Let’s imagine a very serious profession, one that demands concentration and fast decisions, and let’s take… a pilot. That’s a responsible job, right? Hundreds of hours of training, the ability to handle non-standard situations, knowing the protocols and following them. Especially if we’re talking about a Boeing: hundreds of people, maybe even with kids, flying toward new experiences, new opportunities. What place could emotions possibly have here! That’s a privilege reserved for the passengers only. Nothing but cold, sharp bloody reason! Switch your feelings off right now – look at aaaall that responsibility you’ve got.
The problem is that this advice is impossible to follow, and its impossibility costs quite a lot. A person shows up who is alive, cheerful, not afraid to show what they feel – and they’re told: “You’re not allowed to feel anything. Cold reason.” And they honestly try. And, of course, it doesn’t work. Then comes the most interesting part: not “the advice is bad,” but “I’m bad.” I’m a “failure.” So my character is wrong. So I was born the wrong way. So this isn’t for me. The list goes on, and most of us know it by heart, don’t we? I’m one of them. That’s one of the reasons why, a decade or so later, I took up studying neuroscience, psychology and the rest, and that’s exactly why I’m here writing this article.
What I Found in the Aviation Manuals
The FAA – the US Federal Aviation Administration – devotes an entire chapter of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge to Aeronautical Decision-Making. Inside it there’s a checklist called IMSAFE, which the FAA suggests a pilot run through before every flight. Six items, and two of them are these:
Stress – Am I under psychological pressure from the job? Do I have money, health, or family problems?
Emotion – Am I emotionally upset?
So the task is to evaluate your own state.
And in the FAA brochure “Are You Fit to Fly?” there’s this line:
We like to say we leave our problems on the ground when we fly but, for most of us, that’s not really true. If we’re worried or even very happy about something, we may dwell on the topic at the expense of our flight duties or our decision-making may be compromised.
A person’s state affects their decisions, which means it can’t simply be crossed out of the equation. Just like in physics: you can’t throw a variable or a coefficient out of a formula just because you don’t like it. The state has to be accounted for.
Take kinetic energy, Eₖ = mv² / 2. Throw out that inconvenient and, frankly, ugly 2, and by your calculations every fall becomes twice as painful. The floor, just like physics itself, stays exactly the same despite your own desires.
So what should a pilot do if, to “Am I emotionally upset?”, the honest answer is “yes”? The answer is simple: if the state creates a risk that you have no way to compensate for – don’t fly today. Postponing the flight is also a decision.
And notice what exactly creates the risk. Not the emotion as such, but the emotion that came in unnoticed and unaccounted for.
Is Suppressing the Same as Regulating?
Right about now someone has read this far and is already thinking: “So what, do whatever you feel like?”
No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. Between “switch everything off” and “oh well, that’s how I feel” there’s a third thing, and it’s called emotion regulation. James Gross has a model where the strategies are laid out by the stage at which the emotion arises: you can choose or change the situation itself, you can redirect your attention, you can reappraise what’s happening. You can feel fear, anger or anxiety and still choose the action that fits the goal rather than the first impulse.
Or you can do something fundamentally different: suppress the outward expression of an emotion that has already arisen. Force yourself not to cry, not to show fear, keep a stone face. In the scientific literature this is called expressive suppression, and formally it’s also a regulation strategy: the last on the list, the latest in time. Except it works differently from what people tend to think: we change the expression of the emotion. Not necessarily what’s going on inside.
Let me give an example with my daughter. She’s six, and she can’t swim yet. We’re at the beach: sun, joy, salty sea. We’re swimming, and suddenly a small wave, and… she swallows some water. Unpleasant. And scary. She starts crying, which is perfectly understandable to anyone who has ever been to the sea and swum. But I can also see the whole chain: crying → watching the waves less → opening her mouth → more water gets in → more panic.
What do you do? Say “don’t feel that nasty taste and don’t be scared”? The fear isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the taste; it’s just going to become shameful on top of that.
Or you can do it differently: close your mouth, sweetie, or you’ll get even more water in; look at the shore – see, it’s close, you’ll make it; and there, if you want to, you can cry once you’re safe.
That is exactly the redirecting of attention toward the goal, the explanation of what’s happening and why it matters to do it this way right now, and separately leaving room for the feeling, just a little later and somewhere it won’t ruin anything.
By the time she reached the shore and sat down to rest, she no longer felt like crying :)
Or Maybe Emotions Can Just Go to Hell?
Fine, it’s a sweet story. But what about the data?
In my Neural Angel series I explore the nature of feelings (and keep exploring it), and honestly, there is no single point of view there. But there are two lines that come at it from opposite sides and arrive at roughly the same point.
The first is the classic work of Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio on people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These patients could retain perfectly normal intellectual abilities. And yet their lives fell apart.
Intact intelligence and the ability to reason logically are not enough for normal decision-making if the systems that link a choice to an emotional and bodily assessment of its consequences are damaged. (The mechanism of this link is still debated and disputed; the clinical picture itself, however, is well documented.)
The second line is Lisa Feldman Barrett, and she breaks the very picture of “reason versus emotion.” She disagrees with Damasio on a great deal, yet the conclusion comes out quite in tune.
In the Theory of Constructed Emotion she starts by criticizing the old notion that cognition and emotion are two separate systems fighting each other for control of behavior. The brain doesn’t think first and feel later. It does both in a single motion.
In her model the brain is constantly predicting, regulating the state of the body (allostasis), and receiving information about the internal state of the organism through interoception. Emotional experience arises inside that motion, not on top of it.
So the very idea of “let the rational brain calculate everything first, just without emotions” starts to look strange to the point of being off-putting: no such separate rational being has been found inside the brain… at least not yet.
What Happens to the One Who Actually Obeyed
Researchers James Gross and Robert Levenson asked people to watch emotional material and behave so that an outside observer wouldn’t be able to tell they were feeling anything at all. And people managed: the outward expression really did decrease.
Then come two results, and the first, in my view, is worth reading twice.
Suppression did nothing to change the subjective experience of the unpleasant emotion. Nothing at all. People felt exactly as much as those who hadn’t been asked to do anything. Only the face changed.
The second result: physiology didn’t calm down either, but shifted into a rather odd mixed state: somatic activity and heart rate went down. But blink rate went up, and skin conductance and vascular measures pointed to increased sympathetic activation. The body didn’t relax; it took on extra work.
And that energy has to come from somewhere. Jane Richards and James Gross showed that people who suppressed the expression of their emotions remembered less of what was being said at the time. Attention was going to self-control.
But those who were told “look at it like a professional, detached” instead of “hold your face” remembered everything no worse than ordinary viewers, and on some tasks even better. So what we pay for is not regulation as such. We pay specifically for the stone face.
Which is why a person can sit there with an absolutely impenetrable expression while their brain has by no means turned into an impartial calculator. It’s busy holding that expression.
Regulated ≠ Calm
A person who regulates their emotions well is not the same as a calm person. Yes, yes. Surprise!
A person can be very emotional and regulate their emotions beautifully. Or they can look completely collected and regulate them very much poorly. In Gross and John’s questionnaire data you can see it: people who regularly suppress the expression of their emotions experience less of the pleasant and, at the same time, more of the unpleasant. And those who habitually change how they look at the situation instead, like a professional, are the other way round: more of the pleasant and less of the unpleasant.
That said, there really are people who are calmer by temperament or who simply express far less outwardly. And there are those who find it hard to understand and name what exactly they feel. There’s a separate term for this, alexithymia: difficulty identifying and describing one’s own feelings.
A person can look incredibly “cold” and even have a poor grasp of their own emotional state themselves, but that doesn’t mean the emotional and physiological reaction is absent. Part of the alexithymia research shows that the conscious assessment of one’s state and the physiological reactions can come apart: the body reacts, but the person isn’t aware of it. The data here are mixed and the picture varies from study to study, but the distinction itself holds: “I don’t feel anything” and “there is no reaction” are two completely different statements, and they shouldn’t be confused.
And this isn’t only about alexithymia: even when there’s nothing to name, the brain doesn’t switch into some special neutral mode.
So, What About the Failure?
Let’s return to the person who honestly tried to switch their feelings off and couldn’t.
They couldn’t not because their character is wrong, and not because they were born wrong. They couldn’t because nobody can. Not them, not me, not the pilot of that very responsible Boeing. The best available to humans is to notice their state and factor it into the decision.
So before an important event, in a serious situation, don’t try to switch your feelings off. Instead, honestly answer that same question: “Am I emotionally upset?” And if the answer is “yes,” it’s worth remembering that postponing is also a decision.
Sources
Aviation
- FAA. Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (FAA-H-8083-25C), Ch. 2 “Aeronautical Decision-Making” – the IMSAFE checklist. PDF
- FAA. Are You Fit to Fly? FAA Safety Briefing, 2023. PDF
Decisions and Emotions
- Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50(1–3), 7–15.
- Bechara, A., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (1996). Failure to respond autonomically to anticipated future outcomes following damage to prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 6(2), 215–225.
- Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(2), 239–271.
Constructed Emotion
- Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.
- Barrett, L. F., & Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429.
Regulation and Suppression
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.
- Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional suppression: Physiology, self-report, and expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 970–986.
- Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.
- Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: The cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 410–424.
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.
Alexithymia
- Papciak, A. S., Feuerstein, M., & Spiegel, J. A. (1985). Stress reactivity in alexithymia: Decoupling of physiological and cognitive responses. Journal of Human Stress, 11(3), 135–142.
- Stone, L. A., & Nielson, K. A. (2001). Intact physiological response to arousal with impaired emotional recognition in alexithymia. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 70(2), 92–102.