Neuroscience of Emotions and Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation

You are trying to park. Your turn signal is on, there is an open space, and the driver behind you has plenty of room to go around. Instead, they pull up close and lean on the horn. Before you have thought through any of it, anger arrives.

That moment captures something fundamental about emotions: they can interrupt what we are doing and reorganize our attention, physiology, and behavior. Sometimes that is exactly what we need. Other times, the response is disproportionate to the situation.

The goal of emotion regulation is not to eliminate emotions. It is to become more capable of recognizing them, understanding the circumstances, and responding flexibly. My discussion with Ralph Adolphs brought together the neuroscience behind those abilities and the practical question that matters to all of us: How do we develop more control without spending our entire lives thinking about how to control ourselves?

Table of Contents

• What Is an Emotion?
• Emotions Are Not the Same as Conscious Feelings
• Why Eliminating Emotion Would Be a Mistake
• Emotional Granularity: Recognizing What Is Happening
• Emotion Regulation Tools: Start Early and Stay Flexible
• Cold Exposure and the Possibility of Stress Training
• Endurance, Adversity, and Learning That States Change
• Why You Cannot Reliably Read an Emotion From a Face
• The Amygdala Is Not Simply a Fear Center
• Feeling Emotions in the Body: What the Evidence Shows
• How Advertising, Music, and Art Recruit Emotion
• Emotion Circuits Develop Through Both Biology and Experience
• Emotional Intelligence Is About Context, Not Constant Sensitivity
• Autism, Eye Contact, and Individual Differences
• Training Mental Stillness and Better Transitions
• Illness, Gratitude, and Deciding What Matters

What Is an Emotion?

A useful starting point is to define emotions by what they do, rather than by how they feel or where they occur in the brain. Adolphs describes emotions as functional states that help an organism deal with particular kinds of environmental challenges.

Consider two extremes of behavioral control. At one end is a reflex: touch a hot stove and withdraw your hand. The response is fast, relatively rigid, and suited to a particular circumstance. At the other end is deliberate planning, where you can compare many possibilities and decide what to do.

Emotions occupy an important middle ground. If a bear appears, you need something faster than a lengthy planning session but more flexible than a single reflex. Depending on the circumstances, you might retreat, hide, freeze, or defend yourself.

Fear helps coordinate those possibilities. It is not identical to any one of them.

Four important features of emotions

In their work together, Adolphs and David Anderson have emphasized several features that help distinguish emotions from other states:

• Priority: Emotions can interrupt ongoing behavior and take precedence over other goals.
• Valence: Emotions often have a positive or negative quality, related to pleasantness, unpleasantness, approach, or avoidance.
• Scalability: An emotional state can increase or decrease in intensity.
• Temporal persistence: An emotion can continue after the event that initially triggered it.

Priority is easy to understand in a dangerous situation. If you are absorbed in a task and suddenly detect a predator, continuing the task could be fatal. An interrupt mechanism is useful.

Valence helps organize emotional similarities and differences, although Adolphs does not consider every emotion to require a strongly positive or negative position. A relatively neutral state may still fit within the broader framework.

Scalability becomes clear when a threat moves closer. Monitoring a distant bear might involve anxiety. A nearby bear could produce fear. An immediate attack could produce panic. The state changes in intensity and can recruit different responses as the challenge changes.

Persistence is equally important. Withdrawing your hand from a stove largely resolves the immediate problem. A predator can disappear behind a tree and still be dangerous. An internal state that lasts allows you to integrate information over time rather than repeatedly starting from zero.

An emotion can persist without a memory of its cause

A particularly revealing experiment involved people with severe amnesia caused by damage to medial temporal structures, including the hippocampus. These individuals could understand a sad film while it was presented but could lose the explicit memory of the experience within minutes.

Afterward, they still reported sadness. Some could not remember the film or explain why they felt that way.

The study, Feelings Without Memory in Alzheimer Disease, is not the relevant paper here; the experiment discussed was Sustained Experience of Emotion After Loss of Memory in Patients With Amnesia. Its central finding illustrates that an emotional state can outlast conscious recollection of what triggered it.

That does not mean memory is irrelevant to emotion. It means remembering the cause and continuing to feel the emotion are separable processes.

Emotions Are Not the Same as Conscious Feelings

Most of us treat our subjective experience as the ground truth of emotion. We know we are sad because sadness feels a certain way. Anger feels different from fear, so we distinguish them by introspection.

That is a perfectly understandable way to describe personal experience. Scientifically, however, equating emotion with conscious feeling creates a major problem: studying emotion becomes inseparable from solving consciousness.

Adolphs argues for separating the underlying emotional process from the conscious experience that may accompany it. Vision researchers can study visual processing without explaining the conscious experience of seeing. Memory researchers can investigate learning in animals without settling whether those animals consciously recollect events. Emotion science can take a similar approach.

Do animals have emotions?

Under a functional definition, many animal states qualify as emotions. They prioritize behavior, scale in intensity, persist over time, and support flexible responses to challenges.

That is a different claim from proving what an animal consciously feels. Adolphs has little doubt that many animals have conscious emotional experiences, but he emphasizes that we currently lack a definitive scientific test for those experiences.

The distinction also matters for artificial intelligence. A system might exhibit a persistent internal state that changes priorities and behavior in a way that resembles a functional emotion. That alone would not establish that the system feels anything. Functional similarity is not proof of subjective experience.

Why Eliminating Emotion Would Be a Mistake

People working in high-risk, high-consequence environments often describe emotion as something that can cloud judgment. That makes sense when fear, frustration, or excitement interferes with a carefully trained action.

But the lesson is not that emotions are useless.

Antonio Damasio’s work with patients who had substantial frontal lobe damage showed how devastating impaired emotional responding can be for everyday decision-making. A person may retain many intellectual abilities yet struggle to organize life, choose among complex options, or feel motivated toward one outcome rather than another.

Emotions help assign significance. Without them, having many possible choices does not necessarily translate into knowing which choice matters.

The useful target is therefore not emotional flatness. It is the ability to let emotion inform behavior without automatically allowing it to dominate behavior.

Emotional Granularity: Recognizing What Is Happening

Emotion regulation begins with some ability to monitor your internal state. You might notice irritation building while standing in a slow line, or recognize that a difficult conversation has left you feeling several things at once.

The capacity to distinguish those states is often called emotional granularity, an area strongly associated with Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research.

There is a meaningful difference between “I feel bad” and recognizing a mixture of disappointment, uncertainty, frustration, and embarrassment. The latter gives you more information about what might help.

Do you need the perfect emotion word?

Not necessarily. Adolphs emphasizes that recognizing a distinction does not always require putting it into language. Some people think primarily in words, others more in images, and many use a mixture.

Different languages also package emotional concepts differently. English speakers can understand pleasure at another person’s misfortune even without having an English equivalent of the German word Schadenfreude. Likewise, someone can understand the feeling of finding something almost unbearably cute without having a single familiar word for it.

The useful skill is differentiation, not vocabulary collection. You need enough conceptual clarity to recognize what is happening and decide how to respond.

That matters especially when emotions are mixed. Trying to force a complicated experience into one label can be less helpful than acknowledging its several components.

Emotion Regulation Tools: Start Early and Stay Flexible

Much of the difficulty people experience with emotions concerns regulation rather than the mere presence of an emotion. Fear, sadness, and anger are not inherently pathological. Problems arise when they are poorly matched to the situation, difficult to interrupt, or repeatedly drive unwanted behavior.

James Gross’s work helped establish emotion regulation as a major research field. Strategies include changing a situation, reappraising its meaning, accepting an experience, and suppressing aspects of a response. No single strategy is best for every person or circumstance.

Shape the situation before the response escalates

One practical principle from our discussion was to intervene early. If you can reasonably structure your environment to avoid a predictable, unnecessary emotional spiral, you may not need to regulate such an intense response later.

This is situation selection: recognizing circumstances that reliably produce an unwanted state and, when appropriate, changing your exposure to them.

It does not mean every difficult feeling should be avoided. It means regulation can begin before the emotion reaches full intensity.

Use cognitive reappraisal without feeding rumination

Cognitive reappraisal involves changing how you interpret a situation. But reflecting on an emotion can become counterproductive if it turns into repetitive monitoring.

There is a difference between reconsidering what happened and repeatedly telling yourself that you must stop feeling sad or anxious. The latter can keep attention locked onto the very state you are trying to reduce.

This helps explain why apparently contradictory advice can both contain truth. Sometimes acknowledging an emotion is useful. Sometimes sustained attention amplifies it. The outcome depends on what that attention is doing.

Adolphs identifies two trainable components:

• The strategy itself: Learning to reappraise, accept, or redirect without falling into repetitive overthinking.
• The ease of regulation: Developing control that becomes more automatic and requires less deliberate effort.

The long-term goal is not to narrate every emotional adjustment. It is to become more skillful at making the adjustment.

Cold Exposure and the Possibility of Stress Training

Adolphs described a personal experience with ice baths that makes this distinction concrete. At first, entering cold water was painful and produced a strong increase in breathing and arousal. With practice, his experience changed: entering the water became associated with settling down rather than escalating.

More interesting to him was a possible transfer outside the cold water. The driver honking while he tried to park no longer produced the same immediate surge of anger.

His interpretation is that practicing regulation during a reliable physical stressor may have improved the automatic regulation of a psychological stressor.

That is a personal observation, not a controlled demonstration. Adolphs explicitly described it as an experiment involving one person. It is useful as a hypothesis, but it does not establish that ice baths will produce the same benefit for everyone.

We also discussed evidence suggesting that deliberate cold exposure can influence responses to subsequent stressors. Still, the exact relationship between cold adaptation and emotional regulation needs careful study.

Safety cannot be separated from this topic. Cold water can produce substantial physiological stress. Open water, hyperventilation practices, and remaining immersed until hypothermic are not appropriate ways to pursue emotional control. The anecdote is not a temperature or duration prescription.

Endurance, Adversity, and Learning That States Change

Adolphs’s interest in ultramarathons offers a different example of emotional training, this time over many hours rather than minutes.

During a long race, feeling terrible does not always mean that every subsequent mile will feel worse. Energy, discomfort, motivation, and mood can fluctuate dramatically. A low point can level out and sometimes improve.

That experience teaches a useful distinction: your current state is not necessarily a reliable forecast of your future state.

At mile 40 or 50, the remaining distance can seem impossible. Experience with previous lows gives a runner another piece of information: “I have felt awful before, and the trajectory changed.”

The social environment matters too. Adolphs described a culture of encouragement, where runners support one another rather than reinforce the prediction that someone will fail.

This is not evidence that everyone should run 100 miles, nor that perseverance always overcomes physical limits. It illustrates how voluntarily navigating a difficult, time-limited challenge can alter the way a person understands discomfort and possibility.

Awe changes the scale of experience

We also discussed awe, drawing on Dacher Keltner’s work. Awe can involve a shift in scale: from something small to something vast, or from the immediate moment to a much larger span of time.

A demanding experience can make a day feel remarkably expansive. Rather than making ordinary life seem trivial, it may reveal how much can happen within the time we have.

Adolphs connects awe to a broader human ability to move beyond the immediate sensory present. We can imagine another person’s perspective, revisit the past, simulate the future, and consider our lives from a wider vantage point.

He considers this form of flexible perspective-taking central to human mental life. Whether and to what extent other animals experience comparable forms of awe remains an open question.

Why You Cannot Reliably Read an Emotion From a Face

One of the most important corrections in modern emotion science concerns facial expressions.

Paul Ekman’s influential research proposed that several basic emotions could be recognized across cultures from facial expressions. The familiar categories include happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, sometimes with contempt added.

These ideas shaped textbooks, experiments, and technologies that attempt to infer emotion from a face. But the real-world evidence is more complicated.

A posed face is not everyday emotional behavior

Many classic studies used exaggerated expressions posed by actors. Participants then selected an emotion word from a short list.

That task can show that people associate a particular expression with a particular label. It does not necessarily show that the expression reliably reveals a person’s actual emotional state.

When researchers use more natural expressions and ask people to describe them freely, responses become considerably more variable. Adolphs and colleagues examined these limitations in a major review of facial movements and emotion inference.

The practical point is straightforward: a face provides evidence, not a definitive readout.

If someone appears sad, you would ordinarily ask what is happening, listen to their voice, and consider the situation. You might discover that the expression reflected an unpleasant taste rather than sadness.

Our confidence in reading animal expressions can also exceed our accuracy. Adolphs noted controlled studies in which dog owners’ confidence that they could recognize guilt did not translate into reliable identification of whether the dog had actually done something wrong.

Change over time can be more informative than a snapshot

In close relationships, we often notice departures from a person’s usual behavior rather than a textbook facial expression. Someone who normally communicates warmly in the morning becomes unusually quiet. A colleague changes the tone or structure of an email.

Those deviations can carry information because the brain is continuously forming expectations.

This is one reason prediction has become important in contemporary theories of emotion. A mismatch between expectation and experience signals that something may have changed.

Faces also unfold over time. The trajectory of an expression can reveal information that is missing from a still image. Work using dynamic facial expressions asks not just what a face looks like, but when and how its movements begin to support a particular interpretation.

Language provides another rich source of information. We discussed studies in which written diary material or conversations contained enough information for people, and in some tasks large language models, to estimate aspects of personality. That does not turn a short text sample into a comprehensive clinical assessment. It shows that social information extends far beyond the face.

The Amygdala Is Not Simply a Fear Center

Adolphs’s research with the well-known patient SM provides a striking example of why assigning one emotion to one brain region is misleading.

SM had selective damage to both amygdalae. She had difficulty recognizing fear in facial expressions and showed unusually little fear in situations involving a haunted house, snakes, spiders, and frightening films.

Those observations support an important role for the amygdala in certain fear-related processes. They do not establish that all fear resides there.

In another experiment, SM and other patients with similar damage inhaled carbon dioxide under controlled research conditions. Carbon dioxide can create intense air hunger and a feeling of suffocation. These patients experienced panic despite their amygdala damage.

The distinction is between responding to an external threat and responding to an internal bodily alarm. The latter can recruit other circuitry, including brainstem systems.

So even a familiar category such as fear contains different processes. Fear of something approaching from outside and panic associated with not getting enough air are not identical neural events.

Feeling Emotions in the Body: What the Evidence Shows

Emotions can involve tightness in the chest, changes in breathing, warmth, nausea, or a whole-body shift in arousal. Those experiences are real. The scientific challenge is determining precisely what is changing and how the brain represents it.

A popular approach has been to ask people to mark on a body outline where they associate different emotions with increased or decreased sensation. Research by Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues produced widely circulated bodily maps of emotions.

Adolphs emphasized a crucial methodological distinction. In the word-based mapping task we discussed, people were reporting where they believed an emotion would be felt. Researchers were not simultaneously measuring detailed physiological changes throughout their bodies.

That makes the maps informative about people’s concepts of emotions and bodily sensations. They are not direct physiological maps of each emotion, nor evidence that a particular emotion is stored in a particular organ.

The insula helps represent internal bodily states

The insula receives extensive information about the internal body and is important in research on pain, nausea, bodily awareness, and emotional feeling.

Adolphs illustrated this with his experience of a kidney stone. Unlike pain from touching a hot surface, this was not a threat he could simply move away from. It produced a powerful urge to curl up and rock, along with the distress of being unable to escape the source.

The example shows why broad categories can conceal important differences. Pain is not one uniform experience, just as fear is not one uniform process.

William James proposed that emotional feeling arises from perceiving changes in the body. Adolphs sees substantial value in bodily representation as part of conscious emotional experience, but points out that this leaves another question: What initially coordinates the bodily changes and behavior?

In his framework, the underlying emotional state helps organize those responses, while the conscious feeling may emerge and unfold as the brain represents what is happening.

Do specific emotions have specific bodily signatures?

The honest answer is that we do not yet have the complete picture.

Measuring heart rate, blood pressure, and a few other signals captures only a small fraction of bodily activity. A strong test would require much richer measurements across many organs and systems.

Distributed patterns of brain activity can distinguish emotional states in some studies. Given the detailed coupling between brain and body, Adolphs considers it plausible that equally complex bodily patterns could be associated with particular emotions.

That remains a hypothesis requiring better data. It does not justify a simple chart assigning anger, sadness, or fear to specific organs.

How Advertising, Music, and Art Recruit Emotion

Emotion’s priority function helps explain why emotionally provocative media can be so effective. Capturing an emotional response captures attention, and attention creates an opportunity to influence behavior.

Advertising and political messaging can exploit that relationship. The pathway is not merely “make someone feel something.” It is “make that feeling important enough to interrupt competing priorities.”

But emotional recruitment is not limited to threat, outrage, or highly arousing content. Music and abstract art provide much richer examples.

We discussed imaging research by Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre on music that produces chills. The same music can evoke a strong response in one person and little response in another. Emotion-related brain systems participate when those powerful experiences occur.

Research involving John O’Doherty and colleagues has also examined how visual features of abstract art relate to aesthetic preference. Color, composition, and other features can help explain whether people find an image pleasant or unpleasant, even when it depicts no recognizable scene.

These findings raise a fascinating question: How do features in art and music recruit systems that evolved for other purposes? The precise answer is still developing, but aesthetic emotion is not simply disconnected from the rest of emotional biology.

Emotion Circuits Develop Through Both Biology and Experience

Questions about emotional responses often become a debate between what is innate and what is learned. Adolphs’s answer is that this is usually a false choice.

Brain systems develop from biological starting conditions and are refined through experience.

The visual word form area provides a useful example. Written language is too recent for a specialized reading region to have evolved solely for that purpose. Yet before children can read, the connectivity of the region that will later support reading already helps predispose it toward that function.

Experience then shapes what the system becomes capable of doing.

Think in neural populations, not single “emotion cells”

Researchers can identify neurons whose activity distinguishes smiles from frowns or responds selectively to particular stimuli. But a selective neuron is not necessarily the right unit for explaining the entire mechanism.

Single neurons are noisy and often respond to multiple features. Other brain regions generally receive information from large populations, not one isolated cell.

Recordings in epilepsy patients allow researchers to examine how information is represented across ensembles of neurons. At that level, researchers can decode distinctions that people can perceive, including differences between facial expressions.

The “fan in, fan out” architecture

One of the clearest ways to understand emotion is Adolphs and Anderson’s description of a fan in, fan out architecture.

Many different inputs can converge on an emotional state. You might see a bear, hear movement nearby, smell an animal, or hear someone shout a warning. Those sensory events are different, but all can support an abstract representation of threat.

From that state, many responses become possible: hiding, retreating, freezing, or defending yourself.

That flexibility is precisely what a rigid reflex lacks. You do not need a separate fixed response for every possible dangerous object. You need a system capable of abstracting what those objects mean for you.

Emotional Intelligence Is About Context, Not Constant Sensitivity

Being highly attentive to everyone’s emotional state is not always the most adaptive way to move through the world. Sometimes a situation calls for empathy and detailed social attention. Sometimes it calls for narrowing attention and completing a difficult task.

A physician can be deeply attuned to a nervous patient during a conversation and then shift into exacting technical focus during a procedure. Both capacities matter.

Adolphs emphasizes variability and flexibility: having multiple strategies and selecting among them according to context.

This also applies to interpersonal emotion regulation. Parents regulate children’s emotions. Partners influence one another’s states. Colleagues can settle or amplify tension. Regulation is not confined to what happens inside one person.

Emotional granularity and flexible regulation work together. First, recognize what is happening. Then step back far enough to choose among possible responses.

Automatic social processing reduces cognitive load

Social life becomes exhausting if every interaction requires consciously tracking eye contact, turn-taking, facial movement, tone, and the possibility of offending someone.

Many people rely on relatively automatic processing for these tasks. Some autistic people describe having to manage more of them deliberately, which can create a substantial cognitive burden.

It is important not to assume that an unconventional social style reveals a diagnosis, a lack of care, or a lack of competence. Social behavior varies widely, and success is not limited to one interpersonal style.

Autism, Eye Contact, and Individual Differences

Adolphs’s laboratory studies autism partly as a way to understand variation in social processing. This includes both diagnosed autistic participants and people across the broader population who vary in measured autistic traits.

In webcam-based studies, researchers estimate where participants direct their gaze while social interactions appear on a screen. They can examine the relative influence of eyes, faces, the current speaker, and background distractions.

On average, participants with higher autistic traits or an autism diagnosis direct less gaze toward some social features. But the broader finding is that everyone varies. Some people look at faces frequently; others do so much less.

Repeated measurements suggest that these patterns can be fairly stable over time, even though sleep, stress, and other changing conditions may influence them.

What researchers do not yet know is equally important. A stable gaze pattern does not, by itself, tell us whether changing it would improve someone’s relationships, work, or wellbeing. More eye contact is not automatically a better outcome.

Can personality change?

The same longitudinal approach can help separate temporary states from enduring traits. Mood changes from day to day. Some aspects of personality appear more stable. Others may be modifiable to a degree.

Adolphs’s group is examining these differences through repeated questionnaires and behavioral measurements. The relevant question is not simply whether people can change, but which features change, under what conditions, and how much.

Movement and social presence are part of thinking

Our conversation also touched on the relationship between bodily movement and thought. Gesturing, shifting posture, and moving while speaking can help organize or emphasize what we are trying to express.

I noticed this while recording an audiobook: standing made it easier to convey emphasis and inflection, while a more still posture could support a tightly structured passage.

Likewise, social interaction is not identical across formats. A recorded face, a live video call, and an in-person conversation may present similar visual information but differ substantially in reciprocity and the experience of being observed.

Adolphs described research aimed at separating those dimensions, including whether knowing that another person can see you changes the demands of an interaction. These are questions under investigation, not settled conclusions about which format is best.

Training Mental Stillness and Better Transitions

One practical idea repeatedly surfaced: spend some time without continuously reacting to incoming information.

That might occur during meditation, a solitary run, or another quiet activity. The common element is not a particular posture. It is the opportunity to remain with thoughts and emotions without immediately seeking another external stimulus.

Adolphs views this as a potential form of internal training. You are not necessarily doing nothing. You may be practicing the ability to observe and regulate your own mental activity.

The effects are individual, and solitude is not automatically useful for everyone. The important distinction is between reflective practice and simply becoming trapped in repetitive thought.

A brief pause before a meeting

Adolphs’s laboratory begins meetings with roughly three to five minutes of silence. People can close their eyes or rest their attention on an image. The intention is to settle, focus, and become ready for the research presentation.

The practice began in 2020 as a moment of remembrance following George Floyd’s killing. Over time, it evolved into a regular transition away from the noise of the day.

That transition may be as important as the meditation label.

The brain does not switch tasks instantly

Moving from traffic to a conversation, or from email to concentrated work, carries a switching cost. Residual activity from the previous task can interfere with the next one, and the brain has to reconfigure what it is doing.

A deliberate transition acknowledges that reality. Brief silence, a familiar breathing exercise, or mentally rehearsing the next setting may help someone arrive with a clearer intention.

We discussed former SEAL operator DJ Shipley’s description of rehearsing his arrival home: anticipating his children, setting down his bag, and preparing to be present with his family. The point was not to make family life mechanical. It was to stop the previous part of the day from determining how he entered the next one.

There is an important research boundary here. The specific proposition that three to five minutes of silence reduces task-switching costs was a study we wanted to see, not a result already established by the laboratory’s meeting practice.

Stillness can initially be uncomfortable

Short meditation is not always immediately calming. Sitting quietly can make thoughts and anxiety more noticeable, especially at first.

Inhibiting the impulse to move, speak, check a device, or seek stimulation can itself be difficult. Adolphs sees that difficulty as trainable, while recognizing that people differ in their responses.

His own approach also includes avoiding social media and keeping his phone off much of the time. My approach has included separating social media onto another phone and physically putting my phone away during focused work. These are personal strategies, not universal requirements, but they address the same issue: constant incoming stimulation leaves less room to practice internal control.

Illness, Gratitude, and Deciding What Matters

When Adolphs described recovering from a serious illness, the discussion returned to emotion regulation in its most personal form.

A diagnosis that confronts you with mortality can bring fear, sadness, and worry together. He emphasized the interpersonal part of navigating that experience, particularly talking with his wife.

Over time, his account shifted toward acceptance, gratitude, and awe. The experience also changed how he considered the remaining arc of his life and where he wanted to invest his time. Returning to ultramarathon training was one expression of that reassessment.

He offered a striking perspective on mortality. We ordinarily imagine that when we die, the world loses us. From the perspective of conscious experience, we lose the world: the people, places, possibilities, and experiences our brains allow us to encounter.

That perspective is not an argument for denying difficult emotions or turning every hardship into a lesson. It is a reminder that regulation serves something larger than calmness. It helps us participate in life, connect with other people, make decisions, and direct attention toward what we value.

The aim is not to feel less. It is to recognize more clearly, respond more flexibly, and become less captive to any single emotional state.