James Gross

I'm, like, looking around the room at these very famous people and really honored to be among them.

The very first speaker was a professor from Stanford named James Gross.

He is a pioneer in emotion and emotion regulation.

So he stood up, and in front of this, you know, august, um, assembly of his peers, he put up a PowerPoint slide with boxes and arrows.

And even better than finagling with box two, like, I can reframe this, like, maybe if I'm, like, more mindful.

But then ask yourself, "Well, what would make me wanna reframe this?" Or, "How would I become more mindful? What objective physical and social circumstance would give me the thoughts that I want to have that will automatically motivate the response?" So that's the three boxes model, and I don't deserve credit for it.

The credit goes to James Gross.

It's a great framework because, as you say, we live in box three in our lives.

There's a whole heap of literature on it when you dig into it, and, um, I think what you've, what you've just described can really help people.

I, I remember seeing the, the work of James Gross.

He was one of the lecturers on my, um, uh, neuroscience course and, and he talked about his research on reappraisal of stressful events that-

Yeah

And, you know, when I was at San Francisco, you know, I had mentioned being in San Francisco and like, you know, I was there for a very specific reason.

I was there to work with James Gross, who I wrote about in Chapter 2.

And we said that we could put everything together that we've learned about emotion, about human behavior change, about grit, about the situation in one paper called Alignment.

Because really, when you are... aligned, you know what it feels like.

It just takes one or two weeks and they start seeing immediate change in the brain.

But the cognitive reappraisal research of James Gross at Stanford, which we covered in one of the earlier episodes, shows measurable changes in amygdala activation and prefrontal cortex connectivity within eight weeks of consistent practice.

So the changes are structural, visible in neuroimaging, and they persist after the practice period ends.

Structural consolidation, the changes that hold under pressure, that are available in the boardroom, that do not require ongoing effort to maintain, happens over months.

All right, well, 10 years after writing Grit, you now say our success or failure depends as much on the people around us and our environment as it does on ourselves.

Tell us how you were influenced by Stanford professor James Gross.

You know, it was about 2011, I think, that I met this Stanford professor who studies emotion, and what he had discovered is that when people try to regulate their emotion, they don't wanna feel anxious.

What they often do is just try to change emotion directly, but what he had discovered is that it is far wiser to try to change the situation you're in, which changes your thoughts, which in turn change your response to that thought and to that situation.

Yes.

We have a 2003 study from the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, published in Ovid, by researchers Jane Richards, Emily Butler, and James Gross.

It's titled, Emotion Regulation in Romantic Relationships, the Cognitive Consequences of Concealing Feelings.

Yes.

And research on cognitive reappraisal provides another part of the picture.

We have work led by James Gross and others has helped establish that changing how we interpret an emotionally charged situation can alter our emotional response to it.

Neuroimaging studies often find that reappraisal engages frontal parietal systems involved in cognitive control and changes activity in regions involved in emotion and salience, including the amygdala.

So taken together, The research supports a careful conclusion.