He was on edge and his thoughts were starting to spiral out of control.Įthan Kross: For the next couple of nights I was a chatter-filled mess. Sana Qadar: He reported the letter to police but they weren't very helpful.Įthan Kross: The officer I spoke with took a look at the letter, nodded disapprovingly and said, 'Yeah, this happens every now and again, you'll probably be fine.'

I experienced an immediate fight-or-flight terror reaction. It was a truly terrifying moment, I had never received a letter like that before. Anyway, I opened up the letter and I was instantly confronted with lots of hate-filled messages and ugly drawings and racial slurs. Sana Qadar: Ethan and his colleagues had found the brain processed emotional and physical pain in surprisingly similar ways, more so than previously thought.Įthan Kross: And we had no high expectations for this paper but it ended up getting a lot of coverage, I went on national television, and it was really exciting, really fun for a couple of days, until I came into work one day and I found a hand-addressed letter in my envelope, which was a little odd because I never really get hand-addressed mail anymore, I don't know about you, but it always is the email variety. Sana Qadar: What in the world had gotten him to this point? Well, the story starts out straightforward enough.Įthan Kross: We had just published a study showing that when people use the words of physical pain to describe how they feel after being socially rejected, so people often say 'I'm in pain', 'my feelings are hurt', we published a study that suggested that when people are using that language of being in pain, they might actually be referring to physical sensations in their body.

At one point I found myself contemplating just terribly irrational things, you know, these bad guys are coming to get us, and at one point in the early morning hours, I actually, as embarrassing as it is to admit, contemplated doing a Google search for bodyguards that specialise in protecting academics, which in retrospect is totally preposterous.

Sana Qadar: About a decade ago, psychologist Ethan Kross found himself doing something totally out of character.Įthan Kross: I'm pacing my house with a baseball bat.

Chatter book ethan