Marc Brackett: Emotional Intelligence Unpacked
In this special episode of The Learning Future Podcast, host Louka Parry welcomes back the podcast’s inaugural guest, Professor Marc Brackett, a global authority on emotional intelligence and founder of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence. They dive deep into the significance of emotional education, reflecting on how far the field has come and the challenges that lie ahead in embedding emotional intelligence into schools, workplaces, and communities.
Marc shares personal stories, research insights, and practical strategies to build emotional intelligence systems, such as the RULER framework. Together, they explore questions like why emotions matter more than ever in today’s world, the importance of implementation in education reform, and how to create environments where people feel truly cared for.
What You’ll Learn:
• The origins and evolution of the RULER emotional intelligence framework.
• Why emotional intelligence is a necessity, not a luxury, for navigating life’s challenges.
• How to create emotionally intelligent schools and workplaces.
• The critical role of adult emotional education in shaping young minds.
• Marc’s reflections on technology’s impact on emotional health and practical strategies to address it.
• Inspiring stories about how emotional intelligence transforms communities.
Key Quotes:
• “Every child deserves one adult who is irrationally crazy about them.” – Uri Bronfenbrenner, shared by Marc.
• “Emotions aren’t gendered—they’re what make us human.”
• “It’s not about fixing people; it’s about creating environments where they feel seen and heard.”
About Marc Brackett:
Marc Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a professor at Yale University, and author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel. His work focuses on integrating emotional intelligence into education systems and organizations to improve outcomes for children and adults worldwide.
Resources Mentioned:
• RULER Framework for Emotional Intelligence
• Book: Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett
• Studies on social-emotional learning and their impact
[Transcript Auto-generated]
Louka Parry (00:01)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Learning Future podcast. Today is such a special episode because I'm speaking with a very dear friend of mine, someone that I've found hugely inspiring in my journey as an educator. And also it's a return visit because Professor Mark Brackett was the first ever episode of the Learning Future podcast. And so it's such a delight to have you back Mark.
Yeah, I guess to really talk about the last few years and what you've continued to explore. know, Mark is the foundation director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University. He's also a professor there at Yale as well, and he's the author of Permission to Feel. He's also one of the co-founders and co-developers of RULA, which is, in my view, one of the best emotional intelligence frameworks that we can deploy in schools and in workplaces.
Marc (00:55)
Thank you.
Louka Parry (00:55)
So Mark, it's
just a delight to have you back.
Marc (00:58)
Great to see you too. We're gonna get together a couple of times and big things happen and unfortunately we couldn't, so I'm really happy to be here today with you.
Louka Parry (01:09)
Yeah, I'm sad to miss you in New York, but it's wonderful to see the work. And Australia, that's fair, Australia, that's true. There's so many people in Australia that keep on asking me about RULA and your work, and so we have to talk about that as well.
Marc (01:13)
And Australia, and Australia, don't forget Australia.
Great.
Louka Parry (01:25)
I'm gonna kick off with the first question though, and it's just one to kind of open the door of possibility, and it's what is something that you're learning at the moment, or you've been sitting with in your journey as a leader of this field of emotional intelligence, or as a human being, even.
Marc (01:44)
You know, it's funny because a lot of questions that I get recently have been like, what's next? What's next? And I don't really have a lot about what's next because I feel like the thing that I'm sitting with the most and the thing that I'm concerned about most is like the thing that I've been working on for so long that I don't think is doing as well as it should be doing because I feel like people...
are not interested as much as I am interested in going deeper with the concepts that people want to just like the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, you know, and even that question like, what's next, Mark? And I'm like, I gotta get people to figure out, you know, how to give themselves permission to feel, you know, you know, working on it for a while now and develop the skills of emotional intelligence. And then in my work in schools, you know, I'm primarily concerned with
Louka Parry (02:20)
Yes.
Mmm. Mmm.
Marc (02:40)
lasting results, know, I don't like, you know, like great workshop. Thank you. But that's not the goal. The goal is to embed these principles and skills, you know, forever into the environment.
Louka Parry (02:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
There's something about this moment. mean, I guess we can always reflect in this way, but something about the poly-crisis as it's called, or the meta-crisis. When you think about all the converging aspects of society, including the waves of generative AI, social cohesion, conflict, mental health, I mean...
It can be quite overwhelming to sit with. And I wonder like, what's your main hypothesis as to why people are resistant to sitting with the discomfort of their emotions? Is it just the fact that it is uncomfortable? Like what is even my journey in this, a man that's deeply curious about masculinity, emotional wellbeing, our work in schools, there's this kind of skimming along the surface so often. What's the resistance do you think?
Marc (03:23)
you
Mm-hmm.
Well,
it's funny, I told you I didn't want to talk about my next book. This is something I've been writing about and studying for now the last four years since the pandemic. Because, you know, I was so surprised. Well, maybe not surprised. I was taken aback by how poorly people dealt with their emotions during the pandemic. And I just did endless amounts of workshops and
kind of really deep thinking about my own emotion regulation skill development, you know, because I did not do as well as I would have liked. You know, I thought I had the strategies and the tools and I guess it was like I always joke that you don't need emotional intelligence when you're on the beach and you're on vacation and everything's going well, right? You need it when someone kicks the sand in your face. And I feel like the last few years have been a lot of sand kicking.
And so people are activated in, you know, weird ways, legitimate ways. And I just don't think, I think for me, I wrote a piece, a very small piece in a journal here in the United States a while back, that we've had 30 years of psychology, of positive psychology, 35 years of emotional intelligence, 35 years of social and emotional learning.
And the world's getting worse. health. And the, question is like, why is that the case? And it kind of goes back to my, thing I'm thinking about, which is, think primarily it has to do with an implementation problem that, we just have not created the systems to ensure that every child gets an emotion education from early childhood until high school and college, et cetera.
And then couple that with, you know, the quick fix mentality that we all have, you know, just want to pop a pill, which is necessary for many people, but not for everyone. And it's certainly not the only solution even for people who need it. And so to me, those are, there's other ones, you know, the other one is kind of just we're phobic of feeling still, you know, masculinity, you know, it's not, you know,
Louka Parry (05:55)
Mmm.
Marc (05:59)
A guy is not going to show up at work and say, know, hey dude, you know, I'm feeling really anxious right now. Or I'm feeling, you know, they may say I'm overwhelmed, but that's like a kind of an easy way to talk about being stressed or anxious or feeling fear. Fear, right, would be I would be weak if I were, if I would share that I was fearful or afraid. You know, that doesn't really coincide with.
masculinity in many ways, or at least the way it's commonly talked about. Obviously, I think you and I are on a different page, which is that emotions are not gendered. They are what it means to be human.
Louka Parry (06:24)
Hmm.
It's a beautiful reflection mark and kind of a stark one also, I guess, with where you took us in that regard, know, 35 years of social-emotional learning, field of emotional intelligence. What is it that we can say empirically about?
this work and because I think that's kind of step one, which is our understanding of what's needed. And then how do we imbue that or even embody that in the way that we teach, learn, the way that our systems are designed is kind of a subsequent question that we haven't fully answered well in the world it seems. But what can we say? Like what's the case? Because I feel like always making the case for this stuff, you know.
Marc (07:00)
Yeah.
The case is dropped.
No, the case is very strong, but even my colleague Chris, who published a very big meta-analysis recently as the first author, it was something like 425 studies, 575,000 children, very carefully constructed study, and the effects are strong for the most part. Children...
do better academically, socially, emotionally, mental health, things that we want to go up, go up and things that we want to see go down, go down, like bullying, know, and suicidality. So I think that's, I'm not trashing the field. I'm a supporter of the field. I think it's the most important thing we can do. But, you know, when you think about that, that was 425 studies over, I don't know, decade or so with 575,000 kids.
Just to give you perspective, there are 1.1 million children just in New York City's public schools. So those studies that are carefully crafted and implemented with lots of money, because it's expensive to do this research, those kids are benefiting. Longitudinally, I'm not sure, but in the short term, they're benefiting. But that's a very small percentage of our world. There's obviously billions of children across the world.
And so again, that's why I say it's an implementation problem because we're not figuring out how to scale these interventions quickly enough to ensure that all kids get the education they need.
Louka Parry (08:51)
It's interesting Mark, you know, when we think about like an intervention or like, often feel this work that you lead is so much more prevention, you know, and it's as if, yeah, and yet the challenge seems to be it's adding, it's kind of an add on into the existing paradigm of the purpose of education.
I think there's been a lot of work and you know some of our work through Cranger at the UN is really about transforming education. It's not about improving the current paradigm. It's very much moving to an entirely new way of being and doing. And that seems like we're kind of in the kind of in between worlds to quote Zack Steins, you know, it's kind of this moment where we're in between these two different paradigms. We're neither here nor there. People know there's issues.
and we're trying to implement within existing systems and structures and therefore existing incentives. And it's not working because we haven't really embraced what it means to be educated in 2024 and onwards. We still kind of got the legacy mental models and a lot of our work at Learning Future is, know, futures literacy to try to challenge all those mental models that are so implicit within us. What do you think about that?
Marc (09:55)
Correct.
I agree. You know, can spend hours just pontificating about all these issues. You know, I think, let's just take schools, which is where we're both have a strong interest. You know, we haven't really made it very clear at the highest level.
Louka Parry (10:13)
You
Yeah.
Marc (10:31)
that social and emotional education is a priority. It's said, like as a side comment, like we care, but it's not, there's no dollars put to it really. There's oftentimes standards, but there's no implementation plan for that. There's nobody, you know, really at most schools and districts that is leading the efforts. And then there's this whole controversy, which drives me out of my mind.
around is it integrated into academics or is it separate? And I find that argument irritating because A, basically it's always finding a way to make this content not as important. Nobody says integrate math into literacy. I'm gonna talk about that.
Right. Or integrate English language arts into, you know, our language arts into history teaching. mean, history is language. So yes, you need to have language, but, you know, with, with social emotional learning, a, like these are like, I don't know about you, but going back to our earlier conversation around emotion regulation, like these are hard skills to learn. And just like.
You know, someone who wants to be an amazing poet needs to write 3,500 poems and maybe they'll be good. Someone who wants to be good at dealing with their emotions has to learn thousands of strategies and practice them in the real world and get feedback and refine them over the course of their development. Now I would make the case that, you know, not everybody maybe wants to be a great poet. That's a choice, I think, if you want to do poetry. I don't think there's a choice about dealing with emotions effectively.
Louka Parry (11:55)
Yeah.
Marc (12:14)
I think everybody needs to learn how to do that. And that will help you be a better poet. It will help you be a better partner. But we don't have that mindset yet. And so that's what I fight for. And I agree with you, prevention is the way to go. We still have to deal with all the cases that are not being dealt with. So there are interventions needed. But if we really thought about this, like I think about it sometimes as my other career was as a martial arts instructor. And so, you know.
Louka Parry (12:14)
Mm.
Mm.
Marc (12:41)
getting a yellow belt, then a blue belt, then a red belt, then a brown belt, then a black belt, you know, in that trajectory. Like, wouldn't it be nice if every kid, every child graduated high school, you know, with a black belt and emotional intelligence? I think it would be incredible. The world would be a very different place. But yet, for some reason, it's become politicized. For some reason, it's become racialized. For some reason, it's become...
Louka Parry (12:47)
Yes.
Marc (13:11)
genderfied, that's not even a word, like it just we seem to find ways to discount the value of teaching these core critical skills. And to me, it's at the service of children's development, because you look at the data. And as I said earlier, you know, we've done all that we have these things that have been developed and tested. They just haven't implemented well. And I think for that reason, we're seeing a decline, you know, in
Louka Parry (13:12)
Mm-hmm. Mm.
Yes.
Marc (13:38)
well-being and mental health.
Louka Parry (13:41)
Mark, is it that, I mean, that's just very well put. It is frustrating, honestly, because I think having to make the case for something that seems so obvious, even like, sure, we'll show you. Yeah, even though, yeah, the data is now even there, but even so, Mark, it's like, well, actually, where would we find time to do, you know, there's such an interesting calcification of our current view.
Marc (13:55)
Yeah, the data are there. You've got good data.
Louka Parry (14:08)
or the historical view, which is that cognition is king and academic achievement is the paradigm rather than holistic fulfillment and development in which academic thriving is also part. It's kind of this, must be, many theorists have talked a lot about this. So I guess my question to you is if you're a school leader or an educator listening to this conversation, when it comes to implementation, what is it that...
you know, or that we are discerning is the best way to go. What kind of context needs to be created around an intervention? What is the gold standard? And I love the analogy of moving towards the black belt. What does that look like for a learning ecosystem for a school? What could it?
Marc (14:47)
Mm-hmm.
Well, here's
the challenge, right? Which is that in order to get a black belt, you need a master to teach you the skills. And so we don't have a lot of those in our world. And so because the adults who are raising us and teaching us and leading our schools, not to their fault, just haven't had a very strong emotional education themselves. So I think for a lot of adults, it's a fear problem.
And then also, right, the other pressure is that academics are what gets you into college. So you've got the pressure of teaching the core academic skills because that's what gets tested, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you've got adults who just haven't learned this stuff. And so there's an, it's intimidating, which is why I think, you know, we just say like the sad part to me around that is that
Louka Parry (15:46)
you
Marc (15:56)
that we're okay with that. Like that the adults aren't motivated to say, cow, like I need to learn these things because A, I need them for myself and B, it's my moral obligation to ensure that the kids who graduate from my school not only do well academically, but thrive when they go to college and when they go off to work. And I just, that's the thing that bothers me the most is that we don't feel compelled to figure out the core skills that kids need.
to navigate their actual lives as opposed to just their academic lives.
Louka Parry (16:31)
It seems like there has to be therefore an enormous focus on the professional workforce, know, the adults that lead schools. And I know I remember a piece of work that you did in New York, if I'm not mistaken, that talked about doing it ecosystemically and in a cascaded way, which is you start with effectively the directors and superintendents, then you work with the principal, because it creates an enabling environment. Is that still the recommendation that you would put?
Marc (16:37)
Yeah. Completely. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Still
the recommendation. You know, we've tweaked it, you know, of course, and try to give people more support and more coaching where they need it. But yes, I mean, my goal for a community is to have a common language around emotional intelligence. And so that we have tools like the mood meter. We have tools, you know, like the Meta Moment, which is these tools that teach a skill or how people, you know, have a have a
a name for something that means something. But what we find is that it's very useful just to have that common language. But then it means something different if you're a leader versus a teacher versus a student versus a parent. It's just the application is different. One is I'm using these skills to ensure a safe and caring and supportive learning environment for my students. That's different than
I'm using this tool to help me deal with my anxiety around taking a test.
Louka Parry (18:03)
Yeah, they're really different. Paint a picture for us Mark of an emotionally intelligent school. Because you know the only language being used, what's happening in the schools that you work with and the different, you know, the kind of lighthouses we put in that way that might be saying you know what we do want to give an emotional education to every single.
Marc (18:18)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Louka Parry (18:25)
young person and every single adult because we know it's the core of being human alongside cognition and social connectedness perhaps.
Marc (18:33)
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, it starts off with there are mindsets that people have to have. so, you know, I'll give you an example. I just, you know, I was visiting a school that has done RULER for 10 years in Brooklyn, New York. And the principal of that school happens to be a former student of mine. And he really
Louka Parry (18:44)
Yeah.
Marc (18:56)
was like, I'm doing this when I become a leader. And he really has done an amazing job. And I'm visiting this school. And he said, know, Mark, the kids were so excited you were coming that they all have a list of questions for you. And so they all wanted to interview me about like, why do this? And why is ruler? Why does ruler exists?
you know, why is there this tool that we call the mood meter and why are you so passionate about teaching kids about their feelings? Really cool questions. So this one young girl, probably 12, 11, she just asked me, you know, what my motivation was. And I said that I hated school as a kid. I just didn't like school. had bullying problems. was, you know, had a lot of fear. and she looked at me for a little bit.
And then she goes, you I understand, but it's hard for me to actually understand. I said, you know, why is that? And she goes, because I've gone to this school since kindergarten and I can't think of a day that someone didn't care about how I felt.
Louka Parry (20:01)
Wow.
Marc (20:03)
And of course, I'm like gonna start crying in this meeting because I'm just so blown away by how well this work has been integrated. And I'm also envious because, you know, I'm the co-developer of this model. I didn't get to actually experience it for my whole childhood. And so I'm watching how children are developing in an environment where...
how they feel matters and that there's no such thing as a bad emotion. know, that emotions are feelings and feelings are feelings and we all have them. And some days are rainy days, some days are sunny days and the rainy days aren't just, they aren't bad days. They're helpful for certain types of thinking and the sunny days are great for certain things, but can interfere in other things. And that going back to the emotion scientist piece, if they're...
curious about how other people feel and curious about their own feelings. That it's not like, my gosh, Mark's in a bad mood today, stay away because that's a signal he's going to be a It's like, my gosh, there's a signal in Mark's facial expression, body language, vocal tone and behavior that a need is not being met. my, this is an opportunity for me to reach out to find out how I can be supportive. And so those kinds of mindsets around.
No good or bad emotions, giving ourselves and everyone else permission to feel, being curious about emotions, and then recognizing that this is all learned. None of us is born with a rich emotion vocabulary or pocket full of effective strategies to regulate. We gotta learn it. We gotta practice it. And so...
That whole mindset is in these schools, which is a big deal. mean, it takes a long time to shift every stakeholder, which is impossible, but most stakeholders, to get on that emotions matter bus.
And then there's the explicit teaching of these skills. And so they're learning how to be better at recognizing and understanding and labeling and expressing and regulating emotions and recognizing that that varies as a function of my cultural background and my personality. So that what might work for me might not work for you because it just, I grew up in an environment where...
Hugging meant one thing and you do that with family, not outside the family, which is okay. And so that kid may want hugs to help them calm down. Another kid may not want hugs because it may be uncomfortable for them. And there's no judgment about that. It's sort of like, then what do you need to help you feel more at ease? And knowing that some kids are shy and some kids are...
very gregarious and that the gregarious ones want to talk about their feelings a lot more than the introverted ones. And that's okay too, because the introverts may want to spend time reflecting and journaling and the extroverts may want to process their emotions in another way. But it's all out there and it's all like a rich conversation. There's endless curiosity and there's endless opportunity to practice and get feedback to self-reflect and grow.
Louka Parry (22:59)
Yeah.
Beautiful. For some of our, that's a powerful story by the way. And I think what I've heard in it is, you know, it takes time and it absolutely takes a leader that understands how important this work is. I think similar to you, most of my emotional education has come after high school and even after university.
Marc (23:43)
Sure.
Louka Parry (23:44)
you know, through even, you know, speaking to therapists, understanding, you know, going to the school of life with Alain de Botton, he talks about emotional education, you know, from a kind of contemporary philosophical way. And then of course, having met the incredible community of leaders in the social emotional learning field at Salzburg Global, you know, that was for me like an instrumental change in my life. Like before that I was not nearly as conscious as I am. And I just, feel so grateful for that.
Marc (24:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Louka Parry (24:14)
It's just such a gift to be curious about the world and especially our emotion world, you know, to go within. I'd love you just to paint a clearer picture of ruler. You've mentioned it's an acronym, but for some of the people listening, they won't know what that is. And yeah.
Marc (24:26)
Sure.
Yeah. So RULER is
both the acronym for the skills of emotional intelligence, recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions, both in self and other people. It's also the name of our kind of model or our system, you know, for implementing those skills in school systems. And so, you know, I think, you know, going back to some of the questions around like where my head is at,
You know, I started my career as a very young, I was in my 20s working with my uncle who was a middle school teacher who taught me about ruler and emotional intelligence. It was not called ruler, was not exactly what ruler is, but it was a feelings based curriculum that he had created.
back in the 1970s. And he really helped me. He gave me language to talk about my feelings. I learned the word alienated and elated and ecstatic and despair. We had rich conversations around what do these words mean and how do they show up and how do we support each other when we have them. And then I decided that was going to be my career. And so we wrote a curriculum that I thought we could do together because my uncle had taught middle school and I was kind of going getting a PhD and kind of
emotional intelligence with a focus on development. And we did. And we spent five years writing a curriculum. And then we tried to implement it. And, you know, that's when the problems arose, right? The problem about because like, I would have people say things like, my job is not just to talk to students about my feelings. You know, I had, you know, someone say something like, you know, this program is going to turn the boys into homosexuals.
Louka Parry (26:03)
Haha, yep.
Marc (26:17)
And I'm thinking to myself, my gosh, like we got a lot of work to do in this school. Anyway, it was all those kinds of barriers. There was endless barriers. You know, there's no time for this. Parents are against it. We have to teach kids. I had one parent say to me like, I don't want my kid taking a course in emotional intelligence. I want them in AP science because I want them to get into Yale. You know, I was like, whoa. And so there's endless amounts of resistance.
Louka Parry (26:22)
Yeah.
interesting.
Marc (26:45)
And it wasn't being implemented well. And so we decided to start thinking about the teachers and the adults. And we started working really thinking through what do they need to know if you had to do. Then that was better, but not sufficient because the principals make choices around what gets implemented in schools and has long-term sustainability. So then we're like, got to get to the leaders. And then I got
invited to do a speech in New York City and you know the head of education for the whole five boroughs was there and she's like I want this in all my schools and I'm like you know I don't know how to do that and that's when I really realized like if I wanted to make change in the world and I wanted our center to be able to support that and think creatively with the right people I had to think at that level you know of like
And Karen, who is my new co-director executive director of center, she gets angry when I say this because I always say things like, I want to infuse the principles of emotional intelligence and the immune system in schools. And she's like, that doesn't mean anything to me. She's like, I want concrete, you you know, you know, and I agree with her, of course. But that's why we're partners. the but that but that's a philosophy.
Louka Parry (27:55)
Hahaha
Marc (28:07)
Because when you have that philosophy, that means that as a superintendent, when I'm meeting with the school board or when I'm meeting with the group of leaders that report to me, I'm actually thinking through the lens of emotional intelligence. It means...
When I get the phone call from the angry parent, it means that when the kid is being thrown out of the classroom to come to the office for misbehavior, it's there. It's in the hallways. It's the greeting of kids in the beginning of school day. It's the kid is like drifting in class and checking with how they're feeling to see what strategy they need to lift them up. It's designing a lesson that says, if I infuse emotion science instead of lessons, students are gonna be more engaged and their writing is gonna be more creative. And so,
That's what RULER is from my perspective. Now, of course, we've made this into bite-sized things for people to digest. But in the end, it's about adults learning the science of emotion, applying it to their own development, thinking about how to use that in the way they teach, so their pedagogy, and then having the skills to do the direct instruction.
not only in the integration into academics, but the direct instruction to support a child who may need additional supports in developing a particular skill, like how to talk to a friend when they're angry.
Louka Parry (29:34)
It's brilliant. It's such such important work. I guess I'm curious just yeah, yeah.
It's brilliant. It's such important work. I guess I'm curious just... Yeah. Yeah.
Marc (29:40)
And it's complicated. want to do, you know, I know, I just want to say like, criticism I
get, it's too complicated. I'm like, well, I'm sorry, life is complicated. Like this is, unfortunately, this aspect of who we are is just, it requires a little more care because it's a unique system that helps us not only just survive, but thrive.
Louka Parry (30:01)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Marc (30:11)
And it's different. I'm sorry, it's different. know, math will help me in certain aspects of my life, but you know, people can get through life with knowing very basic math. It's really hard to get through life without knowing how to deal with
Louka Parry (30:11)
It.
Marc (30:27)
really hard.
Louka Parry (30:27)
It's,
yeah. And I think one of the challenges of course is we see, we don't often see very many positive role models in our culture, especially now kind of lathered with social media, outrage, know, kind of the outrage pornography is it sometimes called, you know, like it's, if someone's incensed, we're drawn to that.
And it's almost the opposite of what someone that was imagining or regulating themselves powerfully so they could keep the prefrontal cortex online and be rational in their thought. It's an interesting, it's a really interesting moment. Who do you look up to, Because I know it your uncle and it was a big inspiration.
Marc (31:00)
Mm-hmm.
Michael was
my hero, and that was especially when I was younger, in the beginning of my career. Now I look up to, because I'm a scientist, I really like people who do great work, who are rigorous and have that level of commitment to high, high quality.
Louka Parry (31:25)
Yeah.
Marc (31:42)
And so just, there are a number of scientists that I've come to really appreciate, you know, in the emotion world, like people like Dacher Keltner, Jonathan Haidt, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Richie Davidson, and Ethan Cross, James Gross. These are really kind of like pretty top level scientists.
who are really trying to not only just do research, but research that has practical applications.
Louka Parry (32:20)
Yeah. want to talk to you.
Marc (32:22)
and many others. There's other people
who just came to mind because I've written a lot about their work recently.
Louka Parry (32:28)
Yeah, no, that's fair. I feel connected in this field. I'm just I got two final questions. One really is about technology and emotions because it's something that you also investigate this intersection and Jonathan Hyatt's new book, The Anxious Generation, he has really strong views about the impact of a subset of technology, social media and the phone and how it's replaced a play-based childhood with a phone-based childhood and all the attention fragmentation, isolation.
Marc (32:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Louka Parry (32:58)
sleep deprivation, all the things that kind of are impacting us. It just seems to me like emotions become more important with technology, not less. What's your view as an emotion scientist?
Marc (33:11)
It's funny, I just gave a talk on this about keeping AI real with EI. And I do think that technology is here to stay. And that, again, this goes back to the implementation problem and parents helping kids develop and having boundaries and really being clear about when we use our phones and when we don't use our phones. I think that's so important. think that you can, I've seen it happen. I've seen...
families that are very healthy. Their kids do not use their phones 24-7. But their parents really have, they're involved in the development of their children. And so it's just, it's a major commitment to be a parent during this technology revolution. It's just different, you know, because of the addiction, you know, qualities of it.
I do think it is also highly problematic. I know this from the research I've done. I used to do research with Metta Facebook and I saw the amount of bullying that happened just in one month among teens and the things that kids would say to each other and the hurt that it would cause. And so the challenge with that, like you know, you know, is that
When I was bullied, it sucked, just to be honest. I had a really rough childhood with bullying. But it didn't... The whole town that I grew up in didn't know about it. And so I think that just makes it not much harder for people because with the thing of one click, entire community, an entire world knows about something.
and it's hard, can't control it. And so there's not, when it comes time to deal with your emotions around these really difficult moments, that's not, you're not gonna change. mean, it's like if you're bullied and someone shares it widely, it's done, it's out there, there's nothing you can do about it. You can try to have your network of friends to support you and that will help.
And then you also need this resilience within yourself to deal with it. And I don't think that's fair to put the onus on kids to figure all this out. So, you know, I'm more along the kind of regulations, safe standards online to ensure that, you know, teenage girls in particular are not getting solicited by people. That is unacceptable. And it's causing way too much trauma and stress for kids.
And they shouldn't have to be offline, right? They should be able to be in a safe place. And so tech companies need to take responsibility. Parents need to take responsibility. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but I think of it as a complex problem that tech companies, government, CEOs of tech companies themselves, employees who are programming these things at companies.
know, leaders, teachers, and students all need to work together to solve for.
Louka Parry (36:25)
Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see how it all plays out. think because teachers in particular are right at the front line of seeing the kind of impacts. That's right. Yeah.
Marc (36:35)
I mean, they get bullied also and then their reputation is at stake. You know,
I've seen horrific stories around that it's terrible. But that's why, like, we need to really... When I was doing my initial work in the bullying prevention space, I made it akin to the playground. Like, there were rules in the playground. No pushing, no shoving. Take turns. Let, you know...
Louka Parry (36:43)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Mmm.
Marc (37:04)
And so, but we don't have that process for online and there's no penalty, you know, oftentimes for, you know, misbehaving. And so we've got to figure that out. But I do firmly believe that it is also an emotional intelligence skill set that can help solve the problem because.
Louka Parry (37:08)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc (37:29)
In the end, it's a need that's not being met and it's a feeling that's not being regulated that is generally causing the misbehavior.
Louka Parry (37:40)
Hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. And again, just to call back some of you said earlier, you know, to be curious, deeply curious about why someone would be behaving or then feeling the way they are. And the unmet need piece is so interesting, you know, often, you know, in schools, we often say the, the, the students that are the most challenging are the ones that need the most love. And that's, you know, because of how they judge themselves. Yeah.
Marc (38:05)
Exactly. I think about that. I just walk around and I, you know, of course, I'm
a psychologist. I'm always observing and I just can't help it. I'm just looking at, I'm on a flight today. There was a whole argument on the flight and I'm just like, what is happening here? Can we just like, can you just sit down and we take off? And I'm just, you know, all I want, I want to go up to everybody and say, tell me about your relationship with your mother and your father.
Louka Parry (38:12)
Frozen consmate, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That mother
Marc (38:33)
They're gonna get to it, but I get to it too much trouble.
Louka Parry (38:33)
wound or the father. It's the real deep self questions though. And I think that's the opportunity for education is to go deep.
and to develop that kind of substrate that then helps, you know, the roots of the tree. So when the storms come, you're strong in these storms. And the storms are, they're hurricane category five. You know, as you know, now being in Florida, just visiting, but it's, it's, it's, it's.
Marc (38:51)
Yeah.
Yeah.
One thing I want to just say, because it's important, I for people who will be listening, is that I think part of the other fear around getting involved in all these things is that people think they need to be licensed psychologists and counselors. And sometimes I get myself in trouble by saying I'm a psychologist. They're like, well, of course you have this knowledge. Of course you can do this. But most of the stuff that we're trying to get children to learn and adults to practice and learn is not
Louka Parry (39:04)
Yeah.
Marc (39:30)
therapeutic by nature. It's a skill. And what I mean by that is that school is not a place for a kid to be problem solving about their parents' divorce. They should see a social worker or a counselor to manage that. But kids are in school from...
you know, early in the morning until the afternoon and are going to have feelings. And they need strategies to manage those feelings around making new friends, around being on the playground, around test anxiety, around just confusion about what they're learning, around disappointment with their grades. And so I think we just need to really be clear that what we're trying to do is help cultivate like...
set of life skills that really will make a difference in terms of a child's life. And that when it doesn't need to cross over to being therapeutic, you know, and I think people get that wrong. And the same thing applies, you know, when things go wrong, you know, like your best friend says, I don't like you anymore. That's devastating. That doesn't necessarily have to be a reason to go into therapy. We just need
to create environments where kids can talk about those things and have friends who care and and let them know that they're not alone. That's what people really want. They don't want to be fixed. They want to be in environments where people listen and care.
Louka Parry (40:55)
Hmm.
Mark, I've got one final question for you. But the thing that's sitting with me is that 10 or 11 year old girl in that Brooklyn school who said to you, there hasn't been one day where I haven't felt like someone has cared about me at this school. And that changes the trajectory of people and of young people in particular. It's just so powerful to know that someone cares and loves you.
Marc (41:02)
Okay.
Louka Parry (41:28)
And you know, it's the Broffenbrenner quote that I quite like. Uri Broffenbrenner says, every child deserves one adult that is irrationally crazy about them. You know, feel so loved by another is just such a beautiful thing. Final question is, you know, as you're in this particular moment, what is the thing that you want to leave us with? What's the kind of words or the mantra or the reflection that we might be able to take forward into our work and our lives?
Marc (41:58)
I think, you know, what comes to mind in this very moment is that I've done this new research on the Uncle Marvin's in the world. And I didn't get a chance to share that with you. do that another time. Where I've studied thousands and thousands of people, like 30,000 people now, about their Uncle Marvin's. Who are these people? Who are the people that give us permission to feel? And they have three core characteristics across the world.
including Australia, including Hong Kong, Costa Rica. I've done this now in many countries. And they are just incredible listeners. They are non-judgmental. And they just show empathy and compassion.
No one ever says they're brilliant problem solvers because I don't think that's what people are looking for. People are just looking to be seen and heard. And that when we have adults and friends and partners and colleagues and bosses who are good listeners, who don't judge us for every freaking thing we do every freaking second, and who have everything in compassion, we can thrive. But at the same time, you know, only a third
of the people across the world that I've studied say they had someone like that growing up. And two thirds say they don't. And some people get a little disconcerted. They're like, Mark, but like, I didn't have the Uncle Marvin. And so maybe that's why I don't have as much purpose and meaning in life. And for people who are in that situation, I always say, it's never too late. And I also say that we have to become our own Uncle Marvins too.
that just become a good listener to your own feelings, become non-judgmental about who you are and have some self-compassion and it'll go a long way. So that's all I got.
Louka Parry (44:03)
Thank you. Thank you for doing the work you do, Mark. It's so inspiring. I continue to learn so much from you and with you. And it's great to reconnect after many years. Thanks for joining us for the Learning Future podcast.
Marc (44:06)
Thank you.
It's pleasure.
Thank you.