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70f04ef1691d-0 | EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published October 1995
Bantam trade paperback edition published July 1997
Bantam 10th anniversary trade paperback edition published October 2005
Bantam 10th anniversary hardcover edition / October 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
Illustration of brain on
this page
is adapted from “Emotional Memory and the Brain” by
Joseph E. LeDoux.
Copyright © 1994 by Scientific American, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Artist: Roberto Osti
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1995 by Daniel Goleman
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Daniel Goleman
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-16685
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90320-1
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r2 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0bca116baa5f-0 | Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Aristotle’s Challenge
PART ONE
THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
1. What Are Emotions For?
2. Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking
PART TWO
THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
3. When Smart Is Dumb
4. Know Thyself
5. Passion’s Slaves
6. The Master Aptitude
7. The Roots of Empathy
8. The Social Arts
PART THREE
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED
9. Intimate Enemies
10. Managing with Heart
11. Mind and Medicine | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
de614c50add1-0 | PART FOUR
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
12. The Family Crucible
13. Trauma and Emotional Relearning
14. Temperament Is Not Destiny
PART FIVE
EMOTIONAL LITERACY
15. The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
16. Schooling the Emotions
Appendix A: What Is Emotion?
Appendix B: Hallmarks of the Emotional Mind
Appendix C: The Neural Circuitry of Fear
Appendix D: W. T. Grant Consortium: Active Ingredients of Prevention Programs
Appendix E: The Self Science Curriculum
Appendix F: Social and Emotional Learning: Results
Resources
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Author | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
37f580cce221-0 | Introduction
OceanofPDF.com
Tenth Anniversary Edition of
Emotional Intelligence
In 1990, in my role as a science reporter at
The New York Times
, I
chanced upon an article in a small academic journal by two
psychologists, John Mayer, now at the University of New Hampshire,
and Yale’s Peter Salovey. Mayer and Salovey offered the first
formulation of a concept they called “emotional intelligence.”
Those were days when the preeminence of IQ as the standard of
excellence in life was unquestioned; a debate raged over whether it
was set in our genes or due to experience. But here, suddenly, was a
new way of thinking about the ingredients of life success. I was
electrified by the notion, which I made the title of this book in 1995.
Like Mayer and Salovey, I used the phrase to synthesize a broad range
of scientific findings, drawing together what had been separate
strands of research—reviewing not only their theory but a wide
variety of other exciting scientific developments, such as the first
fruits of the nascent field of affective neuroscience, which explores
how emotions are regulated in the brain.
I remember having the thought, just before this book was published | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
37f580cce221-1 | I remember having the thought, just before this book was published
ten years ago, that if one day I overheard a conversation in which two
strangers used the phrase
emotional intelligence
and both understood
what it meant, I would have succeeded in spreading the concept more
widely into the culture. Little did I know.
The phrase
emotional intelligence
, or its casual shorthand
EQ
, has
become ubiquitous, showing up in settings as unlikely as the cartoon
strips
Dilbert
and
Zippy the Pinhead
and in Roz Chast’s sequential art in
The New Yorker
. I’ve seen boxes of toys that claim to boost a child’s
EQ; lovelorn
personal ads sometimes trumpet it in those seeking
prospective mates. I once found a quip about EQ printed on a
shampoo bottle in my hotel room.
And the concept has spread to the far corners of our planet.
EQ
has
become a word recognized, I’m told, in languages as diverse as | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
587deab78649-0 | German and Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Malay. (Even so, I
prefer
EI
as the English abbreviation for
emotional intelligence.
) My e-
mail inbox often contains queries from, for example, a doctoral
student in Bulgaria, a schoolteacher in Poland, a college student in
Indonesia, a business consultant in South Africa, a management expert
in the Sultanate of Oman, an executive in Shanghai. Business students
in India read about EI and leadership; a CEO in Argentina
recommends the book I later wrote on that topic. I’ve also heard from
religious scholars within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and
Buddhism that the concept of EI resonates with outlooks in their own
faith.
Most gratifying for me has been how ardently the concept has been
embraced by educators, in the form of programs in “social and
emotional learning,” or SEL. Back in 1995 I was able to find only a
handful of such programs teaching emotional intelligence skills to
children. Now, a decade later, tens of thousands of schools worldwide
offer children SEL. In the United States many districts and even entire
states currently make SEL a curriculum requirement, mandating that
just as students must attain a certain level of competence in math and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
587deab78649-1 | language, so too should they master these essential skills for living.
In Illinois, for instance, specific learning standards in SEL abilities
have been established for every grade from kindergarten through the
last year of high school. To give just one example of a remarkably
detailed and comprehensive curriculum, in the early elementary years
students should learn to recognize and accurately label their emotions
and how they lead them to act. By the late elementary years lessons in
empathy should make children able to identify the nonverbal clues to
how someone else feels; in junior high they should be able to analyze
what creates stress for them or what motivates their best performance.
And in high school the SEL skills include listening and talking in ways
that resolve conflicts instead of escalating them, and negotiating for
win-win solutions.
Around the world Singapore has undertaken an active initiative in
SEL, as have some schools in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea.
In Europe the U.K. has led the way, but more than a dozen other
countries
have schools that embrace EI, as do Australia and New
Zealand, and here and there countries in Latin America and Africa. In
2002 UNESCO began a worldwide initiative to promote SEL, sending | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
587deab78649-2 | a statement of ten basic principles for implementing SEL to the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
04d881830541-0 | ministries of education in 140 countries.
In some states and nations SEL has become the organizing umbrella
under which are gathered programs in character education, violence
prevention, antibullying, drug prevention, and school discipline. The
goal is not just to reduce these problems among schoolchildren but to
enhance the school climate and, ultimately, students’ academic
performance.
In 1995 I outlined the preliminary evidence suggesting that SEL was
the active ingredient in programs that enhance children’s learning
while preventing problems such as violence. Now the case can be
made scientifically: helping children improve their self-awareness and
confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and
increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in
measurable academic achievement.
This is the big news contained in a recently completed meta-
analysis of 668 evaluation studies of SEL programs for children from
preschoolers through high school.
1
The massive survey was conducted
by Roger Weissberg, who directs the Collaborative for Academic,
Social and Emotional Learning at the University of Illinois at Chicago
—the organization that has led the way in bringing SEL into schools
worldwide.
The data show that SEL programs yielded a strong benefit in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
04d881830541-1 | The data show that SEL programs yielded a strong benefit in
academic accomplishment, as demonstrated in achievement test
results and grade-point averages. In participating schools, up to 50
percent of children showed improved achievement scores, and up to
38 percent improved their grade-point averages. SEL programs also
made schools safer: incidents of misbehavior dropped by an average
of 28 percent; suspensions by 44 percent; and other disciplinary
actions by 27 percent. At the same time, attendance rates rose, while
63 percent of students demonstrated significantly more positive
behavior. In the world of social science research, these are remarkable
results for any program promoting behavioral change. SEL has
delivered on its promise.
In 1995 I also proposed that a good part of the effectiveness of SEL
came from its impact in shaping children’s developing neural
circuitry, particularly the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex,
which manage working memory—what we hold in mind as we learn
—and inhibit disruptive emotional impulses. Now the first preliminary
scientific evidence for that notion has arrived. Mark Greenberg of
Pennsylvania State University,
a codeveloper of the PATHS curriculum | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bcaca4e17551-0 | in SEL, reports not only that this program for elementary school
students boosts academic achievement but, even more significantly,
that much of the increased learning can be attributed to
improvements in attention and working memory, key functions of the
prefrontal cortex.
2
This strongly suggests that neuroplasticity, the
shaping of the brain through repeated experiences, plays a key role in
the benefits from SEL.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me has been the impact of EI in the
world of business, particularly in the areas of leadership and
employee development (a form of adult education). The
Harvard
Business Review
has hailed emotional intelligence as “a ground-
breaking, paradigm-shattering idea,” one of the most influential
business ideas of the decade.
Such claims in the business world too often prove to be fads, with
no real underlying substance. But here a far-flung network of
researchers has been at work, ensuring that the application of EI will
be grounded in solid data. The Rutgers University-based Consortium
for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (CREIO) has
led the way in catalyzing this scientific work, collaborating with
organizations that range from the Office of Personnel Management in
the federal government to American Express. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bcaca4e17551-1 | the federal government to American Express.
Today companies worldwide routinely look through the lens of EI in
hiring, promoting, and developing their employees. For instance,
Johnson & Johnson (another CREIO member) found that in divisions
around the world, those identified at midcareer as having high
leadership potential were far stronger in EI competencies than were
their less-promising peers. CREIO continues to foster such research,
which can offer evidence-based guidelines for organizations seeking to
enhance their ability to achieve their business goals or fulfill a
mission.
When Salovey and Mayer published their seminal article in 1990, no
one could have envisioned how the scholarly field they founded
would be thriving just fifteen years later. Research has blossomed in
this area; while in 1995 there was virtually nothing in the scientific
literature on EI, today the field has legions of researchers. A search of
the database for doctoral dissertations investigating aspects of
emotional intelligence yields more than seven hundred completed to
date, with many more in the pipeline—not to mention studies done by | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3d58e32636b5-0 | professors and others not counted in that database.
3
The growth of this area of scholarship owes much to Mayer and
Salovey, who, along with their colleague David Caruso, a business
consultant, have worked tirelessly on behalf of the scientific
acceptance of emotional intelligence. By formulating a scientifically
defensible theory of emotional intelligence and providing a rigorous
measure of this capacity for effective living, they have set an
impeccable research standard for the field.
Another major source of the burgeoning academic findings about EI
has been Reuven Bar-On, now at the University of Texas Medical
Branch in Houston, whose own theory of EI—and high-energy
enthusiasm—have inspired many studies using a measure he devised.
Bar-On has also been instrumental in developing and editing academic
books that have helped give the field a critical mass, including
The
Handbook of Emotional Intelligence
.
The growing EI field of study has met some entrenched opposition
within the insular world of scholars of intelligence, particularly those
who embrace IQ as the sole acceptable measure of human aptitudes.
Nevertheless, the field has emerged as a vibrant paradigm. Any
important theoretical model, observed the philosopher of science
Thomas Kuhn, should become progressively revised and refined as | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3d58e32636b5-1 | Thomas Kuhn, should become progressively revised and refined as
more stringent tests of its premises are made. That process seems well
under way for EI.
There are by now three main models of EI, with dozens of
variations. Each represents a different perspective. That of Salovey
and Mayer rests firmly in the tradition of intelligence shaped by the
original work on IQ a century ago. The model put forth by Reuven
Bar-On is based on his research on well-being. And my own model
focuses on performance at work and organizational leadership,
melding EI theory with decades of research on modeling the
competencies that set star performers apart from average.
Unfortunately, misreadings of this book have spawned some myths,
which I would like to clear up here and now. One is the bizarre—
though widely repeated—fallacy that “EQ accounts for 80 percent of
success.” This claim is preposterous.
The misinterpretation stems from data suggesting IQ accounts for
about 20 percent of career success. Because that estimate—and it is
only an estimate—leaves a large portion of success unaccounted for, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1ede2a861928-0 | we must seek other factors to explain the rest. It does
not
mean,
however, that emotional intelligence represents the rest of the factors
in success: they certainly include a very wide range of forces—from
the wealth and education of the
family we are born into, to
temperament, to blind luck and the like—in addition to emotional
intelligence.
As John Mayer and his associates point out: “To the unsophisticated
reader, bringing up the ‘80 percent unaccounted for variance’ suggests
that there may indeed be a heretofore overlooked variable that truly
can predict huge portions of life success. Although that is desirable,
no variable studied in a century of psychology has made such a huge
contribution.”
4
Another common misconception takes the form of recklessly
applying this book’s subtitle—“Why it can matter more than IQ”—to
domains like academic achievement, where it does not apply without
careful qualification. The extreme form of this misconception is the
myth that EI “matters more than IQ” in all pursuits.
Emotional intelligence trumps IQ primarily in those “soft” domains
where intellect is relatively less relevant for success—where, for
example, emotional self-regulation and empathy may be more salient
skills than purely cognitive abilities. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1ede2a861928-1 | skills than purely cognitive abilities.
As it happens, some of these circumscribed realms are of major
importance in our lives. One that comes to mind is health (as detailed
in
Chapter 11
), to the extent that disturbing emotions and toxic
relationships have been identified as risk factors in disease. Those
who can manage their emotional lives with more calm and self-
awareness seem to have a distinct and measurable health advantage,
as has now been confirmed by many studies.
Another such domain is romantic love and personal relationships
(see
Chapter 9
), where, as we all know, very smart people can do very
dumb things. A third—though I have not written about it here—
occurs at the top levels of competitive endeavors such as world-class
sports. At that level, as I was told by a sports psychologist who
coaches U.S. Olympic teams, everyone has put in the requisite ten
thousand-plus hours of practice, so success hinges on the athlete’s
mental game.
Research findings about leadership in business and the professions
paint a more complex picture (
Chapter 10
). IQ scores predict
extremely well whether we can handle the cognitive challenges that a
given position demands. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of studies have | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5790d62fdb6b-0 | shown that IQ predicts which career rungs a person can manage. No
question there.
But IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a
talented pool of candidates
within
an intellectually demanding
profession, will become the strongest leader. In part this is because of
the “floor effect”: everyone at the top echelons of a given profession,
or at the top levels of
a large organization, has already been sifted for
intellect and expertise. At those lofty levels a high IQ becomes a
“threshold” ability, one needed just to get into and stay in the game.
As I proposed in my 1998 book
Working with Emotional Intelligence
,
EI abilities rather than IQ or technical skills emerge as the
“discriminating” competency that best predicts who among a group of
very smart people will lead most ably. If you scan the competencies
that organizations around the world have independently determined
identify their star leaders, you discover that indicators of IQ and
technical skill drop toward the bottom of the list the higher the
position. (IQ and technical expertise are much stronger predictors of
excellence in lower-rung jobs.)
That point was developed more fully in my 2002 book
Primal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5790d62fdb6b-1 | Primal
Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
(coauthored
with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee). At the very highest levels,
competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from
80 to 100 percent EI-based abilities. As the head of research at a
global executive search firm put it, “CEOs are hired for their intellect
and business expertise—and fired for a lack of emotional
intelligence.”
When I wrote
Emotional Intelligence
, I saw my role as that of a science
journalist, reporting on a significant new trend in psychology,
particularly the merging of neuroscience with the study of emotions.
But as my involvement in the field deepened, I stepped back into my
old role as psychologist to offer my insights into models of EI. As a
result, my formulation of emotional intelligence has progressed since I
wrote these pages.
In
Working with Emotional Intelligence
I proposed an expanded
framework that reflects how the fundamentals of EI—self-awareness,
self-management, social awareness, and the ability to manage
relationships—translate into on-the-job success. In doing so, I
borrowed a concept from David McClelland, the Harvard psychologist
who had been my mentor in graduate school:
competency
. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6098380f4c48-0 | While our emotional
intelligence
determines our potential for
learning the fundamentals of self-mastery and the like, our emotional
competence
shows how much of that potential we have mastered in
ways that translate into on-the-job capabilities. To be adept at an
emotional competence like customer service or teamwork requires an
underlying ability in EI fundamentals, specifically social awareness
and relationship management. But emotional competencies are
learned abilities: having social awareness or skill at managing
relationships does not guarantee that one has mastered
the additional
learning required to handle a customer adeptly or to resolve a
conflict. One simply has the potential to
become
skilled at these
competencies.
Again, an underlying EI ability is necessary, though not sufficient,
to manifest a given competency or job skill. A cognitive analog would
be the student who has excellent spatial abilities yet never learns
geometry, let alone becomes an architect. So, too, can one be highly
empathic yet poor at handling customers—without having learned the
competency for customer service. (For those ultradedicated souls
wanting to understand how my current model nests twenty or so
emotional competencies within the four EI clusters, see the appendix
to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6098380f4c48-1 | to
Primal Leadership
.)
In 1995 I reported data from a nationwide, demographically
representative sample of more than three thousand children aged
seven to sixteen, rated by their parents and teachers, showing that
over the decade or so between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s,
indicators of emotional well-being among America’s kids underwent a
marked decline. These children were more troubled and had more
problems, ranging from loneliness and anxiety to disobedience and
whining. (Of course, there are always individual exceptions—children
who grow up to be outstanding human beings—whatever the overall
numbers show.)
But a later group of children, rated in 1999, seem to have improved
markedly, rating far better than those in the late 1980s, though they
were not quite restored to the levels recorded in the mid-1970s.
5
True, parents are still likely to complain in general about their kids,
still concerned that their children are hanging out with “bad
influences,” and whining seems worse than ever. But the trend is
clearly upward.
Frankly, I’m puzzled. I had conjectured that today’s children are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f730bcc0e3c0-0 | unintended victims of economic and technological progress, deskilled
in EI because their parents spend more time at work than in previous
generations, because increased mobility has cut ties to extended
family, and because “free” time has become so structured and
overorganized. After all, emotional intelligence has traditionally been
passed on in the midst of everyday life—with parents and relatives,
and in the rough-and-tumble of free play—opportunities that are now
being lost to the young.
Then there’s the technological factor. Today’s children spend more
time alone than ever before in human history, staring at a video
monitor. That amounts to a natural experiment on an unprecedented
scale. Will these tech-sawy children become adults who are as
comfortable with
other people as they are with their computers? I
suspected, rather, that a childhood spent relating to a virtual world
would deskill our young people when it came to relating person to
person.
So went my arguments. Nothing has happened in the last decade or
so to reverse these trends. Yet children, thankfully, seem to be faring
better.
Thomas Achenbach, the University of Vermont psychologist who
has done these studies, hypothesizes that the economic boom of the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f730bcc0e3c0-1 | has done these studies, hypothesizes that the economic boom of the
1990s lifted children as well as adults; more jobs and less crime meant
better childrearing. Should there be another major economic
recession, he suggests, we would see another decline in this measure
of children’s skills for life. That may well be; only time will tell.
The hyperspeed at which EI has become a topic of importance in a
wide array of fields makes prediction difficult, but let me offer some
thoughts on what I hope for the field in the near future.
Many of the benefits that accrue from developing emotional
intelligence capabilities have gone to the privileged, such as high-level
business executives and children in private schools. Of course, many
children in impoverished neighborhoods have also benefited—for
instance, if their schools implemented SEL. But I encourage a further
democratization of this variety of human skill development, reaching
into often-neglected pools, like families in poverty (where children so
often suffer emotional wounds that compound their plight) and to
prisons (particularly for young offenders who could benefit
enormously from strengthening skills like anger management, self-
awareness, and empathy). Given the right help with these abilities, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
88a5d5d9fe58-0 | their lives would improve, and their communities would be safer.
I’d also like to see the scope of thinking about emotional
intelligence itself expand, leaping from a focus on capacities within
the individual to a focus on what emerges when people interact,
whether one on one or in larger groups. Some research, notably the
University of New Hampshire psychologist Vanessa Druskat’s work on
how teams can become emotionally intelligent, has seamlessly made
this leap already. But much more could be done.
Finally, I envision a day when emotional intelligence will have
become so widely understood that we need not mention it because it
has melded with our lives. In such a future, SEL would have become
standard practice in schools everywhere. Likewise, EI qualities such as
self-awareness, managing destructive emotions, and empathy would
be givens in the workplace,
“must-haves” for being hired and
promoted, and most especially for leadership. If EI were to become as
widespread as IQ has become, and as ingrained in society as a
measure of human qualities, then, I believe, our families, schools,
jobs, and communities would be all the more humane and nourishing. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
db18a952dc7d-0 | Aristotle’s Challenge
Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right
degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy
.
A
RISTOTLE
,
The Nichomachean Ethics
It was an unbearably steamy August afternoon in New York City, the
kind of sweaty day that makes people sullen with discomfort. I was
heading back to a hotel, and as I stepped onto a bus up Madison
Avenue I was startled by the driver, a middle-aged black man with an
enthusiastic smile, who welcomed me with a friendly, “Hi! How you
doing?” as I got on, a greeting he proffered to everyone else who
entered as the bus wormed through the thick midtown traffic. Each
passenger was as startled as I, and, locked into the morose mood of
the day, few returned his greeting.
But as the bus crawled uptown through the gridlock, a slow, rather
magical transformation occurred. The driver gave a running
monologue for our benefit, a lively commentary on the passing scene
around us: there was a terrific sale at that store, a wonderful exhibit
at this museum, did you hear about the new movie that just opened at | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
db18a952dc7d-1 | that cinema down the block? His delight in the rich possibilities the
city offered was infectious. By the time people got off the bus, each in
turn had shaken off the sullen shell they had entered with, and when
the driver shouted out a “So long, have a great day!” each gave a
smiling response.
The memory of that encounter has stayed with me for close to
twenty years. When I rode that Madison Avenue bus, I had just
finished my own doctorate in psychology—but there was scant
attention paid in the psychology of the day to just how such a
transformation could happen. Psychological science knew little or
nothing of the mechanics of emotion. And yet, imagining the
spreading virus of good feeling that must have rippled through the
city, starting from passengers on his bus, I saw that this bus driver
was an
urban peacemaker of sorts, wizardlike in his power to
transmute the sullen irritability that seethed in his passengers, to
soften and open their hearts a bit. In stark contrast, some items from
this week’s paper: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6fc4fc4b8297-0 | • At a local school, a nine-year-old goes on a rampage, pouring
paint over school desks, computers, and printers, and vandalizing a
car in the school parking lot. The reason: some third-grade classmates
called him a “baby” and he wanted to impress them.
• Eight youngsters are wounded when an inadvertent bump in a
crowd of teenagers milling outside a Manhattan rap club leads to a
shoving match, which ends when one of those affronted starts
shooting a .38 caliber automatic handgun into the crowd. The report
notes that such shootings over seemingly minor slights, which are
perceived as acts of disrespect, have become increasingly common
around the country in recent years.
• For murder victims under twelve, says a report, 57 percent of the
murderers are their parents or stepparents. In almost half the cases,
the parents say they were “merely trying to discipline the child.” The
fatal beatings were prompted by “infractions” such as the child
blocking the TV, crying, or soiling diapers.
• A German youth is on trial for murdering five Turkish women and
girls in a fire he set while they slept. Part of a neo-Nazi group, he tells | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6fc4fc4b8297-1 | of failing to hold jobs, of drinking, of blaming his hard luck on
foreigners. In a barely audible voice, he pleads, “I can’t stop being
sorry for what we’ve done, and I am infinitely ashamed.”
Each day’s news comes to us rife with such reports of the
disintegration of civility and safety, an onslaught of mean-spirited
impulse running amok. But the news simply reflects back to us on a
larger scale a creeping sense of emotions out of control in our own
lives and in those of the people around us. No one is insulated from
this erratic tide of outburst and regret; it reaches into all of our lives
in one way or another.
The last decade has seen a steady drumroll of reports like these,
portraying an uptick in emotional ineptitude, desperation, and
recklessness in our families, our communities, and our collective lives.
These years have chronicled surging rage and despair, whether in the
quiet loneliness of latchkey kids left with a TV for a babysitter, or in
the pain of children abandoned, neglected, or abused, or in the ugly
intimacy of marital violence. A spreading emotional malaise can be | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6fc4fc4b8297-2 | read in numbers showing a jump in depression around the world, and
in the reminders of a surging
tide of aggression—teens with guns in
schools, freeway mishaps ending in shootings, disgruntled ex- | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
de685ee7b22a-0 | employees massacring former fellow workers.
Emotional abuse, drive-
by shooting
, and
post-traumatic stress
all entered the common lexicon
over the last decade, as the slogan of the hour shifted from the cheery
“Have a nice day” to the testiness of “Make my day.”
This book is a guide to making sense of the senselessness. As a
psychologist, and for the last decade as a journalist for
The New York
Times
, I have been tracking the progress of our scientific
understanding of the realm of the irrational. From that perch I have
been struck by two opposing trends, one portraying a growing
calamity in our shared emotional life, the other offering some hopeful
remedies.
WHY THIS EXPLORATION NOW
The last decade, despite its bad news, has also seen an unparalleled
burst of scientific studies of emotion. Most dramatic are the glimpses
of the brain at work, made possible by innovative methods such as
new brain-imaging technologies. They have made visible for the first
time in human history what has always been a source of deep
mystery: exactly how this intricate mass of cells operates while we
think and feel, imagine and dream. This flood of neurobiological data | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
de685ee7b22a-1 | lets us understand more clearly than ever how the brain’s centers for
emotion move us to rage or to tears, and how more ancient parts of
the brain, which stir us to make war as well as love, are channeled for
better or worse. This unprecedented clarity on the workings of
emotions and their failings brings into focus some fresh remedies for
our collective emotional crisis.
I have had to wait till now before the scientific harvest was full
enough to write this book. These insights are so late in coming largely
because the place of feeling in mental life has been surprisingly
slighted by research over the years, leaving the emotions a largely
unexplored continent for scientific psychology. Into this void has
rushed a welter of self-help books, well-intentioned advice based at
best on clinical opinion but lacking much, if any, scientific basis. Now
science is finally able to speak with authority to these urgent and
perplexing questions of the psyche at its most irrational, to map with
some precision the human heart.
This mapping offers a challenge to those who subscribe to a narrow
view of intelligence, arguing that IQ is a genetic given that cannot be | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9a19e5e10327-0 | changed by life experience, and that our destiny in life is largely fixed
by
these aptitudes. That argument ignores the more challenging
question: What
can
we change that will help our children fare better
in life? What factors are at play, for example, when people of high IQ
flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well? I would argue
that the difference quite often lies in the abilities called here
emotional
intelligence
, which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the
ability to motivate oneself. And these skills, as we shall see, can be
taught to children, giving them a better chance to use whatever
intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given them.
Beyond this possibility looms a pressing moral imperative. These
are times when the fabric of society seems to unravel at ever-greater
speed, when selfishness, violence, and a meanness of spirit seem to be
rotting the goodness of our communal lives. Here the argument for
the importance of emotional intelligence hinges on the link between
sentiment, character, and moral instincts. There is growing evidence
that fundamental ethical stances in life stem from underlying
emotional capacities. For one, impulse is the medium of emotion; the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9a19e5e10327-1 | seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action.
Those who are at the mercy of impulse—who lack self-control—suffer
a moral deficiency: The ability to control impulse is the base of will
and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy,
the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s
need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral
stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint
and compassion.
OUR JOURNEY
In this book I serve as a guide in a journey through these scientific
insights into the emotions, a voyage aimed at bringing greater
understanding to some of the most perplexing moments in our own
lives and in the world around us. The journey’s end is to understand
what it means—and how—to bring intelligence to emotion. This
understanding itself can help to some degree; bringing cognizance to
the realm of feeling has an effect something like the impact of an
observer at the quantum level in physics, altering what is being
observed.
Our journey begins in
Part One
with new discoveries about the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27691be9aae0-0 | brain’s emotional architecture that offer an explanation of those most
baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality.
Understanding
the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments
of rage and fear—or passion and joy—reveals much about how we
learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as
well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-
defeating emotional impulses. Most important, the neurological data
suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children’s emotional
habits.
The next major stop on our journey,
Part Two
of this book, is in
seeing how neurological givens play out in the basic flair for living
called
emotional intelligence:
being able, for example, to rein in
emotional impulse; to read another’s innermost feelings; to handle
relationships smoothly—as Aristotle put it, the rare skill “to be angry
with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the
right purpose, and in the right way.” (Readers who are not drawn to
neurological detail may want to proceed directly to this section.)
This expanded model of what it means to be “intelligent” puts
emotions at the center of aptitudes for living.
Part Three
examines | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27691be9aae0-1 | Part Three
examines
some key differences this aptitude makes: how these abilities can
preserve our most prized relationships, or their lack corrode them;
how the market forces that are reshaping our worklife are putting an
unprecedented premium on emotional intelligence for on-the-job
success; and how toxic emotions put our physical health at as much
risk as does chain-smoking, even as emotional balance can help
protect our health and well-being.
Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional
set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry
involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny. As
Part Four
shows, the emotional lessons we learn as children at home
and at school shape the emotional circuits, making us more adept—or
inept—at the basics of emotional intelligence. This means that
childhood and adolescence are critical windows of opportunity for
setting down the essential emotional habits that will govern our lives.
Part Five
explores what hazards await those who, in growing to
maturity, fail to master the emotional realm—how deficiencies in
emotional intelligence heighten a spectrum of risks, from depression
or a life of violence to eating disorders and drug abuse. And it | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27691be9aae0-2 | documents how pioneering schools are teaching children the
emotional and social skills they need to keep their lives on track. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e1ee6cdc8287-0 | Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in this book comes
from a massive survey of parents and teachers and shows a worldwide
trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled
emotionally
than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and
unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and
aggressive.
If there is a remedy, I feel it must lie in how we prepare our young
for life. At present we leave the emotional education of our children
to chance, with ever more disastrous results. One solution is a new
vision of what schools can do to educate the whole student, bringing
together mind and heart in the classroom. Our journey ends with
visits to innovative classes that aim to give children a grounding in
the basics of emotional intelligence. I can foresee a day when
education will routinely include inculcating essential human
competencies such as self-awareness, self-control, and empathy, and
the arts of listening, resolving conflicts, and cooperation.
In
The Nichomachean Ethics
, Aristotle’s philosophical enquiry into
virtue, character, and the good life, his challenge is to manage our
emotional life with intelligence. Our passions, when well exercised, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e1ee6cdc8287-1 | have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival. But
they can easily go awry, and do so all too often. As Aristotle saw, the
problem is not with emotionality, but with the
appropriateness
of
emotion and its expression. The question is, how can we bring
intelligence to our emotions—and civility to our streets and caring to
our communal life? | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
354534819660-0 | PART ONE
THE
EMOTIONAL
BRAIN | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7a240b8215ec-0 | 1
What Are Emotions For?
It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye
.
A
NTOINE DE
S
AINT
-E
XUPÉRY
,
The Little Prince
Ponder the last moments of Gary and Mary Jane Chauncey, a couple
completely devoted to their eleven-year-old daughter Andrea, who
was confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy. The Chauncey family
were passengers on an Amtrak train that crashed into a river after a
barge hit and weakened a railroad bridge in Louisiana’s bayou
country. Thinking first of their daughter, the couple tried their best to
save Andrea as water rushed into the sinking train; somehow they
managed to push Andrea through a window to rescuers. Then, as the
car sank beneath the water, they perished.
1
Andrea’s story, of parents whose last heroic act is to ensure their
child’s survival, captures a moment of almost mythic courage.
Without doubt such incidents of parental sacrifice for their progeny
have been repeated countless times in human history and prehistory,
and countless more in the larger course of evolution of our species.
2
Seen from the perspective of evolutionary biologists, such parental | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7a240b8215ec-1 | 2
Seen from the perspective of evolutionary biologists, such parental
self-sacrifice is in the service of “reproductive success” in passing on
one’s genes to future generations. But from the perspective of a parent
making a desperate decision in a moment of crisis, it is about nothing
other than love.
As an insight into the purpose and potency of emotions, this
exemplary act of parental heroism testifies to the role of altruistic love
—and every other emotion we feel—in human life.
3
It suggests that
our deepest feelings, our passions and longings, are essential guides,
and that our species owes much
of its existence to their power in
human affairs. That power is extraordinary: Only a potent love—the
urgency of saving a cherished child—could lead a parent to override
the impulse for personal survival. Seen from the intellect, their self-
sacrifice was arguably irrational; seen from the heart, it was the only | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
338f92fdcd96-0 | choice to make.
Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over head at such
crucial moments when they conjecture about why evolution has given
emotion such a central role in the human psyche. Our emotions, they
say, guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave
to intellect alone—danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal
despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a family. Each
emotion offers a distinctive readiness to act; each points us in a
direction that has worked well to handle the recurring challenges of
human life.
4
As these eternal situations were repeated and repeated
over our evolutionary history, the survival value of our emotional
repertoire was attested to by its becoming imprinted in our nerves as
innate, automatic tendencies of the human heart.
A view of human nature that ignores the power of emotions is sadly
shortsighted. The very name
Homo sapiens
, the thinking species, is
misleading in light of the new appreciation and vision of the place of
emotions in our lives that science now offers. As we all know from
experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and our actions,
feeling counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought. We | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
338f92fdcd96-1 | have gone too far in emphasizing the value and import of the purely
rational—of what IQ measures—in human life. For better or worse,
intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.
WHEN PASSIONS OVERWHELM REASON
It was a tragedy of errors. Fourteen-year-old Matilda Crabtree was just
playing a practical joke on her father: she jumped out of a closet and
yelled “Boo!” as her parents came home at one in the morning from
visiting friends.
But Bobby Crabtree and his wife thought Matilda was staying with
friends that night. Hearing noises as he entered the house, Crabtree
reached for his .357 caliber pistol and went into Matilda’s bedroom to
investigate. When his daughter jumped from the closet, Crabtree shot
her in the neck. Matilda Crabtree died twelve hours later.
5
One emotional legacy of evolution is the fear that mobilizes us to
protect our family from danger; that impulse impelled Bobby Crabtree
to get his gun
and search his house for the intruder he thought was
prowling there. Fear primed Crabtree to shoot before he could fully
register what he was shooting at, even before he could recognize his | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b794d85549e4-0 | daughter’s voice. Automatic reactions of this sort have become etched
in our nervous system, evolutionary biologists presume, because for a
long and crucial period in human prehistory they made the difference
between survival and death. Even more important, they mattered for
the main task of evolution: being able to bear progeny who would
carry on these very genetic predispositions—a sad irony, given the
tragedy at the Crabtree household.
But while our emotions have been wise guides in the evolutionary
long run, the new realities civilization presents have arisen with such
rapidity that the slow march of evolution cannot keep up. Indeed, the
first laws and proclamations of ethics—the Code of Hammurabi, the
Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka—
can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate
emotional life. As Freud described in
Civilization and Its Discontents
,
society has had to enforce from without rules meant to subdue tides of
emotional excess that surge too freely within.
Despite these social constraints, passions overwhelm reason time
and again. This given of human nature arises from the basic
architecture of mental life. In terms of biological design for the basic | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b794d85549e4-1 | architecture of mental life. In terms of biological design for the basic
neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what worked
best for the last 50,000 human generations, not the last 500
generations—and certainly not the last five. The slow, deliberate
forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their
work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years—despite
having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the
explosion of the human population from five million to five billion—
have left little imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.
For better or for worse, our appraisal of every personal encounter
and our responses to it are shaped not just by our rational judgments
or our personal history, but also by our distant ancestral past. This
leaves us with sometimes tragic propensities, as witness the sad events
at the Crabtree household. In short, we too often confront postmodern
dilemmas with an emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the
Pleistocene. That predicament is at the heart of my subject.
Impulses to Action
One early spring day I was driving along a highway over a mountain
pass in Colorado, when a snow flurry suddenly blotted out the car a
few lengths | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b794d85549e4-2 | few lengths
ahead of me. As I peered ahead I couldn’t make out | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
415af1b6ff8b-0 | anything; the swirling snow was now a blinding whiteness. Pressing
my foot on the brake, I could feel anxiety flood my body and hear the
thumping of my heart.
The anxiety built to full fear: I pulled over to the side of the road,
waiting for the flurry to pass. A half hour later the snow stopped,
visibility returned, and I continued on my way—only to be stopped a
few hundred yards down the road, where an ambulance crew was
helping a passenger in a car that had rear-ended a slower car in front;
the collision blocked the highway. If I had continued driving in the
blinding snow, I probably would have hit them.
The caution fear forced on me that day may have saved my life.
Like a rabbit frozen in terror at the hint of a passing fox—or a
protomammal hiding from a marauding dinosaur—I was overtaken by
an internal state that compelled me to stop, pay attention, and take
heed of a coming danger.
All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for
handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the
word
emotion
is
motere
, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-”
to connote “move away,” suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
415af1b6ff8b-1 | in every emotion. That emotions lead to actions is most obvious in
watching animals or children; it is only in “civilized” adults we so
often find the great anomaly in the animal kingdom, emotions—root
impulses to act—divorced from obvious reaction.
6
In our emotional repertoire each emotion plays a unique role, as
revealed by their distinctive biological signatures (see
Appendix A
for
details on “basic” emotions). With new methods to peer into the body
and brain, researchers are discovering more physiological details of
how each emotion prepares the body for a very different kind of
response:
7
• With
anger
blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a
weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones
such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for
vigorous action.
• With
fear
blood goes to the large skeletal muscles, such as in the
legs, making it easier to flee—and making the face blanch as blood is
shunted away from it (creating the feeling that the blood “runs cold”).
At the same time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps
allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
415af1b6ff8b-2 | allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction.
Circuits in the brain’s emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
84e3b8febaed-0 | that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for
action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand, the better to
evaluate what response to make.
• Among the main biological changes in
happiness
is an increased
activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an
increase in
available energy, and a quieting of those that generate
worrisome thought. But there is no particular shift in physiology save
a quiescence, which makes the body recover more quickly from the
biological arousal of upsetting emotions. This configuration offers the
body a general rest, as well as readiness and enthusiasm for whatever
task is at hand and for striving toward a great variety of goals.
•
Love
, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction entail
parasympathetic arousal—the physiological opposite of the “fight-or-
flight” mobilization shared by fear and anger. The parasympathetic
pattern, dubbed the “relaxation response,” is a bodywide set of
reactions that generates a general state of calm and contentment,
facilitating cooperation.
• The lifting of the eyebrows in
surprise
allows the taking in of a
larger visual sweep and also permits more light to strike the retina.
This offers more information about the unexpected event, making it | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
84e3b8febaed-1 | This offers more information about the unexpected event, making it
easier to figure out exactly what is going on and concoct the best plan
for action.
• Around the world an expression of
disgust
looks the same, and
sends the identical message: something is offensive in taste or smell,
or metaphorically so. The facial expression of disgust—the upper lip
curled to the side as the nose wrinkles slightly—suggests a primordial
attempt, as Darwin observed, to close the nostrils against a noxious
odor or to spit out a poisonous food.
• A main function for
sadness
is to help adjust to a significant loss,
such as the death of someone close or a major disappointment.
Sadness brings a drop in energy and enthusiasm for life’s activities,
particularly diversions and pleasures, and, as it deepens and
approaches depression, slows the body’s metabolism. This
introspective withdrawal creates the opportunity to mourn a loss or
frustrated hope, grasp its consequences for one’s life, and, as energy
returns, plan new beginnings. This loss of energy may well have kept
saddened—and vulnerable—early humans close to home, where they
were safer.
These biological propensities to act are shaped further by our life | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eae7dffca4b0-0 | experience and our culture. For instance, universally the loss of a
loved one elicits sadness and grief. But how we show our grieving—
how emotions are displayed or held back for private moments—is
molded by culture, as are which particular people in our lives fall into
the category of “loved ones” to be mourned.
The protracted period of evolution when these emotional responses
were hammered into shape was certainly a harsher reality than most
humans endured as a species after the dawn of recorded history. It
was a time when few infants survived to childhood and few adults to
thirty years, when
predators could strike at any moment, when the
vagaries of droughts and floods meant the difference between
starvation and survival. But with the coming of agriculture and even
the most rudimentary human societies, the odds for survival began to
change dramatically. In the last ten thousand years, when these
advances took hold throughout the world, the ferocious pressures that
had held the human population in check eased steadily.
Those same pressures had made our emotional responses so
valuable for survival; as they waned, so did the goodness of fit of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eae7dffca4b0-1 | parts of our emotional repertoire. While in the ancient past a hair-
trigger anger may have offered a crucial edge for survival, the
availability of automatic weaponry to thirteen-year-olds has made it
too often a disastrous reaction.
8
Our Two
Minds
A friend was telling me about her divorce, a painful separation. Her
husband had fallen in love with a younger woman at work, and
suddenly announced he was leaving to live with the other woman.
Months of bitter wrangling over house, money, and custody of the
children followed. Now, some months later, she was saying that her
independence was appealing to her, that she was happy to be on her
own. “I just don’t think about him anymore—I really don’t care,” she
said. But as she said it, her eyes momentarily welled up with tears.
That moment of teary eyes could easily pass unnoted. But the
empathic understanding that someone’s watering eyes means she is
sad despite her words to the contrary is an act of comprehending just
as surely as is distilling meaning from words on a printed page. One is
an act of the emotional mind, the other of the rational mind. In a very | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eae7dffca4b0-2 | real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.
These two fundamentally different ways of knowing interact to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0b406e76c0b4-0 | construct our mental life. One, the rational mind, is the mode of
comprehension we are typically conscious of: more prominent in
awareness, thoughtful, able to ponder and reflect. But alongside that
there is another system of knowing: impulsive and powerful, if
sometimes illogical—the emotional mind. (For a more detailed
description of the characteristics of the emotional mind, see
Appendix
B
.)
The emotional/rational dichotomy approximates the folk distinction
between “heart” and “head”; knowing something is right “in your
heart” is a different order of conviction—somehow a deeper kind of
certainty—than thinking so with your rational mind. There is a steady
gradient in the ratio of rational-to-emotional control over the mind;
the more intense the feeling, the
more dominant the emotional mind
becomes—and the more ineffectual the rational. This is an
arrangement that seems to stem from eons of evolutionary advantage
to having emotions and intuitions guide our instantaneous response in
situations where our lives are in peril—and where pausing to think
over what to do could cost us our lives.
These two minds, the emotional and the rational, operate in tight
harmony for the most part, intertwining their very different ways of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0b406e76c0b4-1 | knowing to guide us through the world. Ordinarily there is a balance
between emotional and rational minds, with emotion feeding into and
informing the operations of the rational mind, and the rational mind
refining and sometimes vetoing the inputs of the emotions. Still, the
emotional and rational minds are semi-independent faculties, each, as
we shall see, reflecting the operation of distinct, but interconnected,
circuitry in the brain.
In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely coordinated;
feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when
passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures
the upper hand, swamping the rational mind. The sixteenth-century
humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in a satirical vein of this
perennial tension between reason and emotion:
9
Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason—you could calculate the ratio as 24
to one. He set up two raging tyrants in opposition to Reason’s solitary power: anger
and lust. How far Reason can prevail against the combined forces of these two the
common life of man makes quite clear. Reason does the only thing she can and shouts | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0b406e76c0b4-2 | herself hoarse, repeating formulas of virtue, while the other two bid her go hang
herself, and are increasingly noisy and offensive, until at last their Ruler is exhausted, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
82eddcc09d27-0 | gives up, and surrenders.
HOW THE BRAIN GREW
To better grasp the potent hold of the emotions on the thinking mind
—and why feeling and reason are so readily at war—consider how the
brain evolved. Human brains, with their three pounds or so of cells
and neural juices, are about triple the size of those in our nearest
cousins in evolution, the nonhuman primates. Over millions of years
of evolution, the brain has grown from the bottom up, with its higher
centers developing as elaborations of lower, more ancient parts. (The
growth of the brain in the human embryo roughly retraces this
evolutionary course.)
The most primitive part of the brain, shared with all species that
have more than a minimal nervous system, is the brainstem
surrounding the top of the spinal cord. This root brain regulates basic
life functions like breathing and the metabolism of the body’s other
organs, as well as controlling stereotyped reactions and movements.
This primitive brain cannot be said to think or learn; rather it is a set
of preprogrammed regulators that keep the body running as it should
and reacting in a way that ensures survival. This brain reigned
supreme in the Age of the Reptiles: Picture a snake hissing to signal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
82eddcc09d27-1 | the threat of an attack.
From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged the
emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these
emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or “neocortex,” the great
bulb of convoluted tissues that make up the top layers. The fact that
the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the
relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long
before there was a rational one.
The most ancient root of our emotional life is in the sense of smell,
or, more precisely, in the olfactory lobe, the cells that take in and
analyze smell. Every living entity, be it nutritious, poisonous, sexual
partner, predator or prey, has a distinctive molecular signature that
can be carried in the wind. In those primitive times smell commended
itself as a paramount sense for survival.
From the olfactory lobe the ancient centers for emotion began to
evolve, eventually growing large enough to encircle the top of the
brainstem. In its rudimentary stages, the olfactory center was | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d14a7047aa46-0 | composed of little more than thin layers of neurons gathered to
analyze smell. One layer of cells took in what was smelled and sorted
it out into the relevant categories: edible or toxic, sexually available,
enemy or meal. A second layer of cells sent reflexive messages
throughout the nervous system telling the body what to do: bite, spit,
approach, flee, chase.
10
With the arrival of the first mammals came new, key layers of the
emotional brain. These, surrounding the brainstem, look roughly like
a bagel with a bite taken out at the bottom where the brainstem
nestles into them. Because this part of the brain rings and borders the
brainstem, it was called the “limbic” system, from “limbus,” the Latin
word for “ring.” This new neural territory added emotions proper to
the brain’s repertoire.
11
When we are in the grip of craving or fury,
head-over-heels in love or recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system
that has us in its grip.
As it evolved, the limbic system refined two powerful tools: learning
and memory. These revolutionary advances allowed an animal to be
much smarter in its choices for survival, and to fine-tune its responses
to adapt to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d14a7047aa46-1 | to adapt to
changing demands rather than having invariable and
automatic reactions. If a food led to sickness, it could be avoided next
time. Decisions like knowing what to eat and what to spurn were still
determined largely through smell; the connections between the
olfactory bulb and the limbic system now took on the tasks of making
distinctions among smells and recognizing them, comparing a present
smell with past ones, and so discriminating good from bad. This was
done by the “rhinencephalon,” literally, the “nose brain,” a part of the
limbic wiring, and the rudimentary basis of the neocortex, the
thinking brain.
About 100 million years ago the brain in mammals took a great
growth spurt. Piled on top of the thin two-layered cortex—the regions
that plan, comprehend what is sensed, coordinate movement—several
new layers of brain cells were added to form the neocortex. In
contrast to the ancient brain’s two-layered cortex, the neocortex
offered an extraordinary intellectual edge.
The
Homo sapiens
neocortex, so much larger than in any other
species, has added all that is distinctly human. The neocortex is the
seat of thought; it contains the centers that put together and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d14a7047aa46-2 | seat of thought; it contains the centers that put together and
comprehend what the senses perceive. It adds to a feeling what we
think about it—and allows us to have feelings about ideas, art,
symbols, imaginings. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8e3ae93e9ccb-0 | In evolution the neocortex allowed a judicious fine-tuning that no
doubt has made enormous advantages in an organism’s ability to
survive adversity, making it more likely that its progeny would in turn
pass on the genes that contain that same neural circuitry. The survival
edge is due to the neocortex’s talent for strategizing, long-term
planning, and other mental wiles. Beyond that, the triumphs of art, of
civilization and culture, are all fruits of the neocortex.
This new addition to the brain allowed the addition of nuance to
emotional life. Take love. Limbic structures generate feelings of
pleasure and sexual desire—the emotions that feed sexual passion. But
the addition of the neocortex and its connections to the limbic system
allowed for the mother-child bond that is the basis of the family unit
and the long-term commitment to childrearing that makes human
development possible. (Species that have no neocortex, such as
reptiles, lack maternal affection; when their young hatch, the
newborns must hide to avoid being cannibalized.) In humans the
protective bond between parent and child allows much of maturation
to go on over the course of a long childhood—during which the brain
continues to develop. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8e3ae93e9ccb-1 | continues to develop.
As we proceed up the phylogenetic scale from reptile to rhesus to
human, the sheer mass of the neocortex increases; with that increase
comes a
geometrie rise in the interconnections in brain circuitry. The
larger the number of such connections, the greater the range of
possible responses. The neocortex allows for the subtlety and
complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings
about
our feelings. There is more neocortex-to-limbic system in primates
than in other species—and vastly more in humans—suggesting why
we are able to display a far greater range of reactions to our emotions,
and more nuance. While a rabbit or rhesus has a restricted set of
typical responses to fear, the larger human neocortex allows a far
more nimble repertoire—including calling 911. The more complex the
social system, the more essential is such flexibility—and there is no
more complex social world than our own.
12
But these higher centers do not govern all of emotional life; in
crucial matters of the heart—and most especially in emotional
emergencies—they can be said to defer to the limbic system. Because
so many of the brain’s higher centers sprouted from or extended the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8e3ae93e9ccb-2 | scope of the limbic area, the emotional brain plays a crucial role in
neural architecture. As the root from which the newer brain grew, the
emotional areas are intertwined via myriad connecting circuits to all | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
93cc67446916-0 | parts of the neocortex. This gives the emotional centers immense
power to influence the functioning of the rest of the brain—including
its centers for thought. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6d0cf2e31db1-0 | 2
Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel
.
H
ORACE
W
ALPOLE
It was a hot August afternoon in 1963, the same day that the Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a civil
rights march on Washington. On that day Richard Robles, a seasoned
burglar who had just been paroled from a three-year sentence for the
more than one hundred break-ins he had pulled to support a heroin
habit, decided to do one more. He wanted to renounce crime, Robles
later claimed, but he desperately needed money for his girlfriend and
their three-year-old daughter.
The apartment he broke into that day belonged to two young
women, twenty-one-year-old Janice Wylie, a researcher at
Newsweek
magazine, and twenty-three-year-old Emily Hoffert, a grade-school
teacher. Though Robles chose the apartment on New York’s swanky
Upper East Side to burglarize because he thought no one would be
there, Wylie was home. Threatening her with a knife, Robles tied her | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6d0cf2e31db1-1 | up. As he was leaving, Hoffert came home. To make good his escape,
Robles began to tie her up, too.
As Robles tells the tale years later, while he was tying up Hoffert,
Janice Wylie warned him he would not get away with this crime: She
would remember his face and help the police track him down. Robles,
who had promised himself this was to have been his last burglary,
panicked at that, completely losing control. In a frenzy, he grabbed a
soda bottle and clubbed
the women until they were unconscious,
then, awash in rage and fear, he slashed and stabbed them over and
over with a kitchen knife. Looking back on that moment some twenty-
five years later, Robles lamented, “I just went bananas. My head just
exploded.”
To this day Robles has lots of time to regret those few minutes of
rage unleashed. At this writing he is still in prison, some three
decades later, for what became known as the “Career Girl Murders.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c92356896ac5-0 | Such emotional explosions are neural hijackings. At those moments,
evidence suggests, a center in the limbic brain proclaims an
emergency, recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda. The
hijacking occurs in an instant, triggering this reaction crucial
moments before the neocortex, the thinking brain, has had a chance
to glimpse fully what is happening, let alone decide if it is a good
idea. The hallmark of such a hijack is that once the moment passes,
those so possessed have the sense of not knowing what came over
them.
These hijacks are by no means isolated, horrific incidents that lead
to brutal crimes like the Career Girl Murders. In less catastrophic form
—but not necessarily less intense—they happen to us with fair
frequency. Think back to the last time you “lost it,” blowing up at
someone—your spouse or child, or perhaps the driver of another car—
to a degree that later, with some reflection and hindsight, seemed
uncalled for. In all probability, that, too, was such a hijacking, a
neural takeover which, as we shall see, originates in the amygdala, a
center in the limbic brain.
Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c92356896ac5-1 | someone as so uproarious that their laughter is almost explosive, that,
too, is a limbic response. It is at work also in moments of intense joy:
When Dan Jansen, after several heartbreaking failures to capture an
Olympic Gold Medal for speed skating (which he had vowed to do for
his dying sister), finally won the Gold in the 1,000-meter race in the
1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, his wife was so overcome by the
excitement and happiness that she had to be rushed to emergency
physicians at rinkside.
THE SEAT OF ALL PASSION
In humans the amygdala (from the Greek word for “almond”) is an
almond-shaped cluster of interconnected structures perched above the
brainstem, near the bottom of the limbic ring. There are two
amygdalas, one on each side of the brain, nestled toward the side of
the head. The human amygdala is
relatively large compared to that in
any of our closest evolutionary cousins, the primates.
The hippocampus and the amygdala were the two key parts of the
primitive “nose brain” that, in evolution, gave rise to the cortex and
then the neocortex. To this day these limbic structures do much or | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
866fdd921b28-0 | most of the brain’s learning and remembering; the amygdala is the
specialist for emotional matters. If the amygdala is severed from the
rest of the brain, the result is a striking inability to gauge the
emotional significance of events; this condition is sometimes called
“affective blindness.”
Lacking emotional weight, encounters lose their hold. One young
man whose amygdala had been surgically removed to control severe
seizures became completely uninterested in people, preferring to sit in
isolation with no human contact. While he was perfectly capable of
conversation, he no longer recognized close friends, relatives, or even
his mother, and remained impassive in the face of their anguish at his
indifference. Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all
recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings.
1
The
amygdala acts as a storehouse of emotional memory, and thus of
significance itself; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of
personal meanings.
More than affection is tied to the amygdala; all passion depends on
it. Animals that have their amygdala removed or severed lack fear and
rage, lose the urge to compete or cooperate, and no longer have any | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
866fdd921b28-1 | sense of their place in their kind’s social order; emotion is blunted or
absent. Tears, an emotional signal unique to humans, are triggered by
the amygdala and a nearby structure, the cingulate gyrus; being held,
stroked, or otherwise comforted soothes these same brain regions,
stopping the sobs. Without an amygdala, there are no tears of sorrow
to soothe.
Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at
New York University, was the first to discover the key role of the
amygdala in the emotional brain.
2
LeDoux is part of a fresh breed of
neuroscientists who draw on innovative methods and technologies
that bring a previously unknown level of precision to mapping the
brain at work, and so can lay bare mysteries of mind that earlier
generations of scientists have found impenetrable. His findings on the
circuitry of the emotional brain overthrow a long-standing notion
about the limbic system, putting the amygdala at the center of the
action and placing other limbic structures in very different roles.
3
LeDoux’s research explains how the amygdala can take control over
what we do even as the thinking brain, the neocortex, is still coming
to a decision. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
866fdd921b28-2 | to a decision.
As we shall see, the workings of the amygdala and its interplay with
the neocortex are at the heart of emotional intelligence. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a80e9938d71a-0 | THE NEURAL TRIPWIRE
Most intriguing for understanding the power of emotions in mental
life are those moments of impassioned action that we later regret,
once the dust has settled; the question is how we so easily become so
irrational. Take, for example, a young woman who drove two hours to
Boston to have brunch and spend the day with her boyfriend. During
brunch he gave her a present she’d been wanting for months, a hard-
to-find art print brought back from Spain. But her delight dissolved
the moment she suggested that after brunch they go to a matinee of a
movie she’d been wanting to see and her friend stunned her by saying
he couldn’t spend the day with her because he had softball practice.
Hurt and incredulous, she got up in tears, left the cafe, and, on
impulse, threw the print in a garbage can. Months later, recounting
the incident, it’s not walking out she regrets, but the loss of the print.
It is in moments such as these—when impulsive feeling overrides
the rational—that the newly discovered role for the amygdala is
pivotal. Incoming signals from the senses let the amygdala scan every | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a80e9938d71a-1 | experience for trouble. This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in
mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every
situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the
most primitive: “Is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I
fear?” If so—if the moment at hand somehow draws a “Yes”—the
amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a
message of crisis to all parts of the brain.
In the brain’s architecture, the amygdala is poised something like an
alarm company where operators stand ready to send out emergency
calls to the fire department, police, and a neighbor whenever a home
security system signals trouble.
When it sounds an alarm of, say, fear, it sends urgent messages to
every major part of the brain: it triggers the secretion of the body’s
fight-or-flight hormones, mobilizes the centers for movement, and
activates the cardiovascular system, the muscles, and the gut.
4
Other
circuits from the amygdala signal the secretion of emergency dollops
of the hormone norepinephrine to heighten the reactivity of key brain
areas, including those that make the senses more alert, in effect
setting the brain on edge. Additional signals from the amygdala tell | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a80e9938d71a-2 | the brainstem to fix the face in a fearful expression,
freeze unrelated
movements the muscles had underway, speed heart rate and raise
blood pressure, slow breathing. Others rivet attention on the source of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b31f26f9b7c5-0 | the fear, and prepare the muscles to react accordingly.
Simultaneously, cortical memory systems are shuffled to retrieve any
knowledge relevant to the emergency at hand, taking precedence over
other strands of thought.
And these are just part of a carefully coordinated array of changes
the amygdala orchestrates as it commandeers areas throughout the
brain (for a more detailed account, see
Appendix C
). The amygdala’s
extensive web of neural connections allows it, during an emotional
emergency, to capture and drive much of the rest of the brain—
including the rational mind.
THE EMOTIONAL SENTINEL
A friend tells of having been on vacation in England, and eating
brunch at a canalside cafe. Taking a stroll afterward along the stone
steps down to the canal, he suddenly saw a girl gazing at the water,
her face frozen in fear. Before he knew quite why, he had jumped in
the water—in his coat and tie. Only once he was in the water did he
realize that the girl was staring in shock at a toddler who had fallen in
—whom he was able to rescue.
What made him jump in the water before he knew why? The
answer, very likely, was his amygdala. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b31f26f9b7c5-1 | answer, very likely, was his amygdala.
In one of the most telling discoveries about emotions of the last
decade, LeDoux’s work revealed how the architecture of the brain
gives the amygdala a privileged position as an emotional sentinel,
able to hijack the brain.
5
His research has shown that sensory signals
from eye or ear travel first in the brain to the thalamus, and then—
across a single synapse—to the amygdala; a second signal from the
thalamus is routed to the neocortex—the thinking brain. This
branching allows the amygdala to begin to respond
before
the
neocortex, which mulls information through several levels of brain
circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely
tailored response.
LeDoux’s research is revolutionary for understanding emotional life
because it is the first to work out neural pathways for feelings that
bypass the neocortex. Those feelings that take the direct route through
the amygdala include our most primitive and potent; this circuit does
much to explain the power of emotion to overwhelm rationality.
The conventional view in neuroscience had been that the eye, ear, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1a5db9095e2f-0 | and other sensory organs transmit signals to the thalamus, and from
there to
sensory processing areas of the neocortex, where the signals
are put together into objects as we perceive them. The signals are
sorted for meanings so that the brain recognizes what each object is
and what its presence means. From the neocortex, the old theory held,
the signals are sent to the limbic brain, and from there the appropriate
response radiates out through the brain and the rest of the body. That
is the way it works much or most of the time—but LeDoux discovered
a smaller bundle of neurons that leads directly from the thalamus to
the amygdala, in addition to those going through the larger path of
neurons to the cortex. This smaller and shorter pathway—something
like a neural back alley—allows the amygdala to receive some direct
inputs from the senses and start a response
before
they are fully
registered by the neocortex.
This discovery overthrows the notion that the amygdala must
depend entirely on signals from the neocortex to formulate its
emotional reactions. The amygdala can trigger an emotional response
via this emergency route even as a parallel reverberating circuit
begins between the amygdala and neocortex. The amygdala can have | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1a5db9095e2f-1 | us spring to action while the slightly slower—but more fully informed
—neocortex unfolds its more refined plan for reaction.
LeDoux overturned the prevailing wisdom about the pathways
traveled by emotions through his research on fear in animals. In a
crucial experiment he destroyed the auditory cortex of rats, then
exposed them to a tone paired with an electric shock. The rats quickly
learned to fear the tone, even though the sound of the tone could not
register in their neocortex. Instead, the sound took the direct route
from ear to thalamus to amygdala, skipping all higher avenues. In
short, the rats had learned an emotional reaction without any higher
cortical involvement: The amygdala perceived, remembered, and
orchestrated their fear independently.
“Anatomically the emotional system can act independently of the
neocortex,” LeDoux told me. “Some emotional reactions and
emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive
participation at all.” The amygdala can house memories and response
repertoires that we enact without quite realizing why we do so
because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses
the neocortex. This bypass seems to allow the amygdala to be a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1a5db9095e2f-2 | repository for emotional impressions and memories that we have
never known about in full awareness. LeDoux proposes that it is the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
47762ac2fdb1-0 | amygdala’s subterranean role in memory that explains, for example, a
startling experiment in which people acquired a preference for oddly
shaped
geometric figures that had been flashed at them so quickly
that they had no conscious awareness of having seen them at all!
6
A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of
the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for
meaning and appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to
activate the emotional centers. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the
thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise)
response. Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centers have fully
understood what is happening
.
Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our
perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it
is, but decide whether we like it or not; the “cognitive unconscious”
presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but
an opinion about it.
7
Our emotions have a mind of their own, one | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
47762ac2fdb1-1 | 7
Our emotions have a mind of their own, one
which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60beb31aa2fc-0 | THE SPECIALIST IN EMOTIONAL MEMORY
Those unconscious opinions are emotional memories; their storehouse
is the amygdala. Research by LeDoux and other neuroscientists now
seems to suggest that the hippocampus, which has long been
considered the key structure of the limbic system, is more involved in
registering and making sense of perceptual patterns than with
emotional reactions. The hippocampus’s main input is in providing a
keen memory of context, vital for emotional meaning; it is the
hippocampus that recognizes the differing significance of, say, a bear
in the zoo versus one in your backyard.
While the hippocampus remembers the dry facts, the amygdala
retains the emotional flavor that goes with those facts. If we try to
pass a car on a two-lane highway and narrowly miss having a head-on
collision, the hippocampus retains the specifics of the incident, like
what stretch of road we were on, who was with us, what the other car
looked like. But it is the amygdala that everafter will send a surge of
anxiety through us whenever we try to pass a car in similar
circumstances. As LeDoux put it to me, “The hippocampus is crucial in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60beb31aa2fc-1 | recognizing a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that
adds you don’t really like her.”
The brain uses a simple but cunning method to make emotional
memories register with special potency: the very same neurochemical
alerting systems that prime the body to react to life-threatening
emergencies by fighting or fleeing also stamp the moment in memory
with vividness.
8
Under stress (or anxiety, or presumably even the
intense excitement of joy) a nerve running from the brain to the
adrenal glands atop the kidneys triggers a secretion of the hormones
epinephrine and norepinephrine, which surge through the body
priming it for an emergency. These hormones activate receptors on
the vagus nerve; while the vagus nerve carries messages from the
brain to regulate the heart, it also carries signals back
into the brain,
triggered by epinephrine and norepinephrine. The amygdala is the
main site in the brain where these signals go; they activate neurons
within the amygdala to signal other brain regions to strengthen
memory for what is happening.
This amygdala arousal seems to imprint in memory most moments
of emotional arousal with an added degree of strength—that’s why we | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60beb31aa2fc-2 | are more likely, for example, to remember where we went on a first
date, or what we were doing when we heard the news that the space | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a14f5bb1966d-0 | shuttle
Challenger
had exploded. The more intense the amygdala
arousal, the stronger the imprint; the experiences that scare or thrill
us the most in life are among our most indelible memories. This
means that, in effect, the brain has two memory systems, one for
ordinary facts and one for emotionally charged ones. A special system
for emotional memories makes excellent sense in evolution, of course,
ensuring that animals would have particularly vivid memories of what
threatens or pleases them. But emotional memories can be faulty
guides to the present.
OUT-OF-DATE NEURAL ALARMS
One drawback of such neural alarms is that the urgent message the
amygdala sends is sometimes, if not often, out-of-date—especially in
the fluid social world we humans inhabit. As the repository for
emotional memory, the amygdala scans experience, comparing what
is happening now with what happened in the past. Its method of
comparison is associative: when one key element of a present
situation is similar to the past, it can call it a “match”—which is why
this circuit is sloppy: it acts before there is full confirmation. It
frantically commands that we react to the present in ways that were
imprinted long ago, with thoughts, emotions, reactions learned in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a14f5bb1966d-1 | response to events perhaps only dimly similar, but close enough to
alarm the amygdala.
Thus a former army nurse, traumatized by the relentless flood of
ghastly wounds she once tended in wartime, is suddenly swept with a
mix of dread, loathing, and panic—a repeat of her battlefield reaction
triggered once again, years later, by the stench when she opens a
closet door to find her toddler had stashed a stinking diaper there. A
few spare elements of the situation is all that need seem similar to
some past danger for the amygdala to trigger its emergency
proclamation. The trouble is that along with the emotionally charged
memories that have the power to trigger this crisis response can come
equally outdated ways of responding to it.
The emotional brain’s imprecision in such moments is added to by
the fact that many potent emotional memories date from the first few
years of life, in the relationship between an infant and its caretakers.
This is especially true for traumatic events, like beatings or outright
neglect. During this early period of life other brain structures, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
cfc4aad94ea8-0 | particularly the hippocampus, which is crucial for narrative
memories, and the neocortex, seat of rational thought, have yet to
become fully developed. In memory, the amygdala and hippocampus
work hand-in-hand; each stores and retrieves its special information
independently. While the hippocampus retrieves information, the
amygdala determines if that information has any emotional valence.
But the amygdala, which matures very quickly in the infant’s brain, is
much closer to fully formed at birth.
LeDoux turns to the role of the amygdala in childhood to support
what has long been a basic tenet of psychoanalytic thought: that the
interactions of life’s earliest years lay down a set of emotional lessons
based on the attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant
and caretakers.
9
These emotional lessons are so potent and yet so
difficult to understand from the vantage point of adult life because,
believes LeDoux, they are stored in the amygdala as rough, wordless
blueprints for emotional life. Since these earliest emotional memories
are established at a time before infants have words for their
experience, when these emotional memories are triggered in later life | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
cfc4aad94ea8-1 | experience, when these emotional memories are triggered in later life
there is no matching set of articulated thoughts about the response
that takes us over. One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional
outbursts, then, is that they often date from a time early in our lives
when things were bewildering and we did not yet have words for
comprehending events. We may have the chaotic feelings, but not the
words for the memories that formed them.
WHEN EMOTIONS ARE FAST AND SLOPPY
It was somewhere around three in the morning when a huge object
came crashing through the ceiling in a far corner of my bedroom,
spilling the contents of the attic into the room. In a second I leapt out
of bed and ran out of the room, terrified the entire ceiling would cave
in. Then, realizing I was safe, I cautiously peered back in the bedroom
to see what had caused all the damage—only to discover that the
sound I had taken to be the ceiling caving in was actually the fall of a
tall pile of boxes my wife had stacked in the corner
the day before
while she sorted out her closet. Nothing had fallen from the attic: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
cfc4aad94ea8-2 | there was no attic. The ceiling was intact, and so was I.
My leap from bed while half-asleep—which might have saved me
from injury had it truly been the ceiling falling—illustrates the power | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6b194fbef756-0 | of the amygdala to propel us to action in emergencies, vital moments
before the neocortex has time to fully register what is actually going
on. The emergency route from eye or ear to thalamus to amygdala is
crucial: it saves time in an emergency, when an instantaneous
response is required. But this circuit from thalamus to amygdala
carries only a small portion of sensory messages, with the majority
taking the main route up to the neocortex. So what registers in the
amygdala via this express route is, at best, a rough signal, just enough
for a warning. As LeDoux points out, “You don’t need to know exactly
what something is to know that it may be dangerous.”
10
The direct route has a vast advantage in brain time, which is
reckoned in thousandths of a second. The amygdala in a rat can begin
a response to a perception in as little as twelve milliseconds—twelve
thousandths of a second. The route from thalamus to neocortex to
amygdala takes about twice as long. Similar measurements have yet
to be made in the human brain, but the rough ratio would likely hold.
In evolutionary terms, the survival value of this direct route would
have been great, allowing a quick-response option that shaves a few | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6b194fbef756-1 | critical milliseconds in reaction time to dangers. Those milliseconds
could well have saved the lives of our protomammalian ancestors in
such numbers that this arrangement is now featured in every
mammalian brain, including yours and mine. In fact, while this circuit
may play a relatively limited role in human mental life, largely
restricted to emotional crises, much of the mental life of birds, fish,
and reptiles revolves around it, since their very survival depends on
constantly scanning for predators or prey. “This primitive, minor
brain system in mammals is the main brain system in non-mammals,”
says LeDoux. “It offers a very rapid way to turn on emotions. But it’s a
quick-and-dirty process; the cells are fast, but not very precise.”
Such imprecision in, say, a squirrel, is fine, since it leads to erring
on the side of safety, springing away at the first sign of anything that
might signal a looming enemy, or springing toward a hint of
something edible. But in human emotional life that imprecision can
have disastrous consequences for our relationships, since it means,
figuratively speaking, we can spring at or away from the wrong thing
—or person. (Consider, for example, the waitress who dropped a tray | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6b194fbef756-2 | of six dinners when she glimpsed a woman with a huge,
curly mane of
red hair—exactly like the woman her ex-husband had left her for.)
Such inchoate emotional mistakes are based on feeling prior to
thought. LeDoux calls it “precognitive emotion,” a reaction based on | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
74bef1ea8a35-0 | neural bits and pieces of sensory information that have not been fully
sorted out and integrated into a recognizable object. It’s a very raw
form of sensory information, something like a neural
Name That Tune
,
where, instead of snap judgments of melody being made on the basis
of just a few notes, a whole perception is grasped on the basis of the
first few tentative parts. If the amygdala senses a sensory pattern of
import emerging, it jumps to a conclusion, triggering its reactions
before there is full confirming evidence—or any confirmation at all.
Small wonder we can have so little insight into the murk of our
more explosive emotions, especially while they still hold us in thrall.
The amygdala can react in a delirium of rage or fear before the cortex
knows what is going on because such raw emotion is triggered
independent of, and prior to, thought.
THE EMOTIONAL MANAGER
A friend’s six-year-old daughter Jessica was spending her first night
ever sleeping over at a playmate’s, and it was unclear who was more
nervous about it, mother or daughter. While the mother tried not to
let Jessica see the intense anxiety she felt, her tension peaked near | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
74bef1ea8a35-1 | midnight that night, as she was getting ready for bed and heard the
phone ring. Dropping her toothbrush, she raced to the phone, her
heart pounding, images of Jessica in terrible distress racing through
her mind.
The mother snatched the receiver, and blurted, “Jessica!” into the
phone—only to hear a woman’s voice say, “Oh, I think this must be a
wrong number.…”
At that, the mother recovered her composure, and in a polite,
measured tone, asked, “What number were you calling?”
While the amygdala is at work in priming an anxious, impulsive
reaction, another part of the emotional brain allows for a more fitting,
corrective response. The brain’s damper switch for the amygdala’s
surges appears to lie at the other end of a major circuit to the
neocortex, in the prefrontal lobes just behind the forehead. The
prefrontal cortex seems to be at work when someone is fearful or
enraged, but stifles or controls the feeling in order to
deal more
effectively with the situation at hand, or when a reappraisal calls for a
completely different response, as with the worried mother on the
phone. This neocortical area of the brain brings a more analytic or | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
591a6d1e6c56-0 | appropriate response to our emotional impulses, modulating the
amygdala and other limbic areas.
Ordinarily the prefrontal areas govern our emotional reactions from
the start. The largest projection of sensory information from the
thalamus, remember, goes not to the amygdala, but to the neocortex
and its many centers for taking in and making sense of what is being
perceived; that information and our response to it is coordinated by
the prefrontal lobes, the seat of planning and organizing actions
toward a goal, including emotional ones. In the neocortex a cascading
series of circuits registers and analyzes that information, comprehends
it, and, through the prefrontal lobes, orchestrates a reaction. If in the
process an emotional response is called for, the prefrontal lobes
dictate it, working hand-in-hand with the amygdala and other circuits
in the emotional brain.
This progression, which allows for discernment in emotional
response, is the standard arrangement, with the significant exception
of emotional emergencies. When an emotion triggers, within moments
the prefrontal lobes perform what amounts to a risk/benefit ratio of
myriad possible reactions, and bet that one of them is best.
11
For | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
591a6d1e6c56-1 | 11
For
animals, when to attack, when to run. And for we humans … when to
attack, when to run—and also, when to placate, persuade, seek
sympathy, stonewall, provoke guilt, whine, put on a facade of
bravado, be contemptuous—and so on, through the whole repertoire
of emotional wiles.
The neocortical response is slower in brain time than the hijack
mechanism because it involves more circuitry. It can also be more
judicious and considered, since more thought precedes feeling. When
we register a loss and become sad, or feel happy after a triumph, or
mull over something someone has said or done and then get hurt or
angry, the neocortex is at work.
Just as with the amygdala, absent the workings of the prefrontal
lobes, much of emotional life would fall away; lacking an
understanding that something merits an emotional response, none
comes. This role of the prefrontal lobes in emotions has been
suspected by neurologists since the advent in the 1940s of that rather
desperate—and sadly misguided—surgical “cure” for mental illness:
the prefrontal lobotomy, which (often sloppily) removed part of the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
591a6d1e6c56-2 | prefrontal lobes or otherwise cut connections between the prefrontal
cortex and the lower brain. In the days before any effective
medications for mental illness, the lobotomy was hailed as the answer | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b543f8387c41-0 | to
grave emotional distress—sever the links between the prefrontal
lobes and the rest of the brain, and patients’ distress was “relieved.”
Unfortunately, the cost was that most of patients’ emotional lives
seemed to vanish, too. The key circuitry had been destroyed.
Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynamics: triggering
of the amygdala and a failure to activate the neocortical processes
that usually keep emotional response in balance—or a recruitment of
the neocortical zones to the emotional urgency.
12
At these moments
the rational mind is swamped by the emotional. One way the
prefrontal cortex acts as an efficient manager of emotion—weighing
reactions before acting—is by dampening the signals for activation
sent out by the amygdala and other limbic centers—something like a
parent who stops an impulsive child from grabbing and tells the child
to ask properly (or wait) for what it wants instead.
13
The key “off” switch for distressing emotion seems to be the left
prefrontal lobe. Neuropsychologists studying moods in patients with
injuries to parts of the frontal lobes have determined that one of the
tasks of the left frontal lobe is to act as a neural thermostat, regulating | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b543f8387c41-1 | unpleasant emotions. The right prefrontal lobes are a seat of negative
feelings like fear and aggression, while the left lobes keep those raw
emotions in check, probably by inhibiting the right lobe.
14
In one
group of stroke patients, for example, those whose lesions were in the
left prefrontal cortex were prone to catastrophic worries and fears;
those with lesions on the right were “unduly cheerful”; during
neurological exams they joked around and were so laid back they
clearly did not care how well they did.
15
And then there was the case
of the happy husband: a man whose right prefrontal lobe had been
partially removed in surgery for a brain malformation. His wife told
physicians that after the operation he underwent a dramatic
personality change, becoming less easily upset and, she was happy to
say, more affectionate.
16
The left prefrontal lobe, in short, seems to be part of a neural circuit
that can switch off, or at least dampen down, all but the strongest
negative surges of emotion. If the amygdala often acts as an
emergency trigger, the left prefrontal lobe appears to be part of the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |