The Benefits of Mixed Emotions

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.

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. Come on, let's go!

There was just one catch.

The players on this team predominantly came from the east side of town and played at Harbor High.

Naomi's school, Santa Cruz High, was on the west side of her hometown of Santa Cruz, California.

And so during our high school season, we had to play against each other, and someone always had to lose.

Harbor and Santa Cruz were always among the top contenders. The rivalry between the schools was intense.

Every game we played against one another was, 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.

The same players 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?

It's absolutely, you know, 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.

The pain, paralysis, and promise of mixed emotions. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Thank you so much for having me here with you.

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?

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, and 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, that it stains your rug, it's a total waste of money, and it's like this one-and-done activity.

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.

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, right? 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, right, 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.

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?

I had this really great opportunity to convene a group of world-class academics to work on a project on ambivalence. 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. These older academic brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles, whatever you want to call them. 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. 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.

Hmm.

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, right? And what happens when the conversation starts to veer is that I feel like I have 3 options, right? On one hand, I have this choice, I can remain silent. But a second choice is to play the cheerleader, right? 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 like showing my ambivalence because my sentiments at the time were very positive and negative, right? 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 to miss out on this opportunity to create something great with these really esteemed scholars.

Naomi tentatively entered the discussion. Instead of cheerleading or criticizing, she hesitantly expressed her mixed feelings. The intervention backfired.

The unintended consequences of showing my ambivalence in this meeting is that it indicated my indecision. It indicated a 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 a difficult outcome to stomach.

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.

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, you know, 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.

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, expect the doctor to be decisive, to say, you know, 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?

I think you're really onto something there. And we've collected some data on that very question with Jessica 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, you know, 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 decisions, and if an expert signals their lack of ability to decide, We tend to lose faith in their expertise.

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?

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, right? And so what we did was 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.

These executives, when they express ambivalence, they invite more harsh questioning. They face what you call a scrutiny penalty. The performance of their company is examined and judged more harshly.

Exactly.

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.

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 5 times to do so. John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows.

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?

Yeah, so I think that that's a wonderful example, right, of how there can be some liabilities for leaders in sharing their ambivalence. You know, everyone wants a leader to be black and white because otherwise they might look inauthentic if they changed and were inconsistent, you know. And there's evidence that says we would like a dominant leader, right? We think that they're going to help us and provide us with, you know, 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.

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.

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, 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.

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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. 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.

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, you know, small apartments, overpaying rent, dealing with roommates. You know, 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 rural environment with these, like, 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, like, 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, 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, right? One is it took my husband over 2 hours one way to get to his job in New York City.

Oh my God.

2, just like you don't get to choose your coworkers, you don't get to choose all of your neighbors. 3, 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, right? Let alone lived in the country, and nor did we know how to, like, take care of this beautiful and expansive garden. And we had groundhogs, we had rodents, we had deer, we had trees that fell down. We had bamboo that took over our, you know, 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, like, 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, right? 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—

you know, 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 4 years after purchasing it, of course at a loss. And again, I wanted closure. I wanted my family to be together. I wanted to not be lonely, that I just had to get out.

The story in many ways matches what your research has found in terms of the effect that ambivalence has on the way we make judgments. 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?

Yeah, so this was some interesting work I did with Laura Reiss, Reuben LeHavy, and Jeffrey Singes-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, right? 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, right, about the weather, you know, 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, right? But that if you have multiple emotions, the error in 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 our judgments.

So much of this is premised on 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.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. There's an approach to the study of emotions by Schwartz and Kloor who argued that affect is information, that when we have emotions, that it actually provides us with information, right, about our environment, and that emotions are actually here for a reason. And if you pay attention to the emotional— your emotional cues, it can signal perhaps an appropriate response to the challenges that you might be facing. Mm-hmm. We know that from a whole large beautiful body of work by Jeff Larson 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 Shimon Milani and I have written about is You know, maybe emotional ambivalence exists in part to help us solve contradictory and complex problems.

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.

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.

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. 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 I would never 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.

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?

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, you know, 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.

In other words, when we feel ambivalence, our minds are processing a situation that feels complicated. When we shut down 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.

Yes. So the research I conducted initially that people, you know, 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? I trained an actor from the Tisch School of the Arts to express ambivalence. She was torn and conflicted in her nonverbal behavior. 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.

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?

Yeah, so I just really love this research where we have been exploring both in experimental laboratory contexts 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? What we have found across these 3 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.

But there's a 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?

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.

I'm thinking, though, in the political sphere, when you're running for office, I mean, that's in some ways 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're 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?

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, right? And in fact, be more effective once they get there.

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?

Yeah, so there's this really fascinating research by Raul Berrios and colleagues that is kind of inspired by some writing that Jeff Larson 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 well-being 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.

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.

I think that's exactly right.

When we come back, how to put ambivalence to work in your own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud— new customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Support for Hidden Brain comes from U.S. Bank. With a U.S. Bank SmartLevi Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations. No categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply. 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?

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 of 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 2 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 like 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 3 daughters to determine basically how to divide the land of his kingdom between them. And Cordelia's sisters Goneril and Regan give deceitfully lavish speeches that basically profess their love, flatter his vanity, right? And Cordelia basically sees right through her sisters' 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, no less. And Lear then exiles her as a response to her honesty. And so, you know, clearly there's just like a lot to unpack here, but especially as the daughter of somebody who totally was beloved by so many people, right? 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 know, like, you might wonder what in the world does this even look like? Well, my dad often sounded like he was quite torn and conflicted. He would rarely just agree or disagree. My mom has said that this was— could be rather frustrating. 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, you know, 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, right? He actually helped people work through difficult problems. And so, you know, it's totally undeniable that his interpersonal style inspired my research on the benefits of sharing your emotional ambivalence.

So researchers have found that people who, like your father, embrace what's sometimes called a paradox mindset are able to use ambivalence effectively. What exactly is a paradox mindset, Naomi?

This is this fascinating research conducted by scholars, including Ella Mirren-Spector, Amy Ingram, Josh Keller, Wendy Smith, Maryanne Lewis, who've 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. And, you know, so one assumption is that competing demands, you know, like the ones that people have really experienced through the pandemic, are very uncomfortable. And what these authors found was that You know, 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 realize that one demand can actually enable another and that they might need both of them to thrive.

In many ways, I think the paradox mindset 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. 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 summarizing the idea?

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.

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?

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, right? 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 fail 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.

Can you talk about them, Naomi?

Absolutely. So it's kind of a funny story. I mean, now in retrospect, right? Which is that when dating my spouse, I really wanted it to work. 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. 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 our match was cultivated by my emotional ambivalence.

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.

I think you're so right.

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.

Certainly. So, a year and a half into the COVID pandemic, my mother noticed that she had some shortness of breath, And, you know, 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, you know, sitting in the hospital room waiting 5 hours for the surgeon to be ready. And I remember feeling these waves of anxiety, you know, 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 ones. 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, right? And, you know, I think that that was a more kind of— or 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. You know, these like kind of throwaway 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.

And what did you say to her? What did you say to your mom? How did you express the negatives?

I said, Mom, you know, I'm noticing that I'm having this inclination to want to cheerlead 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.

And what was the effect of doing this on your mom, do you think, that you were expressing not just, you know, your cheerleading and optimism, but also putting in place the context of your anxiety and worry?

You know, 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.

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?

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.

I asked Naomi to read me the letter her mother sent her after the surgery.

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 and the important contribution you have to make. About the difficulty and the importance of embracing ambivalence and holding off premature certainty. Love, Mom.

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.

Thank you so much for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, 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'd 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.

I was attending what was billed as a women'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 hundred women milled around different booths picking up brochures and eating crudités offered by the— those black-panted white Shirted waitstaff. 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's 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. In the following 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 6-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.

Jackie Briggs of Portland, Oregon. She tells us that about 2 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.

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Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain. On Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org.

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