Feeling Follows Frame: Why you have more control over your emotions than you think

Two-year-olds fall in love with the most adorable things. A pumpkin romance over the past few weeks has kept our little guy infatuated with seasonal delight. “It’s?my?pumpkin,” he would jealously remind me. Not to be outdone by his sister, who decorated her own with melted wax, he artfully brushed strokes of “spooky red” across his masterpiece.

He would ask for it at night. He would squish it against his cheek as if it were his favorite toy. I even caught him rolling it across our driveway gleefully shouting, “And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight!” All was right with the world and Halloween this year was going to be better than ever.

Until it happened.

One morning, as we hurriedly put on the get-ready-and-get-out-the-door show, he had his pumpkin on his high chair tray, lovingly playing with the perfect-sized companion that was made just for him. As I turned my back, I heard what can only be described as a thud. Instantly, I knew what had happened. I careened my neck to get a glimpse…yup, sure enough. The pumpkin was split cleanly apart, laying there in two devastating pieces.

In the split second after it happened — and anticipating an agonizing wail — I blurted out, “Oh my gosh! Did you see that?! It’s almost Halloween, so the pumpkin opened up!”

My two-year-old, not knowing what pumpkins are and are not supposed to do, looked down in astonishment, as if the Halloween prophecy of splitting pumpkins came true.

I bent down, picked up the pumpkin, and doubled down on what I’d just said. “Wow — it opened up buddy…just in time for Halloween.” Not missing a beat (and without a hint of negative emotion), he took the pumpkin from me and squealed with delight that now his pumpkin was even more awesome than it was before! I mean, what kind of special pumpkin opens up the week of Halloween?

While this may seem like a simple trick — one that many a parent has used before — the principle it implies for how much power we have over our emotions just might surprise you.

The Power of Framing (and Reframing)

What happened with our two-year-old is what scientists call?cognitive appraisal. It’s a fancy term, which is why I prefer to use a simpler one that means the same thing: framing. A frame is simply the meaning or interpretation we give to an event. The pumpkin fell and broke in two. That’s what happened. What we make it mean is something entirely separate from what actually happened. Whether it’s good or bad, a disaster or an opportunity, a catastrophe or simply the next phase of what a pumpkin is?supposed?to do as Halloween approaches — it’s all up for interpretation. This lightning-fast interpretation — the meaning we give to something that happens — has a dramatic effect on the emotion that follows.

Through a series of?careful experiments, Prof. Kevin Ochsner and his co-authors at Columbia and Stanford have shown that the frame we give a situation comes first and the emotion follows second.

In other words:?feeling follows frame.

According to Ochsner, “Our emotional responses ultimately flow out of our appraisals of the world, and if we can shift those appraisals, we shift our emotional responses.”

So why didn’t our little guy get upset? To be clear, he would have had I not framed it for him. When things break, our default response is to be frustrated. That’s normal. But in that small window between stimulus and response, there was just enough time to see the potential upset and come up with an alternative frame on the fly (pumpkins are?supposed?to do this), which both neutralized his negative emotion and actually activated a positive emotion.

What normally would have been a 1.0 default response (“Waaaaa!”) became a 2.0 upgrade (“Whoaaaaa!”).

Now, you might be thinking — what if the thought (that pumpkins are?supposed?to do this) hadn’t occurred to me so quickly? Let’s say he did erupt in upset. Would there have been a chance at recovery? In other words, can we manage difficult emotions once they have occurred by?reframing even after the emotion is in full swing?

Again, the answer is good news.

Here’s how Ochsner and his colleagues tested this. While looking at participants’ brain activity, they showed them a picture of a group of people outside a church crying, which, not surprisingly, people assumed was a funeral and it made them sad. (Specifically, Ochsner was able to show that the brain areas associated with sadness lit up.) Then, after feeling sad, the participants were told that, actually, this was a picture of a wedding and that the tears they were crying were tears of joy. A new frame — a?reframe?— changed everything. Their brain activity changed and the areas associated with positive emotions lit up.

Scientists consider reframing (or?cognitive?reappraisal) to be one of the most powerful tools in our “emotion management toolkit.” In other words, it’s often the case that by the time we recognize what’s happening, the emotion has already hit us. That powerful surge of upset has seemingly hijacked our body and mind. We’re a mess. Even (or especially) in those situations — when we’re swimming in a soup of emotional upset — we can always reframe. And yes, that reframe will still change the emotion that follows.

To be clear, however, we?can?do this in the milliseconds between when an event occurs and?before?the emotional wave hits us. In other words, you can outmaneuver the negative emotion before it even happens. In fact, if you frame it quickly enough (immediately after something happens), you won’t even?feel?the negative emotion. Because there was no negative emotion to be felt. Without a negative interpretation, there is simply no negative feeling. It never materializes.

Both uses — framing and reframing — are emotional superpowers. Once you start experimenting with these superpowers, emotions become more like creations rather than reactions.

It’s now four days past Halloween and that magical pumpkin is still sitting in two pieces on the counter in our breakfast nook. Its edges have shriveled a bit, but to our two-year-old, it’s still as magical as ever. He looks up at me, with a bite of egg in his mouth — pointing as if to remind me in case I’d forgotten — “Daddy…the pumpkin. It opened up for Halloween!”

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Also published on the Brain by Design blog and in Better Humans on November 4, 2022.