The Benefits of Mixed Emotions | Hidden Brain Media

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Shankar Vedantam:This is Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam. In high school, Naomi Rothman was a shy teenager. That is until she laced up her cleats and stepped on the field for her travel soccer team. Surrounded by teammates she loved, Naomi became a completely different person.Naomi Rothman:We were called the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it was very meaningful to me because I created these really strong friendships and it gave me a lot of confidence. It gave me a sense of self-worth and self-esteem, and I really strongly identified with this team.Shankar Vedantam:There was just one catch.Naomi Rothman:The players on this team predominantly came from the east side of town and played at Harbor High.Shankar Vedantam:Naomi’s school, Santa Cruz High was on the west side of her hometown of Santa Cruz, California.Naomi Rothman:And so during our high school season, we had to play against each other and someone always had to lose.Shankar Vedantam:Harbor and Santa Cruz were always among the top contenders. The rivalry between the schools was intense.Naomi Rothman:Every game we played against one another was high stakes. And these games were some of the most emotionally fraught games that I ever played. And the reason was that I loved these players. I had this deep, genuine affection for the people that I was trying to beat.Shankar Vedantam:The same player she had fought alongside as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were now trying to crush her when Harbor high faced Santa Cruz. Her friends had become her frenemies. Naomi Rothman never forgot what that early experience felt like. Today she’s a psychologist who studies what happens to our minds when we feel like we are being emotionally pulled in opposite directions.Naomi Rothman:It’s absolutely an uncomfortable state. In fact, that will then kind of set the stage for how you engage with your environment, which is essentially to try to get rid of that feeling of discomfort.Shankar Vedantam:The pain paralysis and promise of mixed emotions, this week on Hidden Brain.Sometimes we feel just one single feeling with overwhelming force. We are joyously happy, we are crushingly sad, but sometimes it’s more complicated than that. We feel happy and sad at the same time. At Lehigh University, psychologist Naomi Rothman studies the mixed emotion of ambivalence. She explores how ambivalence changes the way we think and how it changes the way others see us. Naomi Rothman, welcome to Hidden Brain.Naomi Rothman:Thank you so much for having me here with you.Shankar Vedantam:Naomi, you have a young daughter and she recently told you she wanted a hot new toy called a Magic Mixies Cauldron. What is a Magic Mixies Cauldron, and what was your reaction to her request?Naomi Rothman:Apparently this is a toy where there’s a special wand that allows you to mix a potion and it creates a mist to rise in this cute little furry friend called a Magic Mixie appears through the mist. And all she really wants is this toy and all of her friends are obsessed with this toy. It’s kind of constantly on their minds. And when I looked up online kind of the reviews, which is what I always typically do, I was completely ambivalent. There are all these complaints that the potion leaks, it stains your rug, it’s a total waste of money. And it’s like this one and done activity.Shankar Vedantam:Naomi had mixed feelings about getting the toy, but then she started hearing from other moms. They were going to great lengths to get it during a time of limited inventory.Naomi Rothman:I actually had a friend who texted me that she was at Target waiting for the shipment to be unboxed because she was told that they might actually have a delivery of a few of these. And this is a working mother who’s basically hanging out at Target to get one of these Cauldrons. She’s not ambivalent at all. She’s completely committed. I ultimately decided to go ahead and get it, but that was after a whole lot of vacillation. And lo and behold by the time I actually pulled the trigger, the prices had skyrocketed and it’s totally sold out at all of our local Target stores. And my lack of action is going to cost me either time – I’m going to have to go hang out in Target for this next shipment, it’s going to cost me in terms of money – or it’s going to cost me in terms of my daughter’s happiness.Shankar Vedantam:I want to look at another moment in your life, perhaps with slightly more serious stakes, where you also felt ambivalence. You were working on a project with several other colleagues when you experienced a rather severe bout of ambivalence. What happened and how did your colleagues receive your ambivalence?Naomi Rothman:I had this really great opportunity to convene a group of world-class academics to work on a project on ambivalence. And this was a really big deal for me because I’m bringing together experts in different areas of research who, as coming up as an academic, you look up to other scholars, right? These older academic brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles, whatever you want to call them. And here I got to work with them on my area of expertise. They were giving me a seat at their table and I was an expert. So everything starts off great. It’s really generative. I feel really good about what’s going on, but then it starts to take a little bit of a turn because we’re going into areas that I know more about than they do and I realize this. And so there’s this pressure because on the one hand, I feel in some ways, subordinate to them. But on the other hand, this is my meeting. And what happens when the conversation starts to veer is that I feel like I have three options. On one hand, I have this choice that I can remain silent, but a second choice is to play the cheerleader. “Hey guys, this is great. Keep it going, no wrong answers here.” And I felt like a third option is to tell them what I really thought, which was complex. And it’s essentially showing my ambivalence because my sentiments at the time were very positive and negative. And so I was thinking to myself, ultimately, this is a conversation about ambivalence and so ambivalence should be honored here. And I didn’t want just miss out on this opportunity to create something great with these really esteemed scholars.Shankar Vedantam:Naomi tentatively entered the discussion. Instead of cheerleading or criticizing, she hesitantly expressed her mixed feelings. The intervention backfired.Naomi Rothman:The unintended consequences of showing my ambivalence in this meeting is that it indicated my indecision. It indicated lack of assertiveness or dominance, and it actually invited others in this meeting to take charge of the conversation. But this was supposed to be my party, this was supposed to be my meeting. And that was kind of a difficult outcome to stomach.Shankar Vedantam:And in some ways, this matches what you have found in some of your research when people view others who express ambivalence, they actually look down on them or potentially even want to take advantage of them.Naomi Rothman:Yeah. So, in the first few studies for my dissertation, I showed that people tend to have negative perceptions of those who are ambivalent. So those who are expressing that they feel tension and conflict about something and that’s a result of their mixed emotions. People are more likely to see that ambivalent person compared to a happy person, an angry person, a neutral person, as less dominant, less confident and less assertive. And what I found in those studies was that the reaction to perceiving an ambivalent person in that way is that they had this intention to take control. And they even took more money from the ambivalent partner than they took from the angry and the neutral partner.Shankar Vedantam:And I’m thinking this must also be the case when we interact with experts of all kinds. When I go and talk with a doctor, for example, I expect the doctor to be decisive to say, “Here’s what’s wrong, here’s what we should do.” And if the doctor expresses ambivalence, I start to question: is this really a good doctor?Naomi Rothman:I think you’re really onto something there. And we’ve collected some data on that very question with Jessecae Marsh, who’s also at Lehigh University, we showed that when people read a scenario about a physician who was ambivalent, right? They were torn and conflicted. The patients presenting symptoms for both infection A and infection B. That, in fact, those physicians were rated as more indecisive, as less well-informed, as lower in job performance. And people were less likely to say that they would follow their advice. And so I think you’re right, that there’s this sense that we consult experts to produce decisons. And if an expert signals their lack of ability to decide, we tend to lose faith in their expertise.Shankar Vedantam:One of the fascinating studies that you have done looks at the way leaders of companies are judged during earnings calls when they express ambivalence. Can you tell me about this research and what you found Naomi?Naomi Rothman:We were really interested in what are the implications of a CEO expressing emotional ambivalence in an earnings call – in particular, with relation to how the analysts respond to their ambivalence in terms of the way they show skepticism. And so what we did as we collected data from earnings calls, we coded it using a text analysis software. And lo and behold, what we found is that indeed leaders who show their ambivalence in earnings calls, CEOs, CFOs, receive more skepticism from the analysts and from the marketplace. And that women, this effect is enhanced for women executives.Shankar Vedantam:And so these executives when they express ambivalence they invite more harsh questioning. They face what you call a scrutiny penalty. The performance of that company is examined and judged more harshly.Naomi Rothman:Exactly.Shankar Vedantam:So what is true, of course, in the realm of business is probably triply true in the realm of politics. Politicians certainly are expected to be decisive and confident. People who are presidents or people who are running for president are expected to know precisely what they think on every issue. I want to play you a political attack ad from some years ago, that targeted then US Senator John Kerry, who was running for president in 2004.Attack ad against Senator John Kerry:In which direction would John Kerry lead. Kerry voted for the Iraq war, opposed it, supported it and now opposes it again. He bragged about voting for the 87 billion to support our troops before he voted against it. He voted for education reform and now opposes it. He claims he’s against increasing Medicare premiums, but voted five times to do so. John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows.Shankar Vedantam:And I remember this ad from the time it ran back in 2004, Naomi. And I remember it really was a devastating ad because it painted John Kerry as someone who really didn’t know his own mind. Someone who was wishy washy, who would basically go whichever way the wind blows. What do you think ads like this say about how we view ambivalent political leaders?Naomi Rothman:(laughs) Yeah, so I think that that’s a, is a wonderful example of how there can be some liabilities for leaders in sharing their ambivalence. Everyone wants a leader to be black and white because otherwise they might look inauthentic if they changed and were inconsistent. And there’s evidence that says we would like a dominant leader. We think that they’re going to help us and provide us with certainty about how to act. And it’s very interesting to notice that that does seem to have emerged as the prototypical model of what it looks like to be a leader.Shankar Vedantam:So we’ve talked about how ambivalence can cause us to miss out on hot Christmas deals or cause our colleagues to get upset with us. We’ve looked at how we judge leaders poorly if they express ambivalence. Besides all these effects, can we talk a moment about the subjective experience of ambivalence? I feel like in my own life when I have felt torn, this is often an unpleasant feeling. I don’t necessarily enjoy feeling ambivalent about things.Naomi Rothman:Absolutely. It’s considered to be an uncomfortable state. In fact, there’s decades of research in the attitude ambivalence literature that draws on dissonance theory right – which assumes that when you have an inconsistent state, perhaps like attitude ambivalence, you’re going to be feeling pretty uncomfortable, feeling torn and conflicted. And that, that will then kind of set the stage for how you engage with your environment, which is essentially to try to get rid of that feeling of discomfort. So there’s a long history of research that has really established that ambivalence is quite an uncomfortable state.Shankar Vedantam:When we come back, what Naomi’s research shows about the surprising upsides of ambivalence. You’re listening to Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam.This is Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam. Ambivalence has many downsides. It’s personally uncomfortable. It irritates our friends and colleagues. It even encourages others to take advantage of us. When we express ambivalence, people may think we are less competent or ready for leadership, but it turns out that is hardly the whole story. Naomi, you’ve given me a couple of examples from your life when ambivalence did not produce salutary outcomes, but I want you to tell me a story about a time when you deliberately ignored your ambivalence. Tell me about your real estate adventure in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.Naomi Rothman:When my husband and I got married, we had both lived in New York City for about 10 years each. And this is 10 years of living in small apartments, overpaying rent, dealing with roommates. We both really wanted to own a home. So we took trips out to the country on weekends. We kind of daydreamed about the idyllic life living in a real environment with these beautiful old colonial farmhouses. And we finally found a place that we felt like was us. We fell in love with this house. It was this remodeled farmhouse in Bucks County, just above the Delaware River. It had been remodeled by a designer from New York and it just really aesthetically appealed to both of our tastes. But at the time I actually had these strong feelings that we might be jumping into something that we hadn’t fully weighed the pros and cons on, but I didn’t share this with my husband. And turns out my husband was also ambivalent, but he just didn’t share this with me either. And the reality was that we were not prepared for country living for a whole number of reasons. One is, it took my husband over two hours, one way to get to his job in New York City.Shankar Vedantam:Oh my God.Naomi Rothman:Two, just like you don’t get to choose your coworkers, you don’t get to choose all of your neighbors. Three, it was a quite small home, family couldn’t visit very comfortably. It was off the road, a road that floods. We knew nobody out there and neither of us had actually owned a home, let alone lived in the country and nor did we know how to take care of this beautiful and expansive garden. And we had ground hogs, we had rodents, we had deers, we had trees that fell down. We had bamboo that took over our front yard every year. We had pebbles in the driveway that would wash into the road every time it rained. We had to literally rake it with our own hands every time this happened. We were just in so over our heads. We went actually over our budget to purchase it. Even though we could see some of these downsides, we leaped because we wanted stability and we wanted closure on this long search and in our lives, and we were ignoring the negative cues. And in the end it was not a great choice for us. We essentially lived so far away from my spouse’s work that he had to couch surf during the week in New York City at friends houses because the commute was unbearably long. I ended up, we ended up having a daughter in 2015. In 2016, I was up for tenure. I was raising her, she was a toddler and I was pregnant with our second kid and my spouse couldn’t even come home during the week. So we sold the house four years after purchasing it, of course, in a loss. And again, I wanted closure and I wanted my family to be together. I wanted to not be lonely that I just had to get out.Shankar Vedantam:The story in many ways matches what your research has found in terms of the effect that ambivalence has on the way we make judgements. In one of your studies, you primed participants’ emotional state by having them write about a time when they felt happy, sad, or ambivalent, and then you gave them an estimation task. You asked them to estimate the average daily temperature in major US cities like New York, Atlanta, and San Francisco. What did you find when you had them do this? And what do we find in general ambivalence produces in terms of the way people approach decisions?Naomi Rothman:Yeah, so this was some interesting work I did with Laura Rees, Reuven Lehavy and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, who were all at Michigan at the time. And we primed people to feel emotional ambivalence. We had them recall a time in their life where they felt really mixed, really happy and sad at the same time. And to really write about this experience so that they could relive the experience and that somebody who was reading it would also relive that experience along with them. We were really trying to put them in that state. And then we did a series of studies where we explored whether, you know, priming people to feel mixed emotions made them more open and receptive to peer advice. And then we had them do these tasks, these estimation tasks that were unrelated to the ambivalence that they were experiencing: about the weather, about college tuition rates – things that they might not have known a whole lot about. And we found that in fact, lo and behold, priming people to have mixed feelings, not only made them more open and receptive to peer advice, but also more accurate in their estimates. And the way we described this was that our emotions perhaps lead us to be biased in particular ways. But that if you have multiple emotions, the error and the bias can be canceled out. And therefore, in fact, it can make us more accurate in our predictions and in our estimates about the world and in our judgments.Shankar Vedantam:So much of this is premised in the idea that our emotions in some ways are providing us with signals. So when our emotions tell us something, they tell us how to respond to the world, how to behave in the world, how to walk in the world. And I think what you’re showing with these studies is that ambivalence itself actually is not just a state of uncertainty, it’s actually a signal of how we ought to behave in the world.Naomi Rothman:Yeah. I think that’s really well said. There’s a approach to the study of emotions by Schwarz and Clore who argue that affect is information. That when we have emotions, that it actually provides us with information and about our environment, and that emotions are actually here for a reason. And, if you pay attention to your emotional cues, it can signal perhaps an appropriate response to the challenges that you might be facing. And so, we know that from a whole large, beautiful body of work by Jeff Larsen, that mixed emotions, emotional ambivalence tend to be triggered by pretty emotionally complex situations. Like college graduation day, dormitory move out day, watching the movie Life Is Beautiful, and that these are pretty contradictory, complex situations. And so one thought that Shimul Melwani and I have written about is, maybe emotional ambivalence exists in part to help us solve contradictory and complex problems.Shankar Vedantam:So another way to put this perhaps might be is that one of the functions of an emotion like ambivalence is to protect us against impulsive decisions.Naomi Rothman:I think that’s absolutely right. In fact, I’m conducting right now a meta-analysis with some scholars at UT Austin, where we’re really trying to unpack the conditions under which ambivalence yields greater learning and exploration versus the conditions under which it leads to less exploration and learning. And one of the things that we have identified is that, in this closure imperative, this desire to have an answer, get closure on a decision, move forward in our lives, we really may do less exploration of the information that exists in our world. But guess what? Under low closure imperative, you do more exploration and learning.Shankar Vedantam:So being in an ambivalent state of mind changes the way we think in a range of different ways. I want to play you a clip from the movie Father of the Bride. In this scene, the actor Steve Martin is playing a dad whose daughter is about to get married.Steve Martin :I realized at that moment that I was never going to come home again and see Annie at the top of the stairs. Never going to see her again at our breakfast table in her nightgown and socks. I suddenly realized what was happening. Annie was all grown up and leaving us, and something inside began to hurt.Shankar Vedantam:So Naomi, researchers have used this movie clip to give people a sense of what it’s like to feel ambivalence. Can you tell me about the research experiments they’ve conducted and what they found?Naomi Rothman:Yeah, so this is the kind of foundational research on emotional ambivalence that Christina Fong conducted. What she was able to do was prime people to feel emotional ambivalence through clips like this, and then had them engage in creativity tasks. And this is the work that has very much inspired a lot of the scholarship on the benefits of emotional ambivalence, particularly for cognitive flexibility and other outcomes like that. What she was able to show was that priming people to feel mixed emotions tells people that they may be in an unusual environment and that it cues to them unusual associations in the subsequent tasks that they engage in. And we’ve done some research recently where we’ve shown that feeling emotional ambivalence makes you more cognitively flexible. And what I mean by that is that you not only think about concepts in a more broad and inclusive way, if you’re feeling ambivalent, you’ll actually process information in a more cognitively flexible manner.Shankar Vedantam:In other words, when we feel ambivalence, our minds are processing a situation that feels complicated. When we shut down and ambivalence, we can shut down thinking in complex ways about an issue. We start to prioritize decisiveness over accuracy. There’s another important insight here. When we permit ambivalence, we can also change how the people around us are thinking. Naomi has found that people who express ambivalence can help to move negotiation partners toward a result that works well for everyone.Naomi Rothman:Yes. So, the research I conducted initially the people react kind of dominantly towards their ambivalent partner, particularly when they’re in these competitive negotiations, right? Where my win is your loss, your loss is my win. But I wasn’t satisfied completely with that answer and so I set out to examine with Greg Northcraft, what happens when you change the social norms? What happens when you actually encourage people to cooperate with their ambivalent counterpart? Does ambivalence have a different effect in that more cooperative setting? And I trained an actor from the Tisch School of Arts to express ambivalence. She was torn and conflicted in her nonverbal behavior. And I had negotiators watch a video of this partner before they engaged in negotiation with her and report their perceptions of her. She was perceived, just as in my prior studies, as less dominant. But in the negotiations with cooperative goals where I want to win but not at your expense, that ambivalence in that context in fact inspired better outcomes. But it seems like it has to do with setting a cooperative context to create social norms where we’re sitting actually on the same side of the table, that we realize that this is a complex problem, we’re working interdependently. And that that’s precisely the situation where your ambivalence makes me work a little harder, makes me problem solve a little bit better.Shankar Vedantam:We talked earlier about how we have stereotypes of leaders and leadership whereby we see decisive leaders as being competent leaders, effective leaders, and people who come across as ambivalent as indecisive or incompetent. But there’s also been work looking at how leaders who are ambivalent are able to take in more information about complex situations. Can you talk about this work? I mean, what is the upside of ambivalence when it comes to leadership?Naomi Rothman:Yeah, so I just really love this research where we have been exploring – both in experimental laboratory context as well as in the real world with consultants – what is the effect of having a leader who’s torn and conflicted, who’s ambivalent about a project? And what we have found across these three separate studies is that leaders who are ambivalent, in fact, seek more information from their team members. And that has this benefit of then modeling a style of leadership that’s perhaps more democratic and the team members start seeking more information from each other, and the team performs better compared to when leaders experience less ambivalence.Shankar Vedantam:But there’s paradox here. So ambivalence is, we punish ambivalence when leaders express them, but it turns out ambivalence helps make people better leaders. How do you solve this paradox?Naomi Rothman:I have started to answer this question in some of my work. I think this is where the science currently stands is wanting to understand when is it going to be fruitful and when is it not. When you have ambivalence and you share it in a highly individualistic, competitive situation, it’s not going to serve you. But if you can first create cooperative norms where we’re on the same side, that that’s the first step for then harnessing the benefits of sharing our ambivalence with others.Shankar Vedantam:I’m thinking though in the political sphere, when you’re running for office, I mean, that’s, in some way is the definition of a zero-sum game, if you win, I lose, if I win, you lose, only one person can win an election. Is it possible that expressing ambivalence in the course of a campaign is in fact dangerous and counterproductive to actually getting elected – but once you are elected, expressing ambivalence, especially within closed door settings where you are surrounded by other people who are trying to come to the right decision on a matter of policy might actually be effective? So in other words, is it possible that we need to be strategic not just about when we experience ambivalence, but when we express it?Naomi Rothman:Oh yeah, I love that. And so we have shown in some research recently that yeah, you’re not going to promote the ambivalent leader, but you know what, they actually are also perceived as more ethical. They actually also are more likely to take the perspective of their employees. And, in fact, be more effective once they get there.Shankar Vedantam:There’s also been some really fascinating work here Naomi, looking at how ambivalence might change how we orient ourselves towards the meaning of life, how much meaning we derive from life. Can you talk about this work? What’s the relationship between experiencing ambivalence and being able to derive greater meaning from our existence?Naomi Rothman:Yeah, so there’s this really fascinating research by Raul Berrios and colleagues that is kind of inspired by some writing that Jeff Larsen did several years ago, who argued that when you have mixed emotions, it allows you to kind of take both the good with the bad. And in the research by Raul, found that, in fact, when you have mixed emotions, perhaps in the face of contradictory goals, that you also are more likely to experience eudaimonic well-being, which is a form of wellbeing that is rooted in meaning making. So essentially it finds that there’s this importance of having mixed emotions in the search for meaning in life and for resolving our conflicted goals.Shankar Vedantam:So in some ways, being able to see that we are pulled in different ways, allows us in some ways to see the complexity of the shades of life, if you will, and perhaps see how rich that tapestry can be.Naomi Rothman:I think that’s exactly right.Shankar Vedantam:When we come back, how to put ambivalence to work in your own life. You’re listening to Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam.This is Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam. Is ambivalence a good thing, or a bad thing? Turns out, my answer to that question is ambivalent. Ambivalence can help us see the world more clearly and act more creatively, but it can also make us feel uncomfortable and seem weak. Naomi, you grew up with a model of someone who productively used ambivalence in his daily life. Who was this person, and where did his love of ambivalence come from?Naomi Rothman:Yes. So, I’ve been thinking long and hard about how my father influenced me with respect to my own research. And so, yeah my dad was this guy from New York. He spent several years in the late 60s and 70s working towards a PhD in Renaissance literature at UC Berkeley, where he met my mother. And he actually never finished his dissertation because he was drawn away by a larger purpose to teach writing at UC Santa Cruz. And he saw this as a way to give people voice and thereby kind of support their participation in democracy. And he was just beloved. He was beloved by his students. He was beloved by his colleagues, his bosses. Hundreds people came to his memorial service and they wanted to speak about kind of the impact, his impact on their lives and how he changed their lives. And in a few cases, people even told me that he saved their lives. So you can imagine he’s taught me many things. But two pivotal lessons were about ambivalence. The first was to identify ambivalence in the world and the second is the value of ambivalence as a leadership strength. So, my dad taught me to identify ambivalence through Shakespeare plays. During my childhood we went to every single Shakespeare play performed by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. And I’ll never forget this other thing that my dad used to do all the time. I went to college at UC Davis and when he would drive me to campus, there’s an exit near Fairfield, California called Cordelia. And so without fail, every time we drove past this exit, my dad would always retell the story of Cordelia in King Lear. And it’s the story of a complex relationship between a father and a daughter. Lear asks for professions of love from his three daughters to determine basically how to divide the land of his kingdom between them. And Cordelia sisters, Goneril and Regan, give deceitfully lavish speeches that basically profess their love, flatter his vanity.And Cordelia basically sees right through her sister’s feigned professions of love and kind of refuses to do the same. And Lear deems her answer as too simple. And he asks her, “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.” And Cordelia replies, “Nothing, my Lord. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond; no more nor less.” And Lear then exiles her as a response to her honesty. And so, clearly there’s just a lot to unpack here, especially as the daughter of somebody who totally was beloved by so many people. But one of the things that I learned from these conversations was to notice ambivalence, to notice it in relationships, in emotions, in the world. And that ambivalence, contradiction, complexity, are just a core part of our lived experience.And it deserves to be noticed. He also taught me the value of ambivalence and particularly for leaders. And he did this through his interpersonal style. So you might wonder, what in the world does this even look like? Well, my dad often sounded like he was quite torn and conflicted. Um, he would rarely just agree or disagree. My mom has said that this could be rather frustrating, (laughs) but he was resistant to taking sides. He was uncomfortable with premature certainty. And in fact, on his tombstone, we have a quote from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, which is “Much virtue in if.” And the full quote is, “your if is the only peacemaker; much virtue in if.”And so this really epitomizes him as an educator, as an administrator, as a father. He was really just at his best in conversation with other people. He was so curious. He was so ambivalent. He was so open-ended. He loved to ask hard questions. He would often start his sentences with things like, “well, what if,” or “perhaps,” or “I wonder.” And there was just so much virtue in it. He actually helped people work through difficult problems. And so, it’s totally undeniable that his interpersonal style inspired my research on the benefits of sharing your emotional ambivalence.Shankar Vedantam:So researchers have found that people who like your father embrace what sometimes called a paradox mindset are able to use ambivalence effectively. What exactly is a paradox mindset, Naomi?Naomi Rothman:This is this fascinating research conducted by scholars including Ella Miron-Spektor, Amy Ingram, Josh Keller, Wendy Smith, Marianne Lewis, who have suggested that if you develop a paradox mindset where you consider the world with a both-and approach, instead of an either-or approach, it can be really helpful for dealing with competing demands. So one assumption is that competing demands ,like the ones that people have really experienced through the pandemic, are very uncomfortable. And what these authors found was that, although tensions tend to arise when you have these competing demands, the tensions themselves are not the problem, it’s actually people’s mindsets. And, if people believe that addressing one demand means neglecting another, that they’re going to struggle. But with a paradox mindset, people accept and they learn to live with the tensions that are associated with their competing demands. And they realized that one demand can then actually enable another and that they might need both of them to thrive.Shankar Vedantam:In many ways, I think the paradox might set might be the solution to a problem that we discussed earlier, which is that ambivalence is a naturally uncomfortable state. Many of us try and simplify the problems we’re seeing to come down on one side or the other. But of course, we’ve also seen that ambivalence allows us to see the world in all kinds of complex, interesting and creative ways. And so the paradox mindset says: if you can increase people’s capacity to tolerate the discomfort of ambivalence, you can derive the benefits of ambivalence without being overwhelmed by the discomfort of it. Is that sort of summarizing the idea?Naomi Rothman:I think that is summarizing the idea beautifully. And I think it’s actually still a hypothesis. I think we’re still wanting to unpack exactly the role that paradox mindset might have in helping people harness the benefits of ambivalence and deal with the discomfort.Shankar Vedantam:So there are some situations where deliberately cultivating ambivalence can be a way of managing or limiting disappointment. Can you talk about that, sort of using ambivalence almost strategically to head off disappointment or to head off feelings of failure or setback?Naomi Rothman:Yeah, so this is this really interesting research where people in fact are found to cultivate ambivalence when they face uncertainty about what will happen. So perhaps they feel uncertain that they can obtain like a coveted job and in order to protect their feelings in the event that they’ve failed to get what they want, they create mixed emotions or mixed attitudes as a self-protective strategy to buffer their feelings from failure. I have had experiences in my own life where I have done this as well.Shankar Vedantam:Can you talk about them, Naomi?Naomi Rothman:Absolutely. So, it’s kind of a funny story, I mean, now in retrospect – Which is that when dating my spouse I really wanted it to work out with him, but I was of course uncertain if it would because you just never know. And I remember going on vacation with my brother’s family and while I was away for that week, I built up these very mixed feelings about my spouse. And it’s obvious now to see that it was definitely a self-protective strategy in the face of possible rejection. I was preemptively protecting myself by cultivating ambivalence. And I actually think that it made both my spouse and myself think more deeply about the other person, to really see each other, to see both the positives and the negatives, and whether we were a match. And I actually would say I was accurate. He’s my favorite person. And perhaps my ability to predict that, our match cultivated by my emotional ambivalence.Shankar Vedantam:In some ways you did with him what you didn’t do with the house in Bucks County. By allowing yourself to engage in ambivalence, you were able to see things perhaps more clearly and in the long run that might have actually been an asset.Naomi Rothman:I think you’re so right.Shankar Vedantam:I’m struck by the fact Naomi, that your research in some ways has been inspired by events in your own life. But also you have taken the strands of your research and tried to apply it to your own life, to experiences you’ve gone through yourself. I’m wondering if you can tell me about the time when your mom was really sick, and how you applied the insights from your own research to what your mom was going through?Naomi Rothman:Certainly so a year and a half into the COVID pandemic, my mother noticed that she had some shortness of breath and months later they diagnosed her with early stage lung cancer. And she was not somebody who had been a smoker, but her parents had also had lung cancer. And she was going to have surgery. I flew out to support her through this surgery and we were sitting in the hospital room waiting five hours for the surgeon to be ready. And I remember feeling these waves of anxiety. I kind of noticed that I kept having the urge to amplify my positive emotions and to suppress my worry and my anxiety. And, when I was younger, I would often amplify my positive emotions and I would suppress my negative one. I used to have these mantras that I kind of wrote on little soccer balls and gave to my friends, which was like, “it’s what you make of it” or “make the best of it,” or “mind over matter.”And I think that that was a more kind of a less mature way of kind of dealing with my emotions, but not an uncommon one. And so what I had found was that these mantras didn’t really help. And in this moment in the hospital room, I kind of caught myself trying to do this cheerleading. Along the lines of, “You’re doing great. Good job, mom.” These kind of throw away positive affirmations that we kind of so frequently use to kind of manage the moods in the group or in the room. And what I have learned to do is to actually process my negative emotions instead of suppress them.It’s something that I practice. It’s something I’m pretty intentional about: noticing my feelings, identifying them and being curious about them. And so what I found myself doing in my mom’s hospital room was to just stop, and to notice that I was having this inclination to kind of amplify the positive and suppress the negative. And I don’t want to judge people for doing that. But I think for my mother and myself, it’s just not true to us. And so I wanted to honor the truth, I think of the emotional situation, the situation we found ourselves in in the hospital room. And perhaps like Cordelia, I didn’t want to lie.Shankar Vedantam:And what did you say to her? What did you say to your mom? How did you express the negatives?Naomi Rothman:I said, “Mom, I’m noticing that I’m having this inclination to want to cheerleader you and to boost us up. And it’s because I’m anxious. You know, I’m feeling worried and I want to do my best not to just suppress that.”Shankar Vedantam:And what was the effect of doing this on your mom do you think, that you were expressing not just your cheerleading and optimism, but also putting in place the context of your anxiety and worry?Naomi Rothman:If my own experience tells me anything it’s that when people acknowledge their mixed feelings in an honest and real authentic way that it’s comforting to others, particularly to those who are also feeling emotional ambivalence or mixed feelings that it’s completely normal and natural.Shankar Vedantam:Do you feel like your mom felt that way? I mean, did she say anything either before or since that acknowledged to you that in fact she did find it helpful to hear you express both the positive and the negative?Naomi Rothman:Yeah. So my mother in the moment doesn’t often share her feelings, but she does this beautiful thing where she sends me letters and notes.Shankar Vedantam:I asked Naomi to read me the letter her mother sent her after the surgery.Naomi Rothman:She writes. “Dear Naomi, in the conversation we had I felt so totally seen and understood. I felt as though you know me deeply better than anyone in my life now. Thank you for being the intelligent, probing, compassionate person you are. I feel so blessed and proud to be your mother. I feel as though you found your way to carry on Dad’s work in the important contribution you have to make about the difficulty and the importance of embracing ambivalence and holding off premature certainty. Love, Mom.”Shankar Vedantam:Naomi Rothman is a psychologist at Lehigh University. Naomi, I can say this without ambivalence, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.Naomi Rothman:Thank you so much for having me.Shankar Vedantam:Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I’m Hidden Brain’s executive editor. This week for our unsung hero, we thought we turn the mic over to a listener and share a story from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero. Today’s story comes from Jackie Briggs. The moment that changed Jackie’s life came on a Saturday afternoon in August 2006.Jackie Briggs:I was attending what was billed as a woman’s health conference. Turned out it was really a pitch for cosmetic surgery, which really irritated me, but anyway, at that point in my life, I was 52 years old and for several years I’d been working 60 hour work weeks in this high pressure IT job and I had very little time for myself. So I really wanted to go and hear this one particular speaker. As a few 100 women milled around different booths, picking up brochures and eating crudites offered by those black-panted, white-shirted wait staff, this lovely, dark-haired woman came up to me and she said, “Excuse me, but I can’t help but notice your arm.” I had what my boss later described as what he thought was a rose tattoo. It was on my upper right bicep. And I was uncharacteristically wearing a sleeveless dress that day.Well, this woman who I have come to refer to as Angela – although I really don’t know if that’s how she introduced herself or if that’s the name I have since given her – but she asked me if I’d seen a dermatologist about this smallish, irregular, almost birthmark-looking spot, and I assured her I had. She pressed me and said, “When?” And I had to stop to think, and I counted back the months and no, years, it had been over three years. I was supposed to follow up a year after, but I was so caught up in my job I never did. The dermatologist office never reached out to me either. So blah, blah, blah, time moves on. So this woman urged me to call my doctor Monday morning first thing. “Please don’t wait,” she said. She explained she was a nurse for a plastic surgeon. And as she gently touched my arm, she said, “Really, don’t wait.”And thanks to her, I didn’t wait. And the following in weeks of doctor’s appointments, biopsies, and then the surgery are all a bit of a blur but, because everything moved very fast. But my melanoma was removed and my six inch ragged scar that travels almost from the top of my shoulders down my arm is my everyday reminder of her: Angela, my guardian angel. She saved my life. Melanoma is a cancer that metastasizes faster than any other except pancreatic, and if I hadn’t listened to her, I probably wouldn’t be here. So to my hero, nurse Angela, thank you for my life.Shankar Vedantam:Jackie Briggs of Portland, Oregon. She tells us that about two years after that conference and her melanoma surgery, she quit that 60 hour a week IT job. She also took up mountain climbing and summited 12 peaks. When we spoke with her, she was happily retired, going kayaking, hiking, and motorcycle riding whenever possible.If you enjoy Hidden Brain or My Unsung Hero, please consider supporting our work financially. Find out how by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. Hundreds of listeners have already shown they have our back. Please consider joining their ranks. It will mean so much to our team. Again, that’s support.hiddenbrain.org. I’m Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.