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Management Wisdom From a Neuroscientist
Business Journal

Management Wisdom From a Neuroscientist

Dr. Joseph LeDoux explains how emotions drive the behavior of your customers, your employees -- and you

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, such as First, Break All the Rules, 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.

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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?

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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


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