fear, which has to be done in
studies of animals. To approach the neurosystem underlying the
positive emotions, you need a behavioral paradigm that is amenable
to the neurosystem’s analysis. You need a behavior
that’s repeatable on demand in accordance with the stimulus,
that when expressed is expressed the same way every time and when
it’s expressed, gives you an unambiguous explanation of that
behavior.
But it’s just a matter of time before scientists start to
study it. Emotions were not a fashionable subject when I started.
But some others and I started doing research on fear, and we had
some success -- and success breeds success. So now it’s just
shocking how many people are working on fear. It used to be a field
where two or three people did everything, and now there’s an
army of researchers out there.
GMJ: Will neuroscience ever be able to
study positive emotions?
LeDoux: I think we need a critical mass of
researchers on positive emotion, but it’s not going to be
studied in a way that is going to take them into the brain the way
we’ve done with fear. They don’t have such stereotyped
expressions in the presence of a few stimuli.
GMJ: Speaking of stimuli, if you can do
fear conditioning, can you do happiness conditioning? Can you use a
positive stimulus to provoke a positive conditioned response? Like
Pavlov’s dog, but cheerier?
LeDoux: You can condition people, or rats, to
expect positive things when a certain stimulus appears. Mere
exposure to a stimulus can create liking of it, but everyone is
different. The same stimuli won’t have the same effect on
everyone because people are wired differently.
GMJ: So how can you tell if you’ve
engaged an employee or customer? What’s the "engagement
behavior"?
LeDoux: You could probably use pupil-size
changes. This is a good measure of attention.
GMJ: Can you stimulate trust?
LeDoux: Trust is a social emotion. It requires
the conceptualization of me, you, the prediction of what I want, of
what you’ll do. It’s called the theory of the mind --
your ability to put yourself in the mind of another and guess what
they’ll do. So we may be able to break trust down into
separate operations. One is the individual’s conception of
self. Another is what he wants. A third is his ability to conceive
of the existence of others. And a fourth is the ability to predict
what another person will do. The importance of viewing it this way
is that you can see exactly where one’s strengths and
weaknesses might be and then build from there.But it works both
ways. To provoke trust, a salesperson has to put himself in the
mind of another. And the customer has to have a theory of the
salesperson and company, an idea of what they will do.
GMJ: So a salesperson who doesn’t
startle people with unexpected behaviors will do better, or sell
more.
LeDoux: The more "predictable" a salesperson
is, the better customers will feel. The customer goes in with a
theory of what the salesperson will do; psychologists call this
ability to predict the actions and thoughts of others "theory of
mind." As long as that theory isn’t negatively affected, you
won’t lose ground. If it’s affected in a positive way,
you’ll gain ground.
GMJ: It’s giving people more than
they expect.
LeDoux: Ah, but that gets into reinforcement,
and intermittent reinforcement is more effective. Intermittent
"extras" are more powerful than constant bonuses that are
predictable. Say that a manager wants to reward employees. A good
way to do it is with a lottery system. You could set it up so one
would have to maintain some level of performance to be eligible for
the lottery. The hope of entering the lottery will keep workers
going at a higher level of performance than just expecting the same
old check each week. A variable interval schedule is effective at
keeping steady performance. It works with pigeons, and it works
with humans.
GMJ: So the reverse -- what does constant
repetition of threat do to employees?
LeDoux: Learned helplessness is what happens
with constant threat. People just give up.
GMJ: Just about every organization faces a
crisis eventually -- a leader leaves, the economy turns sour,
something bad happens. How do managers help people through a
crisis?
LeDoux: Active participation helps people move
past the situation faster and better than passive acceptance. And
there are ways an organization can help its people to do that. Give
each employee a significant job to do to overcome the crisis. If
everyone feels they are contributing, the overall organization will
benefit.
GMJ: I know a dry whole-wheat muffin is
better for me than a chocolate-covered doughnut. So how come I buy
so many doughnuts? Why is it so much more satisfying to give in to
an emotional response than an intellectual one?
LeDoux: Remember, emotions have a physical
characteristic, too. Emotion creates a physical arousal -- a
tension -- that’s relieved when you give in. Guilt is slower
and less intense.
GMJ: So if we could figure out how to
stimulate a strongly positive emotional response to whole wheat,
we’d own the world.
LeDoux: That’s about right, so long as
you didn’t also have a negative emotional state that was also
aroused. It’s all about balance.
-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison