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b15151598aca-1 | down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s
arousal, leaving
people feeling more angry, not less. Tice found that
when people told of times they had taken their rage out on the person
who provoked it, the net effect was to prolong the mood rather than
end it. Far more effective was when people first cooled down, and
then, in a more constructive or assertive manner, confronted the
person to settle their dispute. As I once heard Chogyam Trungpa, a
Tibetan teacher, reply when asked how best to handle anger: “Don’t
suppress it. But don’t act on it.”
SOOTHING ANXIETY: WHAT, ME WORRY?
Oh, no! The muffler sounds bad.… What if I have to take it to the shop?… I can’t
afford the expense.… I’d have to draw the money from Jamie’s college fund.… What if
I can’t afford his tuition?… That bad school report last week.… What if his grades go
down and he can’t get into college?… Muffler sounds bad.…
And so the worrying mind spins on in an endless loop of low-grade
melodrama, one set of concerns leading on to the next and back again. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b15151598aca-2 | The above specimen is offered by Lizabeth Roemer and Thomas
Borkovec, Pennsylvania State University psychologists, whose | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6afd2ceeeb76-0 | research on worrying—the heart of all anxiety—has raised the topic
from neurotic’s art to science.
10
There is, of course, no hitch when
worry works; by mulling over a problem—that is, employing
constructive reflection, which can look like worrying—a solution can
appear. Indeed, the reaction that underlies worry is the vigilance for
potential danger that has, no doubt, been essential for survival over
the course of evolution. When fear triggers the emotional brain, part
of the resulting anxiety fixates attention on the threat at hand, forcing
the mind to obsess about how to handle it and ignore anything else
for the time being. Worry is, in a sense, a rehearsal of what might go
wrong and how to deal with it; the task of worrying is to come up
with positive solutions for life’s perils by anticipating dangers before
they arise.
The difficulty is with chronic, repetitive worries, the kind that
recycle on and on and never get any nearer a positive solution. A
close analysis of chronic worry suggests that it has all the attributes of
a low-grade emotional hijacking: the worries seem to come from
nowhere, are uncontrollable, generate a steady hum of anxiety, are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6afd2ceeeb76-1 | impervious to reason, and lock the worrier into a single, inflexible
view of the worrisome topic. When this same cycle of worry
intensifies and persists, it shades over the line into full-blown
neural
hijackings, the anxiety disorders: phobias, obsessions and
compulsions, panic attacks. In each of these disorders worry fixates in
a distinct fashion; for the phobic, anxieties rivet on the feared
situation; for the obsessive, they fixate on preventing some feared
calamity; in panic attacks, the worries can focus on a fear of dying or
on the prospect of having the attack itself.
In all these conditions the common denominator is worry run amok.
For example, a woman being treated for obsessive-compulsive
disorder had a series of rituals that took most of her waking hours:
forty-five-minute showers several times daily, washing her hands for
five minutes twenty or more times a day. She would not sit down
unless she first swabbed the seat with rubbing alcohol to sterilize it.
Nor would she touch a child or an animal—both were “too dirty.” All
these compulsions were stirred by her underlying morbid fear of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6afd2ceeeb76-2 | germs; she worried constantly that without her washing and
sterilizing she would catch a disease and die.
11
A woman being treated for “generalized anxiety disorder”—the
psychiatric nomenclature for being a constant worrier—responded to
the request to worry aloud for one minute this way: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
944f1570593d-0 | I might not do this right. This may be so artificial that it won’t be an indication of the
real thing and we need to get at the real thing.… Because if we don’t get at the real
thing, I won’t get well. And if I don’t get well I’ll never be happy.
12
In this virtuoso display of worrying about worrying, the very
request to worry for one minute had, within a few short seconds,
escalated to contemplation of a lifelong catastrophe: “I’ll never be
happy.” Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that
jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes
catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost
always expressed in the mind’s ear, not its eye—that is, in words, not
images—a fact that has significance for controlling worry.
Borkovec and his colleagues began to study worrying per se when
they were trying to come up with a treatment for insomnia. Anxiety,
other researchers have observed, comes in two forms:
cognitive
, or
worrisome thoughts, and
somatic
, the physiological symptoms of
anxiety, such as sweating, a racing heart, or muscle tension. The main | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
944f1570593d-1 | trouble with insomniacs, Borkovec found, was not the somatic
arousal. What kept them up were intrusive thoughts. They were
chronic worriers, and could not stop worrying, no matter how sleepy
they were. The one thing that worked in helping them
get to sleep
was getting their minds off their worries, focusing instead on the
sensations produced by a relaxation method. In short, the worries
could be stopped by shifting attention away.
Most worriers, however, can’t seem to do this. The reason, Borkovec
believes, has to do with a partial payoff from worrying that is highly
reinforcing to the habit. There is, it seems, something positive in
worries: worries are ways to deal with potential threats, with dangers
that may come one’s way. The work of worrying—when it succeeds—
is to rehearse what those dangers are, and to reflect on ways to deal
with them. But worry doesn’t work all that well. New solutions and
fresh ways of seeing a problem do not typically come from worrying,
especially chronic worry. Instead of coming up with solutions to these
potential problems, worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
944f1570593d-2 | potential problems, worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger
itself, immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread associated
with it while staying in the same rut of thought. Chronic worriers
worry about a wide range of things, most of which have almost no
chance of happening; they read dangers into life’s journey that others
never notice.
Yet chronic worriers tell Borkovec that worrying helps them, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
88cae3c3a453-0 | that their worries are self-perpetuating, an endless loop of angst-
ridden thought. Why should worry become what seems to amount to a
mental addiction? Oddly, as Borkovec points out, the worry habit is
reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people
worry about many things that have a very low probability of actually
occurring—a loved one dying in a plane crash, going bankrupt, and
the like—there is, to the primitive limbic brain at least, something
magical about it. Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated evil,
the worry psychologically gets the credit for preventing the danger it
obsesses about.
The Work of Worrying
She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest, lured by a job with a publisher. But
the publisher was bought by another soon after, and she was left without a job.
Turning to freelance writing, an erratic marketplace, she found herself either swamped
with work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ration phone calls, and for the
first time was without health insurance. This lack of coverage was particularly
distressing: she found herself catastrophizing about her health, sure every headache | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
88cae3c3a453-1 | signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive
somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of
distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive.
Borkovec discovered another unexpected benefit to worrying. While
people are immersed in their worried thoughts, they do not seem to
notice the subjective sensations of the anxiety those worries stir—the
speedy heartbeat, the beads of sweat, the shakiness—and as the worry
proceeds it actually seems to suppress some of that anxiety, at least as
reflected in heart rate. The sequence presumably goes something like
this: The worrier notices something that triggers the image of some
potential threat or danger; that imagined catastrophe in turn triggers
a mild attack of anxiety. The worrier then plunges into a long series of
distressed thoughts, each of which primes yet another topic for worry;
as attention continues to be carried along by this train of worry,
focusing on these very thoughts takes the mind off the original
catastrophic image that triggered the anxiety. Images, Borkovec
found, are more powerful triggers for physiological anxiety than are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
88cae3c3a453-2 | thoughts, so immersion in thoughts, to the exclusion of catastrophic
images, partially alleviates the experience of being anxious. And, to
that extent, the worry is also reinforced, as a halfway antidote to the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
51f739a94c82-0 | very anxiety it evoked.
But chronic worries are self-defeating too in that they take the form
of stereotyped, rigid ideas, not creative breakthroughs that actually
move toward solving the problem. This rigidity shows up not just in
the manifest content of worried thought, which simply repeats more
or less the same ideas over and over. But at a neurological level there
seems to be a cortical rigidity, a deficit in the emotional brain’s ability
to respond flexibly to changing circumstance. In short, chronic worry
works in some ways, but not in other, more consequential ones: it
eases some anxiety, but never solves the problem.
The one thing that chronic worriers cannot do is follow the advice
they are most often given: “Just stop worrying” (or, worse, “Don’t
worry—be happy”). Since chronic worries seem to be low-grade
amygdala episodes, they come unbidden. And, by their very nature,
they persist once they arise in the mind. But after much
experimentation, Borkovec discovered some simple steps that can help
even the most chronic worrier control the habit.
The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
51f739a94c82-1 | The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as
near their beginning as possible—ideally, as soon as or just after the
fleeting catastrophic image triggers the worry-anxiety cycle. Borkovec
trains people in this approach by first teaching them to monitor cues
for anxiety, especially learning to identify situations that trigger
worry, or the fleeting thoughts and images that initiate the worry, as
well as the accompanying sensations of anxiety in the body. With
practice, people can identify the worries at an earlier and earlier point
in the anxiety spiral. People also learn relaxation
methods that they
can apply at the moment they recognize the worry beginning, and
practice the relaxation method daily so they will be able to use it on
the spot, when they need it the most.
The relaxation method, though, is not enough in itself. Worriers
also need to actively challenge the worrisome thoughts; failing this,
the worry spiral will keep coming back. So the next step is to take a
critical stance toward their assumptions: Is it very probable that the
dreaded event will occur? Is it necessarily the case that there is only
one or no alternative to letting it happen? Are there constructive steps | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
51f739a94c82-2 | to be taken? Does it really help to run through these same anxious
thoughts over and over?
This combination of mindfulness and healthy skepticism would,
presumably, act as a brake on the neural activation that underlies
low-grade anxiety. Actively generating such thoughts may prime the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
494dd4ef0119-0 | circuitry that can inhibit the limbic driving of worry; at the same
time, actively inducing a relaxed state counters the signals for anxiety
the emotional brain is sending throughout the body.
Indeed, Borkovec points out, these strategies establish a train of
mental activity that is incompatible with worry. When a worry is
allowed to repeat over and over unchallenged, it gains in persuasive
power; challenging it by contemplating a range of equally plausible
points of view keeps the one worried thought from being naively
taken as true. Even some people whose worrying is serious enough to
qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis have been relieved of the worrying
habit this way.
On the other hand, for people with worries so severe they have
flowered into phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or panic
disorder, it may be prudent—indeed, a sign of self-awareness—to turn
to medication to interrupt the cycle. A retraining of the emotional
circuitry through therapy is still called for, however, in order to lessen
the likelihood that anxiety disorders will recur when medication is
stopped.
13
MANAGING MELANCHOLY
The single mood people generally put most effort into shaking is
sadness; Diane Tice found that people are most inventive when it | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
494dd4ef0119-1 | comes to trying to escape the blues. Of course, not all sadness should
be escaped; melancholy, like every other mood, has its benefits. The
sadness that a loss brings has certain invariable effects: it closes down
our interest in diversions and pleasures, fixes attention on what has
been lost, and saps our energy for starting
new endeavors—at least for
the time being. In short, it enforces a kind of reflective retreat from
life’s busy pursuits, and leaves us in a suspended state to mourn the
loss, mull over its meaning, and, finally, make the psychological
adjustments and new plans that will allow our lives to continue.
Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron
renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations
of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a
“dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread
and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”
14
Then there are the
intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of
memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce0bbdbbd43f-0 | distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by
a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response
to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness,
feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but
more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.”
Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within
the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was
the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair
so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that
suicide seemed a solution.
In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings
emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For
Styron, no medication or therapy helped; it was the passing of time
and the refuge of a hospital that finally cleared away the
despondency. But for most people, especially those with less severe
cases, psychotherapy can help, as can medication—Prozac is the
treatment of the hour, but there are more than a dozen other
compounds offering some help, especially for major depression. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce0bbdbbd43f-1 | compounds offering some help, especially for major depression.
My focus here is the far more common sadness that at its upper
limits becomes, technically speaking, a “subclinical depression”—that
is, ordinary melancholy. This is a range of despondency that people
can handle on their own, if they have the internal resources.
Unfortunately, some of the strategies most often resorted to can
backfire, leaving people feeling worse than before. One such strategy
is simply staying alone, which is often appealing when people are
feeling down; more often than not, however, it only adds a sense of
loneliness and isolation to the sadness. That may partly explain why
Tice found the most popular tactic for battling depression is
socializing—going out to eat, to a ballgame or movie; in short, doing
something with friends or family. That works well if the net effect is
to get the person’s mind
off his sadness. But it simply prolongs the
mood if he uses the occasion just to mull over what put him in the
funk.
Indeed, one of the main determinants of whether a depressed mood
will persist or lift is the degree to which people ruminate. Worrying
about what’s depressing us, it seems, makes the depression all the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce0bbdbbd43f-2 | more intense and prolonged. In depression, worry takes several forms,
all focusing on some aspect of the depression itself—how tired we
feel, how little energy or motivation we have, for instance, or how
little work we’re getting done. Typically none of this reflection is | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c06211cfc540-0 | accompanied by any concrete course of action that might alleviate the
problem. Other common worries include “isolating yourself and
thinking about how terrible you feel, worrying that your spouse might
reject you because you are depressed, and wondering whether you are
going to have another sleepless night,” says Stanford psychologist
Susan Nolen-Hoeksma, who has studied rumination in depressed
people.
15
Depressed people sometimes justify this kind of rumination by
saying they are trying to “understand themselves better”; in fact, they
are priming the feelings of sadness without taking any steps that
might actually lift their mood. Thus in therapy it might be perfectly
helpful to reflect deeply on the causes of a depression, if that leads to
insights or actions that will change the conditions that cause it. But a
passive immersion in the sadness simply makes it worse.
Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating
conditions that are, well, more depressing. Nolen-Hoeksma gives the
example of a saleswoman who gets depressed and spends so many
hours worrying about it that she doesn’t get around to important sales
calls. Her sales then decline, making her feel like a failure, which | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c06211cfc540-1 | feeds her depression. But if she reacted to depression by trying to
distract herself, she might well plunge into the sales calls as a way to
get her mind off the sadness. Sales would be less likely to decline, and
the very experience of making a sale might bolster her self-confidence,
lessening the depression somewhat.
Women, Nolen-Hoeksma finds, are far more prone to ruminate
when they are depressed than are men. This, she proposes, may at
least partly explain the fact that women are diagnosed with
depression twice as often as are men. Of course, other factors may
come into play, such as women being more open to disclosing their
distress or having more in their lives to be depressed about. And men
may drown their depression in alcoholism, for which their rate is
about twice that of women.
Cognitive therapy aimed at changing these thought patterns has
been found in some studies to be on a par with medication for treating
mild clinical depression, and superior to medication in preventing the
return of mild depression. Two strategies are particularly effective in
the battle.
16
One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c06211cfc540-2 | 16
One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of
rumination—to question their validity and think of more positive
alternatives. The other is to purposely schedule pleasant, distracting
events. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f33c7d563178-0 | One reason distraction works is that depressing thoughts are
automatic, intruding on one’s state of mind unbidden. Even when
depressed people try to suppress their depressing thoughts, they often
cannot come up with better alternatives; once the depressive tide of
thought has started, it has a powerful magnetic effect on the train of
association. For example, when depressed people were asked to
unscramble jumbled six-word sentences, they were much better at
figuring out the depressing messages (“The future looks very dismal”)
than the upbeat ones (“The future looks very bright”).
17
The tendency for depression to perpetuate itself shades even the
kinds of distractions people choose. When depressed people were
given a list of upbeat or ponderous ways to get their minds off
something sad, such as the funeral of a friend, they picked more of the
melancholy activities. Richard Wenzlaff, the University of Texas
psychologist who did these studies, concludes that people who are
already depressed need to make a special effort to get their attention
on something that is completely upbeat, being careful not to
inadvertently choose something—a tearjerker movie, a tragic novel—
that will drag their mood down again.
Mood-lifters | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f33c7d563178-1 | Mood-lifters
Imagine that you’re driving on an unfamiliar, steep, and winding road through fog.
Suddenly a car pulls out of a driveway only a few feet in front of you, too close for you
to stop in time. Your foot slams the brake to the floor and you go into a skid, your car
sliding into the side of the other one. You see that the car is full of youngsters, a
carpool on the way to preschool—just before the explosion of glass shattering and
metal bending into metal. Then, out of the sudden silence after the collision, you hear
a chorus of crying. You manage to run to the other car, and see that one of the
children is lying motionless. You are flooded with remorse and sadness over this
tragedy.…
Such heart-wrenching scenarios were used to get volunteers upset
in one of Wenzlaff’s experiments. The volunteers then tried to keep
the scene out of their minds while they jotted notes about the stream
of their thoughts for nine
minutes. Each time the thought of the
disturbing scene intruded into their minds, they made a check mark as
they wrote. While most people thought about the upsetting scene less
and less as time went on, those volunteers who were more depressed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f33c7d563178-2 | actually showed a pronounced
increase
in intruding thoughts of the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bd0a612b327d-0 | scene as time passed, and even made oblique references to it in the
thoughts that were supposed to be distractions from it.
What’s more, the depression-prone volunteers used other distressing
thoughts to distract themselves. As Wenzlaff told me, “Thoughts are
associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. People have
what amounts to a set of bad-mood thoughts that come to mind more
readily when they are feeling down. People who get depressed easily
tend to create very strong networks of association between these
thoughts, so that it is harder to suppress them once some kind of bad
mood is evoked. Ironically, depressed people seem to use one
depressing topic to get their minds off another, which only stirs more
negative emotions.”
Crying, one theory holds, may be nature’s way of lowering levels of
the brain chemicals that prime distress. While crying can sometimes
break a spell of sadness, it can also leave the person still obsessing
about the reasons for despair. The idea of a “good cry” is misleading:
crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery.
Distractions break the chain of sadness-maintaining thinking; one of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bd0a612b327d-1 | the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for
the most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term
memory—patients feel better because they can’t remember why they
were so sad. At any rate, to shake garden-variety sadness, Diane Tice
found, many people reported turning to distractions such as reading,
TV and movies, video games and puzzles, sleeping, and daydreams
such as planning a fantasy vacation. Wenzlaff would add that the most
effective distractions are ones that will shift your mood—an exciting
sporting event, a funny movie, an uplifting book. (A note of caution
here: Some distractors in themselves can perpetuate depression.
Studies of heavy TV watchers have found that, after watching TV,
they are generally more depressed than before they started!)
Aerobic exercise, Tice found, is one of the more effective tactics for
lifting mild depression, as well as other bad moods. But the caveat
here is that the mood-lifting benefits of exercise work best for the
lazy, those who usually do not work out very much. For those with a
daily exercise routine, whatever mood-changing benefits it offers were
probably strongest when they first took up the exercise habit. In fact, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bd0a612b327d-2 | for habitual exercisers there is a reverse effect on mood: they start to
feel bad on those days when they skip their workout. Exercise seems
to work well because it changes the physiological
state the mood
evokes: depression is a low-arousal state, and aerobics pitches the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4cd9de088c8d-0 | body into high arousal. By the same token, relaxation techniques,
which put the body into a low-arousal state, work well for anxiety, a
high-arousal state, but not so well for depression. Each of these
approaches seems to work to break the cycle of depression or anxiety
because it pitches the brain into a level of activity incompatible with
the emotional state that has had it in its grip.
Cheering oneself up through treats and sensual pleasures was
another fairly popular antidote to the blues. Common ways people
soothed themselves when depressed ranged from taking hot baths or
eating favorite foods, to listening to music or having sex. Buying
oneself a gift or treat to get out of a bad mood was particularly
popular among women, as was shopping in general, even if only
window-shopping. Among those in college, Tice found that eating was
three times as common a strategy for soothing sadness among women
than men; men, on the other hand, were five times as likely to turn to
drinking or drugs when they felt down. The trouble with overeating
or alcohol as antidotes, of course, is that they can easily backfire:
eating to excess brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4cd9de088c8d-1 | eating to excess brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system
depressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression itself.
A more constructive approach to mood-lifting, Tice reports, is
engineering a small triumph or easy success: tackling some long-
delayed chore around the house or getting to some other duty they’ve
been wanting to clear up. By the same token, lifts to self-image also
were cheering, even if only in the form of getting dressed up or
putting on makeup.
One of the most potent—and, outside therapy, little used—antidotes
to depression is seeing things differently, or
cognitive refraining
. It is
natural to bemoan the end of a relationship and to wallow in self-
pitying thoughts such as the conviction that “this means I’ll always be
alone,” but it’s sure to thicken the sense of despair. However, stepping
back and thinking about the ways the relationship wasn’t so great,
and ways you and your partner were mismatched—in other words,
seeing the loss differently, in a more positive light—is an antidote to
the sadness. By the same token, cancer patients, no matter how
serious their condition, were in better moods if they were able to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4cd9de088c8d-2 | bring to mind another patient who was in even worse shape (“I’m not
so bad off—at least I can walk”); those who compared themselves to
healthy people were the most depressed.
18
Such downward
comparisons are surprisingly cheering: suddenly what had seemed
quite dispiriting doesn’t look all that bad. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fafcb0519fd0-0 | Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in need. Since
depression
feeds on ruminations and preoccupations with the self,
helping others lifts us out of those preoccupations as we empathize
with people in pain of their own. Throwing oneself into volunteer
work—coaching Little League, being a Big Brother, feeding the
homeless—was one of the most powerful mood-changers in Tice’s
study. But it was also one of the rarest.
Finally, at least some people are able to find relief from their
melancholy in turning to a transcendent power. Tice told me,
“Praying, if you’re very religious, works for all moods, especially
depression.”
REPRESSORS: UPBEAT DENIAL
“He kicked his roommate in the stomach …” the sentence begins. It
ends, “… but he meant to turn on the light.”
That transformation of an act of aggression into an innocent, if
slightly implausible, mistake is repression captured
in vivo
. It was
composed by a college student who had volunteered for a study of
repressors
, people who habitually and automatically seem to blot
emotional disturbance from their awareness. The beginning fragment
“He kicked his roommate in the stomach …” was given to this student | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fafcb0519fd0-1 | as part of a sentence-completion test. Other tests showed that this
small act of mental avoidance was part of a larger pattern in his life, a
pattern of tuning out most emotional upset.
19
While at first
researchers saw repressors as a prime example of the inability to feel
emotion—cousins of alexithymics, perhaps—current thinking sees
them as quite proficient in regulating emotion. They have become so
adept at buffering themselves against negative feelings, it seems, that
they are not even aware of the negativity. Rather than calling them
repressors, as has been the custom among researchers, a more apt
term might be
unflappables
.
Much of this research, done principally by Daniel Weinberger, a
psychologist now at Case Western Reserve University, shows that
while such people may seem calm and imperturbable, they can
sometimes seethe with physiological upsets they are oblivious to.
During the sentence-completion test, volunteers were also being
monitored for their level of physiological arousal. The repressors’
veneer of calm was belied by the agitation of their bodies: when faced | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5dd1e314cb7e-0 | with the sentence about the violent roommate and others like it, they
gave all the signs of anxiety, such as a racing heart, sweating, and
climbing blood pressure. Yet when asked, they said they felt perfectly
calm.
This continual tuning-out of emotions such as anger and anxiety is
not
uncommon: about one person in six shows the pattern, according
to Weinberger. In theory, children might learn to become unflappable
in any of several ways. One might be as a strategy for surviving a
troubling situation such as having an alcoholic parent in a family
where the problem itself is denied. Another might be having a parent
or parents who are themselves repressors and so pass on the example
of perennial cheerfulness or a stiff upper lip in the face of disturbing
feelings. Or the trait may simply be inherited temperament. While no
one can say as yet just how such a pattern begins in life, by the time
repressors reach adulthood they are cool and collected under duress.
The question remains, of course, as to just how calm and cool they
actually are. Can they really be unaware of the physical signs of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5dd1e314cb7e-1 | distressing emotions, or are they simply feigning calm? The answer to
that has come from clever research by Richard Davidson, a University
of Wisconsin psychologist and an early collaborator with Weinberger.
Davidson had people with the unflappable pattern free-associate to a
list of words, most neutral, but several with hostile or sexual
meanings that stir anxiety in almost everyone. And, as their bodily
reactions revealed, they had all the physiological signs of distress in
response to the loaded words, even though the words they associated
to almost always showed an attempt to sanitize the upsetting words
by linking them to an innocent one. If the first word was “hate,” the
response might be “love.”
Davidson’s study took advantage of the fact that (in right-handed
people) a key center for processing negative emotion is in the right
half of the brain, while the center for speaking is in the left. Once the
right hemisphere recognizes that a word is upsetting, it transmits that
information across the corpus callosum, the great divide between the
brain’s halves, to the speech center, and a word is spoken in response.
Using an intricate arrangement of lenses, Davidson was able to display
a word so that it was seen in only half of the visual field. Because of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5dd1e314cb7e-2 | the neural wiring of the visual system, if the display was to the left
half of the visual field, it was recognized first by the right half of the
brain, with its sensitivity to distress. If the display was to the right
half of the visual field, the signal went to the left side of the brain | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
11cff8a13d3e-0 | without being assessed for upset.
When the words were presented to the right hemisphere, there was
a lag in the time it took the unflappables to utter a response—but only
if the word they were responding to was one of the upsetting ones.
They had
no
time lag in the speed of their associations to
neutral
words. The lag showed up
only
when the words were presented to the
right hemisphere, not to the left. In
short, their unflappableness seems
due to a neural mechanism that slows or interferes with the transfer of
upsetting information. The implication is that they are
not
faking their
lack of awareness about how upset they are; their brain is keeping
that information from them. More precisely, the layer of mellow
feeling that covers over such disturbing perceptions may well be due
to the workings of the left prefrontal lobe. To his surprise, when
Davidson measured activity levels in their prefrontal lobes, they had a
decided predominance of activity on the left—the center for good
feeling—and less on the right, the center for negativity.
These people “present themselves in a positive light, with an upbeat
mood,” Davidson told me. “They deny that stress is upsetting them | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
11cff8a13d3e-1 | and show a pattern of left frontal activation while just sitting at rest
that is associated with positive feelings. This brain activity may be the
key to their positive claims, despite the underlying physiological
arousal that looks like distress.” Davidson’s theory is that, in terms of
brain activity, it is energy-demanding work to experience distressing
realities in a positive light. The increased physiological arousal may
be due to the sustained attempt by the neural circuitry to maintain
positive feelings or to suppress or inhibit any negative ones.
In short, unflappableness is a kind of upbeat denial, a positive
dissociation—and, possibly, a clue to neural mechanisms at play in
the more severe dissociative states that can occur in, say, post-
traumatic stress disorder. When it is simply involved in equanimity,
says Davidson, “it seems to be a successful strategy for emotional self-
regulation” though with an unknown cost to self-awareness. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3ae124ef119c-0 | 6
The Master Aptitude
Just once in my life have I been paralyzed by fear. The occasion was a calculus exam
during my freshman year in college for which I somehow had managed not to study. I
still remember the room I marched to that spring morning with feelings of doom and
foreboding heavy in my heart. I had been in that lecture hall for many classes. This
morning, though, I noticed nothing through the windows and did not see the hall at
all. My gaze shrank to the patch of floor directly in front of me as I made my way to a
seat near the door. As I opened the blue cover of my exam book, there was the thump
in my ears of heartbeat, there was the taste of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
I looked at the exam questions once, quickly. Hopeless. For an hour I stared at that
page, my mind racing over the consequences I would suffer. The same thoughts
repeated themselves over and over, a tape loop of fear and trembling. I sat motionless,
like an animal frozen in mid-move by curare. What strikes me most about that dreadful
moment was how constricted my mind became. I did not spend the hour in a desperate | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3ae124ef119c-1 | attempt to patch together some semblance of answers to the test. I did not daydream. I
simply sat fixated on my terror, waiting for the ordeal to finish.
1
That narrative of an ordeal by terror is my own; it is to this day for
me the most convincing evidence of the devastating impact of
emotional distress on mental clarity. I now see that my ordeal was
most likely a testament to the power of the emotional brain to
overpower, even paralyze, the thinking brain.
The extent to which emotional upsets can interfere with mental life
is no news to teachers. Students who are anxious, angry, or depressed
don’t learn; people who are caught in these states do not take in
information efficiently or deal with it well. As we saw in
Chapter 5
,
powerful negative emotions twist
attention toward their own
preoccupations, interfering with the attempt to focus elsewhere.
Indeed, one of the signs that feelings have veered over the line into
the pathological is that they are so intrusive they overwhelm all other
thought, continually sabotaging attempts to pay attention to whatever
other task is at hand. For the person going through an upsetting
divorce—or the child whose parents are—the mind does not stay long | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f727ceb6a71a-0 | on the comparatively trivial routines of the work or school day; for
the clinically depressed, thoughts of self-pity and despair,
hopelessness and helplessness, override all others.
When emotions overwhelm concentration, what is being swamped
is the mental capacity cognitive scientists call “working memory,” the
ability to hold in mind all information relevant to the task at hand.
What occupies working memory can be as mundane as the digits that
compose a telephone number or as complicated as the intricate plot
lines a novelist is trying to weave together. Working memory is an
executive function par excellence in mental life, making possible all
other intellectual efforts, from speaking a sentence to tackling a
knotty logical proposition.
2
The prefrontal cortex executes working
memory—and, remember, is where feelings and emotions meet.
3
When the limbic circuitry that converges on the prefrontal cortex is in
the thrall of emotional distress, one cost is in the effectiveness of
working memory: we can’t think straight, as I discovered during that
dread calculus exam.
On the other hand, consider the role of positive motivation—the
marshaling of feelings like enthusiasm and confidence to enhance
achievement. Studies of Olympic athletes, world-class musicians, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f727ceb6a71a-1 | achievement. Studies of Olympic athletes, world-class musicians, and
chess grand masters find their unifying trait is the ability to motivate
themselves to pursue relentless training routines.
4
And, with a steady
rise in the degree of excellence required to be a world-class performer,
these rigorous training routines now increasingly must begin in
childhood. At the 1992 Olympics, twelve-year-old members of the
Chinese diving team had put in as many total lifetime practice dives
as had members of the American team in their early twenties—the
Chinese divers started their rigorous training at age four. Likewise, the
best violin virtuosos of the twentieth century began studying their
instrument at around age five; international chess champions started
on the game at an average age of seven, while those who rose only to
national prominence started at ten. Starting earlier offers a lifetime
edge: the top violin students at the best music academy in Berlin, all
in their early twenties, had put in ten thousand total hours’ lifetime
practice, while the second-tier students averaged around seventy-five
hundred hours.
What seems to set apart those at the very top of competitive
pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is the degree to which, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f727ceb6a71a-2 | beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine
for years and years. And that doggedness depends on emotional traits | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fec281383221-0 | —enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks—above all else.
The added payoff for life success from motivation, apart from other
innate abilities, can be seen in the remarkable performance of Asian
students in American schools and professions. One thorough review of
the evidence suggests that Asian-American children may have an
average IQ advantage over whites of just two or three points.
5
Yet on
the basis of the professions, such as law and medicine, that many
Asian-Americans end up in, as a group they behave as though their IQ
were much higher—the equivalent of an IQ of 110 for Japanese-
Americans and of 120 for Chinese-Americans.
6
The reason seems to be
that from the earliest years of school, Asian children work harder than
whites. Sanford Dorenbusch, a Stanford sociologist who studied more
than ten thousand high-school students, found that Asian-Americans
spent 40 percent more time doing homework than did other students.
“While most American parents are willing to accept a child’s weak
areas and emphasize the strengths, for Asians, the attitude is that if
you’re not doing well, the answer is to study later at night, and if you
still don’t do well, to get up and study earlier in the morning. They | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fec281383221-1 | believe that anyone can do well in school with the right effort.” In
short, a strong cultural work ethic translates into higher motivation,
zeal, and persistence—an emotional edge.
To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or enhance our
ability to think and plan, to pursue training for a distant goal, to solve
problems and the like, they define the limits of our capacity to use our
innate mental abilities, and so determine how we do in life. And to
the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and
pleasure in what we do—or even by an optimal degree of anxiety—
they propel us to accomplishment. It is in this sense that emotional
intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all
other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.
IMPULSE CONTROL: THE MARSHMALLOW TEST
Just imagine you’re four years old, and someone makes the following
proposal: If you’ll wait until after he runs an errand, you can have two
marshmallows
for a treat. If you can’t wait until then, you can have
only one—but you can have it right now. It is a challenge sure to try
the soul of any four-year-old, a microcosm of the eternal battle | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fec281383221-2 | between impulse and restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dcfc71ff2bfe-0 | gratification and delay. Which of these choices a child makes is a
telling test; it offers a quick reading not just of character, but of the
trajectory that child will probably take through life.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than
resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all
emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
The root meaning of the word
emotion
, remember, is “to move.” The
capacity to resist that impulse to act, to squelch the incipient
movement, most likely translates at the level of brain function into
inhibition of limbic signals to the motor cortex, though such an
interpretation must remain speculative for now.
At any rate, a remarkable study in which the marshmallow
challenge was posed to four-year-olds shows just how fundamental is
the ability to restrain the emotions and so delay impulse. Begun by
psychologist Walter Mischel during the 1960s at a preschool on the
Stanford University campus and involving mainly children of Stanford
faculty, graduate students, and other employees, the study tracked
down the four-year-olds as they were graduating from high school.
7
Some four-year-olds were able to wait what must surely have | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dcfc71ff2bfe-1 | seemed an endless fifteen to twenty minutes for the experimenter to
return. To sustain themselves in their struggle they covered their eyes
so they wouldn’t have to stare at temptation, or rested their heads in
their arms, talked to themselves, sang, played games with their hands
and feet, even tried to go to sleep. These plucky preschoolers got the
two-marshmallow reward. But others, more impulsive, grabbed the
one marshmallow, almost always within seconds of the experimenter’s
leaving the room on his “errand.”
The diagnostic power of how this moment of impulse was handled
became clear some twelve to fourteen years later, when these same
children were tracked down as adolescents. The emotional and social
difference between the grab-the-marshmallow preschoolers and their
gratification-delaying peers was dramatic. Those who had resisted
temptation at four were now, as adolescents, more socially competent:
personally effective, self-assertive, and better able to cope with the
frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze, or
regress under stress, or become rattled and disorganized when
pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dcfc71ff2bfe-2 | pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of
giving up even in the face of difficulties; they were self-reliant and
confident, trustworthy and dependable; and they took initiative and
plunged
into projects. And, more than a decade later, they were still | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fff1c720d620-0 | able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals.
The third or so who grabbed for the marshmallow, however, tended
to have fewer of these qualities, and shared instead a relatively more
troubled psychological portrait. In adolescence they were more likely
to be seen as shying away from social contacts; to be stubborn and
indecisive; to be easily upset by frustrations; to think of themselves as
“bad” or unworthy; to regress or become immobilized by stress; to be
mistrustful and resentful about not “getting enough”; to be prone to
jealousy and envy; to overreact to irritations with a sharp temper, so
provoking arguments and fights. And, after all those years, they still
were unable to put off gratification.
What shows up in a small way early in life blossoms into a wide
range of social and emotional competences as life goes on. The
capacity to impose a delay on impulse is at the root of a plethora of
efforts, from staying on a diet to pursuing a medical degree. Some
children, even at four, had mastered the basics: they were able to read
the social situation as one where delay was beneficial, to pry their | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fff1c720d620-1 | attention from focusing on the temptation at hand, and to distract
themselves while maintaining the necessary perseverance toward their
goal—the two marshmallows.
Even more surprising, when the tested children were evaluated
again as they were finishing high school, those who had waited
patiently at four were far superior
as students
to those who had acted
on whim. According to their parents’ evaluations, they were more
academically competent: better able to put their ideas into words, to
use and respond to reason, to concentrate, to make plans and follow
through on them, and more eager to learn. Most astonishingly, they
had dramatically higher scores on their SAT tests. The third of
children who at four grabbed for the marshmallow most eagerly had
an average verbal score of 524 and quantitative (or “math”) score of
528; the third who waited longest had average scores of 610 and 652,
respectively—a 210-point difference in total score.
8
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratification is
twice as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ
at age four; IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT only after
children learn to read.
9 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fff1c720d620-2 | children learn to read.
9
This suggests that the ability to delay
gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite
apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood is also a
powerful predictor of later delinquency, again more so than IQ.
10
) As
we shall see in Part Five, while some argue that IQ cannot be changed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e02778da031b-0 | and so represents an unbendable limitation on a child’s life potential,
there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as impulse control
and accurately reading a social situation
can
be learned.
What Walter Mischel, who did the study, describes with the rather
infelicitous phrase “goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification”
is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny
impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business,
solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His
finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-
ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use
their other mental capacities.
FOUL MOODS, FOULED THINKING
I worry about my son. He just started playing on the varsity football team, so he’s
bound to get an injury sometime. It’s so nerve-wracking to watch him play that I’ve
stopped going to his games. I’m sure my son must be disappointed that I’m not
watching him play, but it’s simply too much for me to take.
The speaker is in therapy for anxiety; she realizes that her worry is
interfering with leading the kind of life she would like.
11 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e02778da031b-1 | 11
But when it
comes time to make a simple decision, such as whether to watch her
son play football, her mind floods with thoughts of disaster. She is not
free to choose; her worries overwhelm her reason.
As we have seen, worry is the nub of anxiety’s damaging effect on
mental performance of all kind. Worry, of course, is in one sense a
useful response gone awry—an overly zealous mental preparation for
an anticipated threat. But such mental rehearsal is disastrous
cognitive static when it becomes trapped in a stale routine that
captures attention, intruding on all other attempts to focus elsewhere.
Anxiety undermines the intellect. In a complex, intellectually
demanding, and high-pressure task such as that of air traffic
controllers, for example, having chronically high anxiety is an almost
sure predictor that a person will eventually fail in training or in the
field. The anxious are more likely to fail even given superior scores on
intelligence tests, as a study of 1,790 students in training for air traffic
control posts discovered.
12
Anxiety also sabotages academic
performance of all kinds: 126 different studies of more than 36,000
people found that the more prone to worries a person is, the poorer | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6f1530d9ee4e-0 | their
academic performance, no matter how measured—grades on
tests, grade-point average, or achievement tests.
13
When people who are prone to worry are asked to perform a
cognitive task such as sorting ambiguous objects into one of two
categories, and narrate what is going through their mind as they do
so, it is the negative thoughts—“I won’t be able to do this,” “I’m just
no good at this kind of test,” and the like—that are found to most
directly disrupt their decision-making. Indeed, when a comparison
group of nonworriers was asked to worry on purpose for fifteen
minutes, their ability to do the same task deteriorated sharply. And
when the worriers were given a fifteen-minute relaxation session—
which reduced their level of worrying—before trying the task, they
had no problem with it.
14
Test anxiety was first studied scientifically in the 1960s by Richard
Alpert, who confessed to me that his interest was piqued because as a
student his nerves often made him do poorly on tests, while his
colleague, Ralph Haber, found that the pressure before an exam
actually helped him to do better.
15
Their research, among other
studies, showed that there are two kinds of anxious students: those | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6f1530d9ee4e-1 | whose anxiety undoes their academic performance, and those who are
able to do well despite the stress—or, perhaps, because of it.
16
The
irony of test anxiety is that the very apprehension about doing well on
the test that, ideally, can motivate students like Haber to study hard
in preparation and so do well can sabotage success in others. For
people who are too anxious, like Alpert, the pretest apprehension
interferes with the clear thinking and memory necessary to study
effectively, while during the test it disrupts the mental clarity
essential for doing well.
The number of worries that people report while taking a test
directly predicts how poorly they will do on it.
17
The mental resources
expended on one cognitive task—the worrying—simply detract from
the resources available for processing other information; if we are
preoccupied by worries that we’re going to flunk the test we’re taking,
we have that much less attention to expend on figuring out the
answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us
toward the very disaster they predict.
People who are adept at harnessing their emotions, on the other
hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an upcoming speech or | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6f1530d9ee4e-2 | hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an upcoming speech or
test, say—to motivate themselves to prepare well for it, thereby doing
well. The classical literature in psychology describes the relationship | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd3429bed375-0 | between anxiety and performance, including mental performance, in
terms of an upside-down U. At the peak of the inverted U is the
optimal relationship between anxiety and
performance, with a
modicum of nerves propelling outstanding achievement. But too little
anxiety—the first side of the U—brings about apathy or too little
motivation to try hard enough to do well, while too much anxiety—
the other side of the U—sabotages any attempt to do well.
A mildly elated state—
hypomania
, as it is technically called—seems
optimal for writers and others in creative callings that demand fluidity
and imaginative diversity of thought; it is somewhere toward the peak
of that inverted U. But let that euphoria get out of control to become
outright mania, as in the mood swings of manic-depressives, and the
agitation undermines the ability to think cohesively enough to write
well, even though ideas flow freely—indeed, much too freely to
pursue any one of them far enough to produce a finished product.
Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly
and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to
problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal. This suggests that one | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd3429bed375-1 | problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal. This suggests that one
way to help someone think through a problem is to tell them a joke.
Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more broadly and
associate more freely, noticing relationships that might have eluded
them otherwise—a mental skill important not just in creativity, but in
recognizing complex relationships and foreseeing the consequences of
a given decision.
The intellectual benefits of a good laugh are most striking when it
comes to solving a problem that demands a creative solution. One
study found that people who had just watched a video of television
bloopers were better at solving a puzzle long used by psychologists to
test creative thinking.
18
In the test people are given a candle, matches,
and a box of tacks and asked to attach the candle to a corkboard wall
so it will burn without dripping wax on the floor. Most people given
this problem fall into “functional fixedness,” thinking about using the
objects in the most conventional ways. But those who had just
watched the funny film, compared to others who had watched a film
on math or who exercised, were more likely to see an alternative use | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd3429bed375-2 | for the box holding the tacks, and so come up with the creative
solution: tack the box to the wall and use it as a candleholder.
Even mild mood changes can sway thinking. In making plans or
decisions people in good moods have a perceptual bias that leads
them to be more expansive and positive in their thinking. This is | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
561119b6589e-0 | partly because memory is state-specific, so that while in a good mood
we remember more positive events; as we think over the pros and
cons of a course of action while feeling pleasant, memory biases our
weighing of evidence in a positive direction, making us more likely to
do something slightly adventurous or risky, for example.
By the same token, being in a foul mood biases memory in a
negative direction, making us more likely to contract into a fearful,
overly cautious decision. Emotions out of control impede the intellect.
But, as we saw in
Chapter 5
, we can bring out-of-control emotions
back into line; this emotional competence is the master aptitude,
facilitating all other kinds of intelligence. Consider some cases in
point: the benefits of hope and optimism, and those soaring moments
when people outdo themselves.
PANDORA’S BOX AND POLLYANNA: THE POWER
OF POSITIVE THINKING
College students were posed the following hypothetical situation:
Although you set your goal of getting a B, when your first exam score, worth 30% of
your final grade is returned, you have received a D. It is now one week after you have
learned about the D grade. What do you do?
19 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
561119b6589e-1 | learned about the D grade. What do you do?
19
Hope made all the difference. The response by students with high
levels of hope was to work harder and think of a range of things they
might try that could bolster their final grade. Students with moderate
levels of hope thought of several ways they might up their grade, but
had far less determination to pursue them. And, understandably,
students with low levels of hope gave up on both counts, demoralized.
The question is not just theoretical, however. When C. R. Snyder,
the University of Kansas psychologist who did this study, compared
the actual academic achievement of freshman students high and low
on hope, he discovered that hope was a better predictor of their first-
semester grades than were their scores on the SAT, a test supposedly
able to predict how students will fare in college (and highly correlated
with IQ). Again, given roughly the same range of intellectual abilities,
emotional aptitudes make the critical difference.
Snyder’s explanation: “Students with high hope set themselves
higher goals and know how to work hard to attain them. When you | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9476a571508-0 | compare students of equivalent intellectual aptitude on their academic
achievements, what sets them apart is hope.”
20
As the familiar legend has it, Pandora, a princess of ancient Greece,
was given a gift, a mysterious box, by gods jealous of her beauty. She
was told she must never open the gift. But one day, overcome by
curiosity and temptation,
Pandora lifted the lid to peek in, letting
loose in the world the grand afflictions—disease, malaise, madness.
But a compassionate god let her close the box just in time to capture
the one antidote that makes life’s misery bearable: hope.
Hope, modern researchers are finding, does more than offer a bit of
solace amid affliction; it plays a surprisingly potent role in life,
offering an advantage in realms as diverse as school achievement and
bearing up in onerous jobs. Hope, in a technical sense, is more than
the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines
it with more specificity as “believing you have both the will and the
way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.”
People tend to differ in the general degree to which they have hope | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9476a571508-1 | in this sense. Some typically think of themselves as able to get out of a
jam or find ways to solve problems, while others simply do not see
themselves as having the energy, ability, or means to accomplish their
goals. People with high levels of hope, Snyder finds, share certain
traits, among them being able to motivate themselves, feeling
resourceful enough to find ways to accomplish their objectives,
reassuring themselves when in a tight spot that things will get better,
being flexible enough to find different ways to get to their goals or to
switch goals if one becomes impossible, and having the sense to break
down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces.
From the perspective of emotional intelligence, having hope means
that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude,
or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks. Indeed,
people who are hopeful evidence less depression than others as they
maneuver through life in pursuit of their goals, are less anxious in
general, and have fewer emotional distresses.
OPTIMISM: THE GREAT MOTIVATOR
Americans who follow swimming had high hopes for Matt Biondi, a
member of the U.S. Olympic Team in 1988. Some sportswriters were | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9476a571508-2 | touting Biondi as likely to match Mark Spitz’s 1972 feat of taking | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c61397bd995d-0 | seven gold medals. But Biondi finished a heartbreaking third in his
first event, the 200-meter freestyle. In his next event, the 100-meter
butterfly, Biondi was inched out for the gold by another swimmer
who made a greater effort in the last meter.
Sportscasters speculated that the defeats would dispirit Biondi in his
successive events. But Biondi rebounded from defeat and took a gold
medal in
his next five events. One viewer who was not surprised by
Biondi’s comeback was Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the
University of Pennsylvania, who had tested Biondi for optimism
earlier that year. In an experiment done with Seligman, the swimming
coach told Biondi during a special event meant to showcase Biondi’s
best performance that he had a worse time than was actually the case.
Despite the downbeat feedback, when Biondi was asked to rest and try
again, his performance—actually already very good—was even better.
But when other team members who were given a false bad time—and
whose test scores showed they were pessimistic—tried again, they did
even worse the second time.
21
Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expectation that, in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c61397bd995d-1 | general, things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and
frustrations. From the standpoint of emotional intelligence, optimism
is an attitude that buffers people against falling into apathy,
hopelessness, or depression in the face of tough going. And, as with
hope, its near cousin, optimism pays dividends in life (providing, of
course, it is a realistic optimism; a too-naive optimism can be
disastrous).
22
Seligman defines optimism in terms of how people explain to
themselves their successes and failures. People who are optimistic see
a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can
succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for failure,
ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are helpless to change.
These differing explanations have profound implications for how
people respond to life. For example, in reaction to a disappointment
such as being turned down for a job, optimists tend to respond
actively and hopefully, by formulating a plan of action, say, or
seeking out help and advice; they see the setback as something that
can be remedied. Pessimists, by contrast, react to such setbacks by
assuming there is nothing they can do to make things go better the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c61397bd995d-2 | assuming there is nothing they can do to make things go better the
next time, and so do nothing about the problem; they see the setback
as due to some personal deficit that will always plague them.
As with hope, optimism predicts academic success. In a study of five | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
949655d7decf-0 | hundred members of the incoming freshman class of 1984 at the
University of Pennsylvania, the students’ scores on a test of optimism
were a better predictor of their actual grades freshman year than were
their SAT scores or their high-school grades. Said Seligman, who
studied them, “College entrance exams measure talent, while
explanatory style tells you who gives up. It is the combination of
reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat
that leads to success. What’s missing in tests of ability is motivation.
What you need to know about someone is whether they will keep
going
when things get frustrating. My hunch is that for a given level
of intelligence, your actual achievement is a function not just of
talent, but also of the capacity to stand defeat.”
23
One of the most telling demonstrations of the power of optimism to
motivate people is a study Seligman did of insurance salesmen with
the MetLife company. Being able to take a rejection with grace is
essential in sales of all kinds, especially with a product like insurance,
where the ratio of noes to yeses can be so discouragingly high. For
this reason, about three quarters of insurance salesmen quit in their | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
949655d7decf-1 | first three years. Seligman found that new salesmen who were by
nature optimists sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two
years on the job than did pessimists. And during the first year the
pessimists quit at twice the rate of the optimists.
What’s more, Seligman persuaded MetLife to hire a special group of
applicants who scored high on a test for optimism but failed the
normal screening tests (which compared a range of their attitudes to a
standard profile based on answers from agents who have been
successful). This special group outsold the pessimists by 21 percent in
their first year, and 57 percent in the second.
Just why optimism makes such a difference in sales success speaks
to the sense in which it is an emotionally intelligent attitude. Each no
a salesperson gets is a small defeat. The emotional reaction to that
defeat is crucial to the ability to marshal enough motivation to
continue. As the noes mount up, morale can deteriorate, making it
harder and harder to pick up the phone for the next call. Such
rejection is especially hard to take for a pessimist, who interprets it as
meaning, “I’m a failure at this; I’ll never make a sale”—an
interpretation that is sure to trigger apathy and defeatism, if not | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
949655d7decf-2 | interpretation that is sure to trigger apathy and defeatism, if not
depression. Optimists, on the other hand, tell themselves, “I’m using
the wrong approach,” or “That last person was just in a bad mood.”
By seeing not themselves but something in the situation as the reason | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
755622f4ca6b-0 | for their failure, they can change their approach in the next call.
While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s
spawns hope.
One source of a positive or negative outlook may well be inborn
temperament; some people by nature tend one way or the other. But
as we shall also see in
Chapter 14
, temperament can be tempered by
experience. Optimism and hope—like helplessness and despair—can
be learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call
self-
efficacy
, the belief that one has mastery over the events of one’s life
and can meet challenges as they come up. Developing a competency
of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person
more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding
challenges.
And surmounting those challenges in turn increases the sense of self-
efficacy. This attitude makes people more likely to make the best use
of whatever skills they may have—or to do what it takes to develop
them.
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the
research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: “People’s beliefs about their
abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
755622f4ca6b-1 | property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who
have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach
things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about
what can go wrong.”
24
FLOW: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EXCELLENCE
A composer describes those moments when his work is at its best:
You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost
don’t exist. I’ve experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and
I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe
and wonderment. And it just flows out by itself.
25
His description is remarkably similar to those of hundreds of diverse
men and women—rock climbers, chess champions, surgeons,
basketball players, engineers, managers, even filing clerks—when they
tell of a time they outdid themselves in some favored activity. The
state they describe is called “flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the
University of Chicago psychologist who has collected such accounts of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
80d52ee082b9-0 | peak performance during two decades of research.
26
Athletes know
this state of grace as “the zone,” where excellence becomes effortless,
crowd and competitors disappearing into a blissful, steady absorption
in the moment. Diane Roffe-Steinrotter, who captured a gold medal in
skiing at the 1994 Winter Olympics, said after she finished her turn at
ski racing that she remembered nothing about it but being immersed
in relaxation: “I felt like a waterfall.”
27
Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow
represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the
service of performance and learning. In flow the emotions are not just
contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with
the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the
agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. Yet flow (or a milder
microflow) is an experience almost everyone
enters from time to time,
particularly when performing at their peak or stretching beyond their
former limits. It is perhaps best captured by ecstatic lovemaking, the
merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one.
That experience is a glorious one: the hallmark of flow is a feeling | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
80d52ee082b9-1 | of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because flow feels so good, it is
intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become utterly
absorbed in what they are doing, paying undivided attention to the
task, their awareness merged with their actions. Indeed, it interrupts
flow to reflect too much on what is happening—the very thought “I’m
doing this wonderfully” can break the feeling of flow. Attention
becomes so focused that people are aware only of the narrow range of
perception related to the immediate task, losing track of time and
space. A surgeon, for example, recalled a challenging operation during
which he was in flow; when he completed the surgery he noticed
some rubble on the floor of the operating room and asked what had
happened. He was amazed to hear that while he was so intent on the
surgery part of the ceiling had caved in—he hadn’t noticed at all.
Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and
worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow
are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-
consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
80d52ee082b9-2 | consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even
doing well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless.
Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they
are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands
of the task. And although people perform at their peak while in flow,
they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c161faa7c60e-0 | success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what
motivates them.
There are several ways to enter flow. One is to intentionally focus a
sharp attention on the task at hand; a highly concentrated state is the
essence of flow. There seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to
this zone: it can require considerable effort to get calm and focused
enough to begin the task—this first step takes some discipline. But
once focus starts to lock in, it takes on a force of its own, both offering
relief from emotional turbulence and making the task effortless.
Entry to this zone can also occur when people find a task they are
skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability.
As Csikszentmihalyi told me, “People seem to concentrate best when
the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to
give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are
bored. If there is too much for them to
handle, they get anxious. Flow
occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.”
28
The spontaneous pleasure, grace, and effectiveness that characterize
flow are incompatible with emotional hijackings, in which limbic | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c161faa7c60e-1 | flow are incompatible with emotional hijackings, in which limbic
surges capture the rest of the brain. The quality of attention in flow is
relaxed yet highly focused. It is a concentration very different from
straining to pay attention when we are tired or bored, or when our
focus is under siege from intrusive feelings such as anxiety or anger.
Flow is a state devoid of emotional static, save for a compelling,
highly motivating feeling of mild ecstasy. That ecstasy seems to be a
by-product of the attentional focus that is a prerequisite of flow.
Indeed, the classic literature of contemplative traditions describes
states of absorption that are experienced as pure bliss: flow induced
by nothing more than intense concentration.
Watching someone in flow gives the impression that the difficult is
easy; peak performance appears natural and ordinary. This impression
parallels what is going on within the brain, where a similar paradox is
repeated: the most challenging tasks are done with a minimum
expenditure of mental energy. In flow the brain is in a “cool” state, its
arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry attuned to the demand of
the moment. When people are engaged in activities that effortlessly | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c161faa7c60e-2 | capture and hold their attention, their brain “quiets down” in the
sense that there is a lessening of cortical arousal.
29
That discovery is
remarkable, given that flow allows people to tackle the most
challenging tasks in a given domain, whether playing against a chess
master or solving a complex mathematical problem. The expectation | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9295073f0fdd-0 | would be that such challenging tasks would require
more
cortical
activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs only within reach
of the summit of ability, where skills are well-rehearsed and neural
circuits are most efficient.
A strained concentration—a focus fueled by worry—produces
increased cortical activation. But the zone of flow and optimal
performance seems to be an oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare
minimum of mental energy expended. That makes sense, perhaps, in
terms of the skilled practice that allows people to get into flow:
having mastered the moves of a task, whether a physical one such as
rock climbing or a mental one such as computer programming, means
that the brain can be more efficient in performing them. Well-
practiced moves require much less brain effort than do ones just being
learned, or those that are still too hard. Likewise, when the brain is
working less efficiently because of fatigue or nervousness, as happens
at the end of a long, stressful day, there is a blurring of the precision
of cortical
effort, with too many superfluous areas being activated—a
neural state experienced as being highly distracted.
30
The same | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9295073f0fdd-1 | 30
The same
happens in boredom. But when the brain is operating at peak
efficiency, as in flow, there is a precise relation between the active
areas and the demands of the task. In this state even hard work can
seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining.
LEARNING AND FLOW: A NEW MODEL FOR EDUCATION
Because flow emerges in the zone in which an activity challenges
people to the fullest of their capacities, as their skills increase it takes
a heightened challenge to get into flow. If a task is too simple, it is
boring; if too challenging, the result is anxiety rather than flow. It can
be argued that mastery in a craft or skill is spurred on by the
experience of flow—that the motivation to get better and better at
something, be it playing the violin, dancing, or gene-splicing, is at
least in part to stay in flow while doing it. Indeed, in a study of two
hundred artists eighteen years after they left art school,
Csikszentmihalyi found that it was those who in their student days
had savored the sheer joy of painting itself who had become serious
painters. Those who had been motivated in art school by dreams of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9295073f0fdd-2 | fame and wealth for the most part drifted away from art after
graduating. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
72690ac6a191-0 | Csikszentmihalyi concludes: “Painters must want to paint above all
else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he
will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won’t be able to
pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-
minded immersion.”
31
Just as flow is a prerequisite for mastery in a craft, profession, or
art, so too with learning. Students who get into flow as they study do
better, quite apart from their potential as measured by achievement
tests. Students in a special Chicago high school for the sciences—all of
whom had scored in the top 5 percent on a test of math proficiency—
were rated by their math teachers as high or low achievers. Then the
way these students spent their time was monitored, each student
carrying a beeper that signaled them at random times during the day
to write down what they were doing and what their mood was. Not
surprisingly, the low achievers spent only about fifteen hours a week
studying at home, much less than the twenty-seven hours a week of
homework done by their high-achieving peers. The low achievers | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
72690ac6a191-1 | spent most of the hours during which they were not studying in
socializing, hanging out with friends and family.
When their moods were analyzed, a telling finding emerged. Both
the high
and low achievers spent a great deal of time during the week
being bored by activities, such as TV watching, that posed no
challenge to their abilities. Such, after all, is the lot of teenagers. But
the key difference was in their experience of studying. For the high
achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of
flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for the low
achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more
often than not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their
abilities. The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not
in studying. In short, students who achieve up to the level of their
academic potential and beyond are more often drawn to study
because it puts them in flow. Sadly, the low achievers, by failing to
hone the skills that would get them in flow, both forfeit the enjoyment
of study and run the risk of limiting the level of intellectual tasks that
will be enjoyable to them in the future.
32 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
72690ac6a191-2 | will be enjoyable to them in the future.
32
Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who developed the
theory of multiple intelligences, sees flow, and the positive states that
typify it, as part of the healthiest way to teach children, motivating
them from inside rather than by threat or promise of reward. “We
should use kids’ positive states to draw them into learning in the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
522a56cf071c-0 | domains where they can develop competencies,” Gardner proposed to
me. “Flow is an internal state that signifies a kid is engaged in a task
that’s right. You have to find something you like and stick to it. It’s
when kids get bored in school that they fight and act up, and when
they’re overwhelmed by a challenge that they get anxious about their
schoolwork. But you learn at your best when you have something you
care about and you can get pleasure from being engaged in.”
The strategy used in many of the schools that are putting Gardner’s
model of multiple intelligences into practice revolves around
identifying a child’s profile of natural competencies and playing to the
strengths as well as trying to shore up the weaknesses. A child who is
naturally talented in music or movement, for example, will enter flow
more easily in that domain than in those where she is less able.
Knowing a child’s profile can help a teacher fine-tune the way a topic
is presented to a child and offer lessons at the level—from remedial to
highly advanced—that is most likely to provide an optimal challenge.
Doing this makes learning more pleasurable, neither fearsome nor a
bore. “The hope is that when kids gain flow from learning, they will | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
522a56cf071c-1 | be emboldened to take on challenges in new areas,” says Gardner,
adding that experience suggests this is the case.
More generally, the flow model suggests that achieving mastery of
any skill or body of knowledge should ideally happen naturally, as the
child is drawn to the areas that spontaneously engage her—that, in
essence, she loves. That
initial passion can be the seed for high levels
of attainment, as the child comes to realize that pursuing the field—
whether it be dance, math, or music—is a source of the joy of flow.
And since it takes pushing the limits of one’s ability to sustain flow,
that becomes a prime motivator for getting better and better; it makes
the child happy. This, of course, is a more positive model of learning
and education than most of us encountered in school. Who does not
recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom
punctuated by moments of high anxiety? Pursuing flow through
learning is a more humane, natural, and very likely more effective
way to marshal emotions in the service of education.
That speaks to the more general sense in which channeling
emotions toward a productive end is a master aptitude. Whether it be
in controlling impulse and putting off gratification, regulating our | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
522a56cf071c-2 | in controlling impulse and putting off gratification, regulating our
moods so they facilitate rather than impede thinking, motivating
ourselves to persist and try, try again in the face of setbacks, or
finding ways to enter flow and so perform more effectively—all | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
887f278e27a1-0 | bespeak the power of emotion to guide effective effort. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b4914ad3a88f-0 | 7
The Roots of Empathy
Back to Gary, the brilliant but alexithymic surgeon who so distressed
his fiancée, Ellen, by being oblivious not only to his own feelings but
to hers as well. Like most alexithymics, he lacked empathy as well as
insight. If Ellen spoke of feeling down, Gary failed to sympathize; if
she spoke of love, he changed the subject. Gary would make “helpful”
critiques of things Ellen did, not realizing these criticisms made her
feel attacked, not helped.
Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our
own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings.
1
Alexithymics like Gary, who have no idea what they feel themselves,
are at a complete loss when it comes to knowing what anyone else
around them is feeling. They are emotionally tone-deaf. The
emotional notes and chords that weave through people’s words and
actions—the telling tone of voice or shift in posture, the eloquent
silence or telltale tremble—go by unnoted.
Confused about their own feelings, alexithymics are equally | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b4914ad3a88f-1 | bewildered when other people express their feelings to them. This
failure to register another’s feelings is a major deficit in emotional
intelligence, and a tragic failing in what it means to be human. For all
rapport, the root of caring, stems from emotional attunement, from
the capacity for empathy.
That capacity—the ability to know how another feels—comes into
play in a vast array of life arenas, from sales and management to
romance and parenting, to compassion and political action. The
absence of empathy is also telling. Its lack is seen in criminal
psychopaths, rapists, and child molesters.
People’s emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are
expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another’s feelings is
in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial
expression, and the like. Perhaps the largest body of research on
people’s ability to read
such nonverbal messages is by Robert
Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and his students. Rosenthal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4dc68309fc1-0 | devised a test of empathy, the PONS (Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity),
a series of videotapes of a young woman expressing feelings ranging
from loathing to motherly love.
2
The scenes span the spectrum from a
jealous rage to asking forgiveness, from a show of gratitude to a
seduction. The video has been edited so that in each portrayal one or
more channels of nonverbal communication are systematically
blanked out; in addition to having the words muffled, for example, in
some scenes all other cues but the facial expression are blocked. In
others, only the body movements are shown, and so on, through the
main nonverbal channels of communication, so that viewers have to
detect emotion from one or another specific nonverbal cue.
In tests with over seven thousand people in the United States and
eighteen other countries, the benefits of being able to read feelings
from nonverbal cues included being better adjusted emotionally, more
popular, more outgoing, and—perhaps not surprisingly—more
sensitive. In general, women are better than men at this kind of
empathy. And people whose performance improved over the course of
the forty-five-minute test—a sign that they have a talent for picking
up empathy skills—also had better relationships with the opposite sex. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4dc68309fc1-1 | Empathy, it should be no surprise to learn, helps with romantic life.
In keeping with findings about other elements of emotional
intelligence, there was only an incidental relationship between scores
on this measure of empathic acuity and SAT or IQ scores or school
achievement tests. Empathy’s independence from academic
intelligence has been found too in testing with a version of the PONS
designed for children. In tests with 1,011 children, those who showed
an aptitude for reading feelings nonverbally were among the most
popular in their schools, the most emotionally stable.
3
They also did
better in school, even though, on average, their IQs were not higher
than those of children who were less skilled at reading nonverbal
messages—suggesting that mastering this empathic ability smooths
the way for classroom effectiveness (or simply makes teachers like
them more).
Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the mode of the
emotions is nonverbal. Indeed, when a person’s words disagree with
what is conveyed via his tone of voice, gesture, or other nonverbal
channel, the emotional truth is in
how
he says something rather than
in
what
he says. One rule of thumb used in communications research | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4dc68309fc1-2 | he says. One rule of thumb used in communications research
is that 90 percent or more of an emotional message is nonverbal. And
such messages—anxiety in someone’s tone of voice, irritation in the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6e74f3f0509a-0 | quickness of a gesture—are almost always taken in
unconsciously,
without paying specific attention to the nature of the message, but
simply tacitly receiving it and responding. The skills that allow us to
do this well or poorly are also, for the most part, learned tacitly.
HOW EMPATHY UNFOLDS
The moment Hope, just nine months old, saw another baby fall, tears
welled up in her own eyes and she crawled off to be comforted by her
mother, as though it were she who had been hurt. And fifteen-month-
old Michael went to get his own teddy bear for his crying friend Paul;
when Paul kept crying, Michael retrieved Paul’s security blanket for
him. Both these small acts of sympathy and caring were observed by
mothers trained to record such incidents of empathy in action.
4
The
results of the study suggest that the roots of empathy can be traced to
infancy. Virtually from the day they are born infants are upset when
they hear another infant crying—a response some see as the earliest
precursor of empathy.
5
Developmental psychologists have found that infants feel
sympathetic distress even before they fully realize that they exist | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6e74f3f0509a-1 | apart from other people. Even a few months after birth, infants react
to a disturbance in those around them as though it were their own,
crying when they see another child’s tears. By one year or so, they
start to realize the misery is not their own but someone else’s, though
they still seem confused over what to do about it. In research by
Martin L. Hoffman at New York University, for example, a one-year-
old brought his own mother over to comfort a crying friend, ignoring
the friend’s mother, who was also in the room. This confusion is seen
too when one-year-olds imitate the distress of someone else, possibly
to better comprehend what they are feeling; for example, if another
baby hurts her fingers, a one-year-old might put her own fingers in
her mouth to see if she hurts, too. On seeing his mother cry, one baby
wiped his own eyes, though they had no tears.
Such
motor mimicry
, as it is called, is the original technical sense of
the word
empathy
as it was first used in the 1920s by E. B. Titchener,
an American psychologist. This sense is slightly different from its | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6e74f3f0509a-2 | an American psychologist. This sense is slightly different from its
original introduction into English from the Greek
empatheia
, “feeling
into,” a term used initially by theoreticians of aesthetics for the ability
to perceive the subjective experience of another person. Titchener’s | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
686423caa45b-0 | theory was that empathy stemmed from a sort of physical imitation of
the distress of another, which then evokes the same feelings in
oneself. He sought a word that would be distinct from
sympathy
,
which can be felt for the general plight of another with no sharing
whatever of what that other person is feeling.
Motor mimicry fades from toddlers’ repertoire at around two and a
half years, at which point they realize that someone else’s pain is
different from their own, and are better able to comfort them. A
typical incident, from a mother’s diary:
A neighbor’s baby cries … and Jenny approaches and tries to give him some cookies.
She follows him around and begins to whimper to herself. She then tries to stroke his
hair, but he pulls away.… He calms down, but Jenny still looks worried. She continues
to bring him toys and to pat his head and shoulders.
6
At this point in their development toddlers begin to diverge from
one another in their overall sensitivity to other people’s emotional
upsets, with some, like Jenny, keenly aware and others tuning out. A
series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
686423caa45b-1 | the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of
this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents
disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic
when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress
their misbehavior caused someone else: “Look how sad you’ve made
her feel” instead of “That was naughty.” They found too that
children’s empathy is also shaped by seeing how others react when
someone else is distressed; by imitating what they see, children
develop a repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping other
people who are distressed.
THE WELL-ATTUNED CHILD
Sarah was twenty-five when she gave birth to twin boys, Mark and
Fred. Mark, she felt, was more like herself; Fred was more like his
father. That perception may have been the seed of a telling but subtle
difference in how she treated each boy. When the boys were just three
months old, Sarah would often try to catch Fred’s gaze, and when he
would avert his face, she would try to catch his eye again; Fred would
respond by turning away more emphatically. Once she would look | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a68fb0c99f47-0 | away, Fred would look back at her, and the cycle of pursuit and
aversion would begin again—often leaving Fred in tears. But with
Mark, Sarah virtually never tried to impose eye contact as she did
with Fred. Instead Mark could break off eye contact whenever he
wanted, and she would not pursue.
A small act, but telling. A year later, Fred was noticeably more
fearful and dependent than Mark; one way he showed his fearfulness
was by breaking off eye contact with other people, as he had done
with his mother at three months, turning his face down and away.
Mark, on the other hand, looked people straight in the eye; when he
wanted to break off contact, he’d turn his head slightly upward and to
the side, with a winning smile.
The twins and their mother were observed so minutely when they
took part in research by Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist then at Cornell
University School of Medicine.
7
Stern is fascinated by the small,
repeated exchanges that take place between parent and child; he
believes that the most basic lessons of emotional life are laid down in
these intimate moments. Of all such moments, the most critical are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |