have a hard time communicating without words

because their weightless bodily fluids make

their faces all puffy and hard to read?

Have you heard that Botox can actually

improve your mood, and not by smoothing wrinkles but

actually by easing depression?

Or that this "come here" gesture is

common in the US but is considered so rude in the

Philippines that it could actually get you arrested.

Yeah. All true!

Emotions and the ways we express them

are strange and powerful things.

And emotions aren't just ephemeral psychological

phenomena, they affect our bodies and our health.

Because so many emotions have a certain

contagious quality, our feelings and the behaviors

they drive also affect the minds, and bodies,

and health of those around us.

This is true whether your emotions of the moment

are of the feel-good variety.

Or not.

The powers of both positivity and negativity are

stronger than you may know.

Lots of studies have shown that people with a positive

outlook on life tend to live longer, more fulfilling lives

than their mean and grumpy neighbors.

Fear, anger, and other more difficult emotions

and how we handle them are pretty closely

related to this thing called stress.

And stress is so powerful that it can straight up kill you

in any number of ways, given the right opportunity.

For better or worse we spend a lot of our lives

swirling around like leaves on the winds of

competing emotions. Before we can hope to harness

these feelings, we first have to understand them.

[Intro]

What do you think this person is feeling?

How about him?

And her?

What about this one?

It's not really hard to tell, is it?

Most of us are better than we think at

reading non-verbal cues and subtle expressions.

The understanding among some, but not all,

psychologists, like emotion expert Paul Ekman,

is that facial expressions are culturally universal.

So a Greek, Britain, American, Samoan, or Nigerian

would all be able to discern the same basic emotions;

happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise,

just by looking at your face.

And our expressions don't just communicate emotions.

According to the Facial Feedback Hypothesis,

they can help regulate our emotions, too.

The act of smiling broadly, even if you aren't happy,

can actually lift your mood just as scowling can lower it.

This is how, bizarrely enough, a recent randomized

controlled clinical trial suggested that a little Botox

injection in the forehead might actually lessen

depression.

'Cause it's apparently hard to feel down if your

frowny muscles are frozen.

Of course whether your face is paralyzed or not, some

people are better at reading your emotions than others.

For example, introverts are usually better at interpreting

people's feelings, while extroverts are often better at

expressing them.

And you've probably heard embarrassing stories or even

experienced first-hand how different cultures express

emotions through particular gestures that are far from universal.

For example, in the United States, this is a peace sign,

but you don't want to flip it around in the UK.

And the iconic thumbs up gesture means "good job" in

many cultures, but if you toss that thumb around in

Greece, well let's just say you won't make any new

friends.

But of course emotions involve a lot more than making faces

and hand gestures, they're also about our

conscious experience of what we're feeling.

So how do we actually feel all these feels, and how

many different emotions are there?

Back in the 1970s, American psychologist Carol Izard

identified ten distinct basic human emotions present

from infancy on.

They are: joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust,

contempt, shame, fear, guilt, and interest or excitement.

Others have since suggested that "pride" should be

added to that list, and still others believe that love should

be classified as a basic emotion as well, but Izard has

argued that these and other emotions are just familiar

combinations of the classic ten.

Today, some psychologists describe our emotional

experience as using a 2-dimensional model.

The idea there is that any of the emotions you might feel

while, like, reading Harry Potter or something are

expressed on a spectrum, and as a combination of

valence, roughly speaking "good" or "bad", and

arousal--excited or not excited, basically.

So if you're feeling both really excited and super

positive when Harry finally bested Voldemort,

you could say you were elated. On the other hand,

if you're at that part in Deathly Hallows when Harry, Ron

and Hermoine are just sort of wandering around on the

lam in a heavy mood, maybe your emotions fell more on

the opposite side of the spectrum.

In this instance, feeling depressed might be a

combination of negative emotion and lack of excitement.

So potentially every emotion can fall in degrees on this

2-dimensional scale. Like being terrified means you're

more frightened than if you're just scared, just as being

enraged is a more extreme form of anger than simply

being mad. These polarities--positive versus negative,

high arousal versus low arousal--affect our psychological

states, and therefore our bodies as well. Because, you'll

remember that what is psychological is ultimately

biological. And when it comes to the physical effects of

our emotions, it pretty much goes the way you might

expect. Happiness is helpful while chronic anger or

depression makes us vulnerable to all kinds of problems

with health and well-being. The good news is that if

we're angry or sad, we often over-estimate the duration

of our bad moods and under-estimate our capacity

to adapt and bounce back from traumas,

even if things feel hopeless, depressing, or stressful

in the thick of it.

And we've all experienced stress before, sometimes on

a daily or even hourly basis. Much like anger or joy,

stress can slowly build and simmer, or it can

strike suddenly and with great intensity.

And yeah, stress, certainly the chronic or extreme type

can be bad for your health, but defining stress

is trickier than you might think.

Psychologists would define stress as the process by

which we perceive and respond to certain events, or

stressors, that we view as challenging or threatening.

In other words, stress isn't technically an emotion, it's

more of a reaction to a disturbing or disruptive stimulus.

And our reactions stem in part from our appraisal of that

stimulus. A person can either roll with, or get worked up

about a missed flight, an increased workload, or a

strange thump in the house. These external stressors

typically fall into three main categories: catastrophes, or

unpredictable large scale events like war, natural

disasters and terrorist attacks; significant life changes,

things like moving, having a child, losing or getting a

job, or the death of a loved on; and then just everyday

inconveniences like getting caught in traffic, running

late, or feuding with your roommates.

Any of these stressful events, big or small, even the

good things, can fire up your sympathetic nervous

system and trigger that old fight or flight response.

In this way, it's important to understand that stress

is ultimately natural. You experience it for a reason

and a bit of short-lived stress can actually be a good

thing. It can make you active and alert when you need to

be, like an upcoming chemistry test might be stressing

you out, but that might help you find focus so you can

dominate that thing. And in your body, moderate stress

can kick the immune system into action to do things

like heal wounds, and fight infections. It does this by

triggering the release of stress hormones like

adrenaline and cortisol. These chemical messengers

are what get your organ systems to respond the way

you need them to when you're getting charged by a

bear, or focusing really hard on the gas law

for your chemistry test. But to also why chronic stress

can really wreck a body and mind, research has shown

that abused children have a high risk of chronic disease

and people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,

PTSD, which we'll talk about in an upcoming episode,

experience higher rates of digestive, respiratory,

circulatory, and infectious diseases. A lot of these

negative connections between your body's systems

have to do with the fact that many of its most basic

functions, like blood pressure, breathing, body

temperature, digestion, and heartbeat, are in part

regulated by the autonomic nervous system.

We've talked before about how the sympathetic side

of that system cranks you up, and the parasympathetic

arm calms you down, but both those systems also

interact with the so-called "brain-in-the-gut", the enteric

nervous system, which helps regulate gastrointestional

functioning. And it's this brain-gut connection that

explains how stress causes digestive problems,

because when that werewolf pops out of the bushes

and a wave of cortisol washes through you, your body

wants to focus its energy on sending blood to your

muscles so that you can react quickly.

Which is good, right?

But it may do that partly by shutting down digestion

or decreasing the amount of digestive secretions

and making your colon spasm; an anxious mind can

lead to an anxious gut. Stress is an even bigger risk

factor in North America's leading cause of death:

heart disease, because it contributes to increased blood

pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol levels in a number

of different ways. Essentially, when your stressed out

nervous system is redirecting all of its energy sources to

your muscles and brain, it pulls flow away from your

other organs. And one of those organs is the liver,

whose job includes removing the fat and cholesterol

from your blood. So basically, when a stressed liver

can't filter properly, that extra fat and cholesterol

ends up circulating in your blood, which can settle

around the heart.

Don't believe me?

One study monitored the blood cholesterol and clotting

speed of 40 male tax accountants throughout the year,

and it found that their cholesterol and clotting rates, and

thus risk of heart attacks, increased dramatically during

the weeks before tax day as they stressed out about

finishing their work.

And physiologically speaking, it's worth pointing out that

some close relatives to stress, when it comes to their

effects on the body, are pessimism and depression,

which also have been linked to stress and heart

disease. Many types of studies have found that people

characterized by their optimism, happiness, love, and

positive feelings often live significantly longer than their

grumpy, dour counterparts. Researchers

don't quite know exactly how chronic negative emotional

states influence health, but it may be some combination

of lifestyle or behavioral factors, like neglecting your

health, or not taking your heart meds when you're

feeling blue, or social factors like the way the depression

can be isolating and thus prevent others from helping

you out. Or biological factors, like increases in certain

kinds of inflammatory proteins released by the immune

system in response to stress and sadness.

So in the end, while stress may not directly cause

disease, you could say that the two walk hand-in-hand.

In that way, it isn't a stretch to say that chronic stress

can kill, so go ahead

take a deep breath,

feel your emotions,

appreciate them,

but don't let them run your life.

Today, we talked more about how our emotions work

and how we use facial expressions to help us

communicate. We also looked at the 2-dimensional