Tension is high this time of year, personally and politically, and award-winning University of Michigan Professor Ethan Kross is in town for a special evening to help explore how emotions work and how we can manage them. An international speaker and bestselling author, his first book, Chatter, helped readers understand how to change the "voice" in our head. And now he returns with his new book, Shift, to help readers understand how emotions form, where they come from, and how we can regulate and master them. 

From our dinner tables at home to workplace conversations, emotional mastery can feel like a distant goal, but Kross says it's something we should all strive for. How can we learn to harness emotions as sources of powerful information? The term "emotional regulation" has now joined popular terminology, but what does it mean and how can we implement it at any age? 

Kross is joined by local celebrated psychology reporter Jenara Nerenberg, author of Divergent Mind and the forthcoming Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing.

About the SpeakersEthan Kross, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-­winning professor and international bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top-­ranked Department of Psychology and its Ross School of Business, he is the director of the Emotion and Self-­Control Laboratory. Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House, spoken at Ted Talks and SXSW, and consulted with some of the world’s top executives and organizations. He has been interviewed about his research on "CBS Evening News," "Good Morning America," "Anderson Cooper Full Circle," and NPR’s "Morning Edition." His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. His first book, Chatter, has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Jenara Nerenberg is the bestselling author of Divergent Mind, hailed as "extraordinary, jaw-dropping" by Library Journal; she is an Aspen Ideas Brave New Idea speaker and the author of a second forthcoming book on the psychology of groupthink. A celebrated writer covering the intersection of psychology and society, Jenara's work has been featured in the UC Berkeley Science Center's Greater Good magazine, Fast Company magazine, CNN, NPR, BBC and elsewhere. Nerenberg speaks widely on social science topics, including at universities, libraries, companies and organizations around the world. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the Harvard School of Public Health; she grew up in San Francisco and, as a millennial, can now be found on Instagram.

Organizer: Denise Michaud

A Grownups Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

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