the director of the emotion and self-control laboratory at the University of Michigan.

What's that mean?

Well, what that means is we get to ask two kinds of questions in my lab.

So, number one, we try to understand how do people work when it comes to managing their emotions.

And we really care about getting in there

to understand the mechanics that underlie what we call emotion regulation. And then the second

kind of question we tackle is, how can we use this understanding of the nuts and bolts that

explain how people can manage their emotions to actually help them do a better job of that in their

daily lives outside the lab. And so trying to address those two big picture issues is something

that keeps us really busy and is something that is really fun, a fun way to spend your life.

From your time, decades looking at them what what are emotions from a

definitional perspective how do you come to actually define him it's great question and you know it's

it's funny i often um when i'm speaking about this topic to folks i I often ask people, hey, who here feels comfortable

coming up to the front and just telling us what it means to have an emotion? What is an emotion?

It's kind of wild. We experience emotions, according to this one study that I cite my book,

about 90% of the time that we're awake, we're experiencing some type of emotional

response. We are truly an emotional species. And yet if you ask people, as I often do in

presentations or what I'm teaching, what's an emotion? People often just stop and they have

trouble answering that question. So let me pose it to you actually before I go give you the,

give you my definition.

What are you thinking of emotionists?

And don't worry about being right or wrong.

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