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a68fb0c99f47-1 | those that let the child know her emotions are met with empathy,
accepted, and reciprocated, in a process Stern calls
attunement
. The
twins’ mother was attuned with Mark, but out of emotional synch
with Fred. Stern contends that the countlessly repeated moments of
attunement or misattunement between parent and child shape the
emotional expectations adults bring to their close relationships—
perhaps far more than the more dramatic events of childhood.
Attunement occurs tacitly, as part of the rhythm of relationship.
Stern has studied it with microscopic precision through videotaping
hours of mothers with their infants. He finds that through attunement
mothers let their infants know they have a sense of what the infant is
feeling. A baby squeals with delight, for example, and the mother
affirms that delight by giving the baby a gentle shake, cooing, or
matching the pitch of her voice to the baby’s squeal. Or a baby shakes
his rattle, and she gives him a quick shimmy in response. In such an
interaction the affirming message is in the mother more or less
matching the baby’s level of excitement. Such small attunements give
an infant the reassuring feeling of being emotionally connected, a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a68fb0c99f47-2 | message that Stern finds mothers send about once a minute when they
interact with their babies.
Attunement is very different from simple imitation. “If you just
imitate a baby,” Stern told me, “that only shows you know what he | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
854ba8f7b400-0 | did, not how he felt. To let him know you sense how he feels, you
have to play back his inner feelings in another way. Then the baby
knows he is understood.”
Making love is perhaps the closest approximation in adult life to
this intimate attunement between infant and mother. Lovemaking,
Stern writes, “involves the experience of sensing the other’s subjective
state: shared desire, aligned intentions, and mutual states of
simultaneously shifting arousal,” with lovers responding to each other
in a synchrony that gives the tacit sense
of deep rapport.
8
Lovemaking
is, at its best, an act of mutual empathy; at its worst it lacks any such
emotional mutuality.
THE COSTS OF MISATTUNEMENT
Stern holds that from repeated attunements an infant begins to
develop a sense that other people can and will share in her feelings.
This sense seems to emerge at around eight months, when infants
begin to realize they are separate from others, and continues to be
shaped by intimate relationships throughout life. When parents are
misattuned to a child it is deeply upsetting. In one experiment, Stern | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
854ba8f7b400-1 | had mothers deliberately over- or underrespond to their infants,
rather than matching them in an attuned way; the infants responded
with immediate dismay and distress.
Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and child takes a
tremendous emotional toll on the child. When a parent consistently
fails to show any empathy with a particular range of emotion in the
child—joys, tears, needing to cuddle—the child begins to avoid
expressing, and perhaps even feeling, those same emotions. In this
way, presumably, entire ranges of emotion can begin to be obliterated
from the repertoire for intimate relations, especially if through
childhood those feelings continue to be covertly or overtly
discouraged.
By the same token, children can come to favor an unfortunate range
of emotion, depending on which moods are reciprocated. Even infants
“catch” moods: Three-month-old babies of depressed mothers, for
example, mirrored their mothers’ moods while playing with them,
displaying more feelings of anger and sadness, and much less
spontaneous curiosity and interest, compared to infants whose
mothers were not depressed.
9 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5456bf4c8abb-0 | One mother in Stern’s study consistently underreacted to her baby’s
level of activity; eventually her baby learned to be passive. “An infant
treated that way learns, when I get excited I can’t get my mother to be
equally excited, so I may as well not try at all,” Stern contends. But
there is hope in “reparative” relationships: “Relationships throughout
life—with friends or relatives, for example, or in psychotherapy—
continually reshape your working model of relationships. An
imbalance at one point can be corrected later; it’s an ongoing, lifelong
process.”
Indeed, several theories of psychoanalysis see the therapeutic
relationship as providing just such an emotional corrective, a
reparative experience of attunement.
Mirroring
is the term used by
some psychoanalytic thinkers for
the therapist’s reflecting back to the
client an understanding of his inner state, just as an attuned mother
does with her infant. The emotional synchrony is unstated and outside
conscious awareness, though a patient may bask in the sense of being
deeply acknowledged and understood.
The lifetime emotional costs of lack of attunement in childhood can
be great—and not just for the child. A study of criminals who | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5456bf4c8abb-1 | committed the cruelest and most violent crimes found that the one
characteristic of their early lives that set them apart from other
criminals was that they had been shuttled from foster home to foster
home, or raised in orphanages—life histories that suggest emotional
neglect and little opportunity for attunement.
10
While emotional neglect seems to dull empathy, there is a
paradoxical result from intense, sustained emotional abuse, including
cruel, sadistic threats, humiliations, and plain meanness. Children
who endure such abuse can become hyperalert to the emotions of
those around them, in what amounts to a post-traumatic vigilance to
cues that have signaled threat. Such an obsessive preoccupation with
the feelings of others is typical of psychologically abused children
who in adulthood suffer the mercurial, intense emotional ups and
downs that are sometimes diagnosed as “borderline personality
disorder.” Many such people are gifted at sensing what others around
them are feeling, and it is quite common for them to report having
suffered emotional abuse in childhood.
11
THE NEUROLOGY OF EMPATHY | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fc83e89bd7d5-0 | As is so often the case in neurology, reports of quirky and bizarre
cases were among the early clues to the brain basis of empathy. A
1975 report, for instance, reviewed several cases in which patients
with certain lesions in the right area of the frontal lobes had a curious
deficit: they were unable to understand the emotional message in
people’s tone of voice, though they were perfectly able to understand
their words. A sarcastic “Thanks,” a grateful “Thanks,” and an angry
“Thanks” all had the same neutral meaning for them. By contrast, a
1979 report spoke of patients with injuries in other parts of the right
hemisphere who had a very different gap in their emotional
perception. These patients were unable to express their own emotions
through their tone of voice or by gesture. They knew what they felt,
but they simply could not convey it. All these cortical brain regions,
the various authors noted, had strong connections to the limbic
system.
These studies were reviewed as background to a seminal paper by
Leslie
Brothers, a psychiatrist at the California Institute of
Technology, on the biology of empathy.
12
Reviewing both | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fc83e89bd7d5-1 | Technology, on the biology of empathy.
12
Reviewing both
neurological findings and comparative studies with animals, Brothers
points to the amygdala and its connections to the association area of
the visual cortex as part of the key brain circuitry underlying
empathy.
Much of the relevant neurological research is from work with
animals, especially nonhuman primates. That such primates display
empathy—or “emotional communication,” as Brothers prefers to say—
is clear not just from anecdotal accounts, but also from studies such as
the following: Rhesus monkeys were trained first to fear a certain tone
by hearing it while they received an electric shock. Then they learned
to avoid the electric shock by pushing a lever whenever they heard
the tone. Next, pairs of these monkeys were put in separate cages,
their only communication being through closed-circuit TV, which
allowed them to see pictures of the face of the other monkey. The first
monkey, but not the second, then heard the dreaded tone sound,
which brought a look of fear to its face. At that moment, the second
monkey, seeing fear on the face of the first, pushed the lever that
prevented the shock—an act of empathy, if not of altruism. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fc83e89bd7d5-2 | prevented the shock—an act of empathy, if not of altruism.
Having established that nonhuman primates do indeed read
emotions from the faces of their peers, researchers gently inserted
long, fine-tipped electrodes into the brains of monkeys. These
electrodes allowed the recording of activity in a single neuron. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d0364d9cad51-0 | Electrodes tapping neurons in the visual cortex and in the amygdala
showed that when one monkey saw the face of another, that
information led to a neuron firing first in the visual cortex, then in the
amygdala. This pathway, of course, is a standard route for information
that is emotionally arousing. But what is surprising about results from
such studies is that they have also identified neurons in the visual
cortex that seem to fire
only
in response to specific facial expressions
or gestures, such as a threatening opening of the mouth, a fearful
grimace, or a docile crouch. These neurons are distinct from others in
the same region that recognize familiar faces. This would seem to
mean that the brain is designed from the beginning to respond to
specific emotional expressions—that is, empathy is a given of biology.
Another line of evidence for the key role of the amygdala-cortical
pathway in reading and responding to emotions, Brothers suggests, is
research in which monkeys in the wild had the connections to and
from the amygdala and cortex severed. When they were released back
to their troops, these monkeys were able to contend with ordinary
tasks such as feeding themselves and climbing trees. But the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d0364d9cad51-1 | unfortunate monkeys had lost all sense of how to respond emotionally
to other monkeys in their band. Even when one
made a friendly
approach, they would run away, and eventually lived as isolates,
shunning contact with their own troop.
The very regions of the cortex where the emotion-specific neurons
concentrate are also, Brothers notes, those with the heaviest
connection to the amygdala; reading emotion involves the amygdala-
cortical circuitry, which has a key role in orchestrating the
appropriate responses. “The survival value of such a system is
obvious” for nonhuman primates, notes Brothers. “The perception of
another individual’s approach should give rise to a specific pattern of
[physiological response]—and very quickly—tailored to whether the
intent is to bite, to have a quiet grooming session, or to copulate.”
13
A similar physiological basis for empathy in us humans is suggested
in research by Robert Levenson, a University of California at Berkeley
psychologist who has studied married couples trying to guess what
their partner is feeling during a heated discussion.
14
His method is
simple: the couple is videotaped and their physiological responses | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d0364d9cad51-2 | simple: the couple is videotaped and their physiological responses
measured while talking over some troubling issue in their marriage—
how to discipline the kids, spending habits, and the like. Each partner
reviews the tape and narrates what he or she was feeling from
moment to moment. Then the partner reviews the tape a second time, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6ca093576f8c-0 | now trying to read the
other’s
feelings.
The most empathic accuracy occurred in those husbands and wives
whose own physiology tracked that of the spouse
they were watching.
That is, when their partner had an elevated sweat response, so did
they; when their partner had a drop in heart rate, their heart slowed.
In short, their body mimicked the subtle, moment-to-moment physical
reactions of their spouse. If the viewer’s physiological patterns simply
repeated their own during the original interaction, they were very
poor at surmising what their partner was feeling. Only when their
bodies were in synch was there empathy.
This suggests that when the emotional brain is driving the body
with a strong reaction—the heat of anger, say—there can be little or
no empathy. Empathy requires enough calm and receptivity so that
the subtle signals of feeling from another person can be received and
mimicked by one’s own emotional brain.
EMPATHY AND ETHICS: THE ROOTS OF ALTRUISM
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” is one of
the most famous lines in English literature. John Donne’s sentiment | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6ca093576f8c-1 | speaks to the heart of the link between empathy and caring: another’s
pain is one’s own. To
feel with another is to care. In this sense, the
opposite of
empathy
is
antipathy
. The empathic attitude is engaged
again and again in moral judgments, for moral dilemmas involve
potential victims: Should you lie to keep from hurting a friend’s
feelings? Should you keep a promise to visit a sick friend or accept a
last-minute invitation to a dinner party instead? When should a life-
support system be kept going for someone who would otherwise die?
These moral questions are posed by the empathy researcher Martin
Hoffman, who argues that the roots of morality are to be found in
empathy, since it is empathizing with the potential victims—someone
in pain, danger, or deprivation, say—and so sharing their distress that
moves people to act to help them.
15
Beyond this immediate link
between empathy and altruism in personal encounters, Hoffman
proposes that the same capacity for empathic affect, for putting
oneself in another’s place, leads people to follow certain moral
principles.
Hoffman sees a natural progression in empathy from infancy | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6ca093576f8c-2 | Hoffman sees a natural progression in empathy from infancy
onward. As we have seen, at one year of age a child feels in distress | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
70587728c016-0 | herself when she sees another fall and start to cry; her rapport is so
strong and immediate that she puts her thumb in her mouth and
buries her head in her mother’s lap, as if she herself were hurt. After
the first year, when infants become more aware that they are distinct
from others, they actively try to soothe another crying infant, offering
them their teddy bears, for example. As early as the age of two,
children begin to realize that someone else’s feelings differ from their
own, and so they become more sensitive to cues revealing what
another actually feels; at this point they might, for example, recognize
that another child’s pride might mean that the best way to help them
deal with their tears is not to call undue attention to them.
By late childhood the most advanced level of empathy emerges, as
children are able to understand distress beyond the immediate
situation, and to see that someone’s condition or station in life may be
a source of chronic distress. At this point they can feel for the plight
of an entire group, such as the poor, the oppressed, the outcast. That
understanding, in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
70587728c016-1 | understanding, in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions
centered on wanting to alleviate misfortune and injustice.
Empathy underlies many facets of moral judgment and action. One
is “empathic anger,” which John Stuart Mill described as “the natural
feeling of retaliation … rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable
to … those hurts which wound us through wounding others”; Mill
dubbed this the “guardian of justice.” Another instance in which
empathy leads to moral action is when a bystander is moved to
intervene on behalf of a victim; the
research shows that the more
empathy a bystander feels for the victim, the more likely it is that she
will intervene. There is some evidence that the level of empathy
people feel shades their moral judgments as well. For example, studies
in Germany and the United States found that the more empathic
people are, the more they favor the moral principle that resources
should be allocated according to people’s need.
16
LIFE WITHOUT EMPATHY: THE MIND OF THE MOLESTER, THE
MORALS OF THE SOCIOPATH
Eric Eckardt was involved in an infamous crime: the bodyguard of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
70587728c016-2 | skater Tonya Harding, Eckardt had arranged to have thugs attack
Nancy Kerrigan, Harding’s archrival for the 1994 women’s Olympic
figure skating gold medal. In the attack, Kerrigan’s knee was battered, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7d1f208bcfaa-0 | sidelining her during crucial training months. But when Eckardt saw
the image of a sobbing Kerrigan on television, he had a sudden rush of
remorse, and sought out a friend to bare his secret, beginning the
sequence that led to the arrest of the attackers. Such is the power of
empathy.
But it is typically, and tragically, lacking in those who commit the
most mean-spirited of crimes. A psychological fault line is common to
rapists, child molesters, and many perpetrators of family violence
alike: they are incapable of empathy. This inability to feel their
victims’ pain allows them to tell themselves lies that encourage their
crime. For rapists, the lies include “Women really want to be raped”
or “If she resists, she’s just playing hard to get”; for molesters, “I’m
not hurting the child, just showing love” or “This is just another form
of affection”; for physically abusive parents, “This is just good
discipline.” These self-justifications are all collected from what people
being treated for these problems say they have told themselves as they
were brutalizing their victims, or preparing to do so.
The blotting out of empathy as these people inflict damage on | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7d1f208bcfaa-1 | The blotting out of empathy as these people inflict damage on
victims is almost always part of an emotional cycle that precipitates
their cruel acts. Witness the emotional sequence that typically leads to
a sex crime such as child molestation.
17
The cycle begins with the
molester feeling upset: angry, depressed, lonely. These sentiments
might be triggered by, say, watching happy couples on TV, and then
feeling depressed about being alone. The molester then seeks solace in
a favored fantasy, typically about a warm friendship with a child; the
fantasy becomes sexual and ends in masturbation. Afterward, the
molester feels a temporary relief from the sadness, but the
relief is
short-lived; the depression and loneliness return even more strongly.
The molester begins to think about acting out the fantasy, telling
himself justifications like “I’m not doing any real harm if the child is
not physically hurt” and “If a child really didn’t want to have sex with
me, she could stop it.”
At this point the molester is seeing the child through the lens of the
perverted fantasy, not with empathy for what a real child would feel
in the situation. That emotional detachment characterizes everything | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7d1f208bcfaa-2 | in the situation. That emotional detachment characterizes everything
that follows, from the ensuing plan to get a child alone, to the careful
rehearsal of what will happen, and then the execution of the plan. All
of it is pursued as though the child involved had no feelings of her
own; instead the molester projects on her the cooperative attitude of
the child in his fantasy. Her feelings—revulsion, fear, disgust—do not | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7676e6549393-0 | register. If they did, it would “ruin” things for the molester.
This utter lack of empathy for their victims is one of the main
focuses of new treatments being devised for child molesters and other
such offenders. In one of the most promising treatment programs, the
offenders read heart-wrenching accounts of crimes like their own, told
from the victim’s perspective. They also watch videotapes of victims
tearfully telling what it was like to be molested. The offenders then
write about their own offense from the victim’s point of view,
imagining what the victim felt. They read this account to a therapy
group, and try to answer questions about the assault from the victim’s
perspective. Finally, the offender goes through a simulated
reenactment of the crime, this time playing the role of the victim.
William Pithers, the Vermont prison psychologist who developed
this perspective-taking therapy, told me, “Empathy with the victim
shifts perception so that the denial of pain, even in one’s fantasies, is
difficult” and so strengthens the men’s motivation to fight their
perverse sexual urges. Sex offenders who have been through the
program in prison had only half the rate of subsequent offenses after | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7676e6549393-1 | release compared to those who had no such treatment. Without this
initial empathy-inspired motivation, none of the rest of treatment will
work.
While there may be some small hope for instilling a sense of
empathy in offenders such as child molesters, there is much less for
another criminal type, the psychopath (more recently called the
sociopath
as a psychiatric diagnosis). Psychopaths are notorious for
being both charming and completely without remorse for even the
most cruel and heartless acts. Psychopathy, the incapacity to feel
empathy or compassion of any sort, or the least twinge of conscience,
is one of the more perplexing of emotional defects. The heart of the
psychopath’s coldness seems to lie in an inability to make
anything
more than the shallowest of emotional connections. The cruelest of
criminals, such as sadistic serial killers who delight in the suffering of
their victims before they die, are the epitome of psychopathy.
18
Psychopaths are also glib liars, willing to say anything to get what
they want, and they manipulate their victims’ emotions with the same
cynicism. Consider the performance of Faro, a seventeen-year-old | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7676e6549393-2 | cynicism. Consider the performance of Faro, a seventeen-year-old
member of a Los Angeles gang who crippled a mother and her baby in
a drive-by shooting, which he described with more pride than
remorse. Driving in a car with Leon Bing, who was writing a book
about the Los Angeles gangs the Crips and the Bloods, Faro wants to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4fef1c964d82-0 | show off. Faro tells Bing he’s “gonna look crazy” at the “two dudes” in
the next car. As Bing recounts the exchange:
The driver, sensing that someone is looking at him, glances over at my car. His eyes
connect with Faro’s, widen for an instant. Then he breaks the contact, looks down,
looks away. And there is no mistaking what I saw there in his eyes: It was fear.
Faro demonstrates the look he flashed at the next car for Bing:
He looks straight at me and everything about his face shifts and changes, as if by some
trick of time-lapse photography. It becomes a nightmare face, and it is a scary thing to
see. It tells you that if you return his stare, if you challenge this kid, you’d better be
able to stand your ground. His look tells you that he doesn’t care about anything, not
your life and not his.
19
Of course, in behavior as complex as crime, there are many
plausible explanations that do not evoke a biological basis. One might
be that a perverse kind of emotional skill—intimidating other people
—has survival value in violent neighborhoods, as might turning to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4fef1c964d82-1 | crime; in these cases too much empathy might be counterproductive.
Indeed, an opportunistic lack of empathy may be a “virtue” in many
roles in life, from “bad cop” police interrogator to corporate raider.
Men who have been torturers for terrorist states, for example, describe
how they learned to dissociate from the feelings of their victims in
order to do their “job.” There are many routes to manipulativeness.
One of the more ominous ways this absence of empathy may
display itself was discovered by accident in a study of the most vicious
of wife batterers. The research revealed a physiological anomaly
among many of the most violent husbands, who regularly beat up
their wives or threaten them with
knives or guns: the husbands do so
in a cold, calculating state rather than while being carried away by
the heat of fury.
20
As their anger mounts, the anomaly emerges: their
heart rate
drops
, instead of climbing higher, as is ordinarily the case
with mounting fury. This means they are growing physiologically
calmer, even as they get more belligerent and abusive. Their violence | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4fef1c964d82-2 | appears to be a calculated act of terrorism, a method for controlling
their wives by instilling fear.
These coolly brutal husbands are a breed apart from most other
men who batter their wives. For one, they are far more likely to be
violent outside the marriage as well, getting into bar fights and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
519102e976ea-0 | battling with coworkers and other family members. And while most
men who become violent with their wives do so impulsively, out of
rage after feeling rejected or jealous, or out of fear of abandonment,
these calculating batterers will strike out at their wives seemingly for
no reason at all—and once they start, nothing she does, including
trying to leave, seems to restrain their violence.
Some researchers who study criminal psychopaths suspect their
cold manipulativeness, such absence of empathy or caring, can
sometimes stem from a neural defect.
*
A possible physiological basis
of heartless psychopathy has been shown in two ways, both of which
suggest the involvement of neural pathways to the limbic brain. In
one, people’s brain waves are measured as they try to decipher words
that have been scrambled. The words are flashed very quickly, for just
a tenth of a second or so. Most people react differently to emotional
words such as
kill
than to neutral words such as
chair:
they can decide
more quickly if the emotional word was scrambled, and their brains
show a distinctive wave pattern in response to the emotional words, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
519102e976ea-1 | show a distinctive wave pattern in response to the emotional words,
but not the neutral ones. But psychopaths have neither of these
responses: their brains do not show the distinctive pattern in response
to the emotional words, and they do not respond more quickly to
them, suggesting a disruption in circuits between the verbal cortex,
which recognizes the word, and the limbic brain, which attaches
feeling to it.
Robert Hare, the University of British Columbia psychologist who
has done this research, interprets these results as meaning that
psychopaths have a shallow understanding of emotional words, a
reflection of their more general shallowness in the affective realm.
The callousness of psychopaths, Hare believes, is based in part on
another physiological pattern he discovered in earlier research, one
that also suggests an irregularity in the workings of the amygdala and
related circuits: psychopaths about to receive an electrical shock show
no sign of the fear response that is normal in people about to
experience pain.
21
Because the prospect of pain does not trigger a
surge of anxiety, Hare contends that psychopaths lack concern about
future punishment for what they do. And because they themselves do | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
519102e976ea-2 | not feel fear, they have no empathy—or compassion—for the fear and
pain of their victims.
*
A note of caution: If there are biological patterns at play in some kinds of criminality—such
as a neural defect in empathy—that does not argue that all criminals are biologically flawed,
or that there is some biological marker for crime. A controversy has raged on this issue, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
178b3f01bac9-0 | the best consensus is that there is no such biological marker, and certainly no “criminal
gene.” Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases, that does not
mean all who have it will drift to crime; most will not. A lack of empathy should be factored
in with all the other psychological, economic, and social forces that contribute to a vector
toward criminality. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
34c05ab8c08b-0 | 8
The Social Arts
As so often happens to five-year-olds with younger siblings, Len has
lost all patience with Jay, his two-and-a-half-year-old brother, who is
making a mess of the Lego blocks they’ve been playing with. Carried
away by a wave of rage, Len bites Jay, who breaks into tears. Their
mother, hearing Jay’s pained yelp, bustles over and scolds Len,
ordering him to put away those objects of contention, the Lego blocks.
At this—what surely must seem a gross miscarriage of justice—Len
bursts out crying. Still peeved, his mother refuses to console him.
But Len is proffered comfort from an unlikely source: Jay, who,
although the original injured party, is now so concerned by his older
brother’s tears that he undertakes a campaign to calm Len down. The
exchange goes something like this:
1
“Len, don’t,” Jay implores. “Stop crying, mate. Stop it crying.”
But Len still cries. His direct plea a failure, Jay beseeches their
mother on Len’s behalf: “Len crying, Mummy! Len crying. Look. Me
show you. Len crying.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
34c05ab8c08b-1 | show you. Len crying.”
And then, turning to Len, Jay adopts a mothering mode, patting his
weeping brother as he reassures him in soothing tones, “Look, Len. No
go on crying.”
Len’s sobs continue, despite the comforting. So Jay turns to another
tactic, lending a helping hand in putting away the Lego blocks in their
bag, with a friendly, “Ah, Len. I put it back for Lennie, hey?”
Even so, the tears continue. The ever-ingenious Jay tries yet another
strategy, distraction. Showing his brother a toy car, Jay tries to draw
his attention away from the minor tragedy that has just befallen him.
“There’s this man in here. What’s this, Len? What’s this, Len?”
Len takes no interest. He’s inconsolable; his tears know no end.
Losing her patience with him, his mother resorts to that classic
parental threat, “Do you want me to smack you?” to which Len
responds with a wavering, “No.”
“Then just stop it, please,” says his mother firmly, if a bit
exasperatedly. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a05238eb0aa0-0 | Through his sobs, Len manages a pathetic, gasping, “I’m trying to.”
Which prompts Jay’s final stratagem: borrowing his mother’s
firmness and voice of authority, he threatens, “Stop crying, Len.
Smack your bottom!”
This microdrama reveals the remarkable emotional sophistication
that a toddler of just thirty months can bring to bear in trying to
manage someone else’s emotions. In his urgent attempts to soothe his
brother, Jay is able to draw on a large repertoire of tactics, ranging
from a simple plea, to seeking an ally in his mother (no help, she), to
physically comforting him, to lending a helping hand, to distraction,
threats, and direct commands. No doubt Jay relies on an arsenal that
has been tried with him in his own moments of distress. No matter.
What counts is that he can readily put them to use in a pinch even at
this very young age.
Of course, as every parent of young children knows, Jay’s display of
empathy and soothing is by no means universal. It is perhaps as likely
that a child his age will see a sibling’s upset as a chance for
vengeance, and so do whatever it takes to make the upset even worse. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a05238eb0aa0-1 | The same skills can be used to tease or torment a sibling. But even
that mean-spiritedness bespeaks the emergence of a crucial emotional
aptitude: the ability to know another’s feelings and to act in a way
that further shapes those feelings. Being able to manage emotions in
someone else is the core of the art of handling relationships.
To manifest such interpersonal power, toddlers must first reach a
benchmark of self-control, the beginnings of the capacity to damp
down their own anger and distress, their impulses and excitement—
even if that ability usually falters. Attunement to others demands a
modicum of calm in oneself. Tentative signs of this ability to manage
their own emotions emerge around this same period: toddlers begin to
be able to wait without wailing, to argue or cajole to get their way
rather than using brute force—even if they don’t always choose to use
this ability Patience emerges as an alternative to tantrums, at least
occasionally. And signs of empathy emerge by age two; it was Jay’s
empathy, the root of compassion, that drove him to try so hard to
cheer up his sobbing brother, Len. Thus handling emotions in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a05238eb0aa0-2 | someone else—the fine art of relationships—requires the ripeness of
two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy.
With this base, the “people skills” ripen. These are the social
competences
that make for effectiveness in dealings with others;
deficits here lead to ineptness in the social world or repeated | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c9c785f5dee5-0 | interpersonal disasters. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of these skills
that can cause even the intellectually brightest to founder in their
relationships, coming off as arrogant, obnoxious, or insensitive. These
social abilities allow one to shape an encounter, to mobilize and
inspire others, to thrive in intimate relationships, to persuade and
influence, to put others at ease.
SHOW SOME EMOTION
One key social competence is how well or poorly people express their
own feelings. Paul Ekman uses the term
display rules
for the social
consensus about which feelings can be properly shown when. Cultures
sometimes vary tremendously in this regard. For example, Ekman and
colleagues in Japan studied the facial reactions of students to a
horrific film about ritual circumcisions of teenage Aborigines. When
the Japanese students watched the film with an authority figure
present, their faces showed only the slightest hints of reaction. But
when they thought they were alone (though they were being taped by
a secret camera) their faces twisted into vivid mixes of anguished
distress, dread, and disgust.
There are several basic kinds of display rules.
2
One is
minimizing
the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c9c785f5dee5-1 | 2
One is
minimizing
the
show of emotion—this is the Japanese norm for feelings of distress in
the presence of someone in authority, which the students were
following when they masked their upset with a poker face. Another is
exaggerating
what one feels by magnifying the emotional expression;
this is the ploy used by the six-year-old who dramatically twists her
face into a pathetic frown, lips quivering, as she runs to complain to
her mother about being teased by her older brother. A third is
substituting
one feeling for another; this comes into play in some Asian
cultures where it is impolite to say no, and positive (but false)
assurances are given instead. How well one employs these strategies,
and knows when to do so, is one factor in emotional intelligence.
We learn these display rules very early, partly by explicit
instruction. An education in display rules is imparted when we
instruct a child not to seem disappointed, but to smile and say thank
you instead, when Grandpa has given a dreadful but well-meant
birthday present. This education in display rules, though, is more
often through modeling: children learn to do what they see done. In | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c9c785f5dee5-2 | educating the sentiments, emotions are both the medium and the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
74505f626c7c-0 | message. If a child is told to “smile and say thank you” by a parent
who is,
at that moment, harsh, demanding, and cold—who hisses the
message instead of warmly whispering it—the child is more likely to
learn a very different lesson, and in fact respond to Grandpa with a
frown and a curt, flat “Thank you.” The effect on Grandpa is very
different: in the first case he’s happy (though misled); in the second
he’s hurt by the mixed message.
Emotional displays, of course, have immediate consequences in the
impact they make on the person who receives them. The rule being
learned by the child is something like, “Mask your real feelings when
they will hurt someone you love; substitute a phony, but less hurtful
feeling instead.” Such rules for expressing emotions are more than
part of the lexicon of social propriety; they dictate how our own
feelings impact on everyone else. To follow these rules well is to have
optimal impact; to do so poorly is to foment emotional havoc.
Actors, of course, are artists of the emotional display; their
expressiveness is what evokes response in their audience. And, no | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
74505f626c7c-1 | expressiveness is what evokes response in their audience. And, no
doubt, some of us come into life as natural actors. But partly because
the lessons we learn about display rules vary according to the models
we’ve had, people differ greatly in their adeptness.
EXPRESSIVENESS AND EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
It was early in the Vietnam War, and an American platoon was
hunkered down in some rice paddies, in the heat of a firefight with
the Vietcong. Suddenly a line of six monks started walking along the
elevated berms that separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and
poised, the monks walked directly toward the line of fire.
“They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight
through,” recalls David Busch, one of the American soldiers. “It was
really strange, because nobody shot at ’em. And after they walked
over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel
like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have
been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just
stopped fighting.”
3
The power of the monks’ quietly courageous calm to pacify soldiers | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
74505f626c7c-2 | in the heat of battle illustrates a basic principle of social life: Emotions
are contagious. To be sure, this tale marks an extreme. Most
emotional contagion is far more subtle, part of a tacit exchange that | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3c7d21a105cf-0 | happens in every encounter. We transmit and catch moods from each
other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in
which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.
This emotional
exchange is typically at a subtle, almost imperceptible level; the way a
salesperson says thank you can leave us feeling ignored, resented, or
genuinely welcomed and appreciated. We catch feelings from one
another as though they were some kind of social virus.
We send emotional signals in every encounter, and those signals
affect those we are with. The more adroit we are socially, the better
we control the signals we send; the reserve of polite society is, after
all, simply a means to ensure that no disturbing emotional leakage
will unsettle the encounter (a social rule that, when brought into the
domain of intimate relationships, is stifling). Emotional intelligence
includes managing this exchange; “popular” and “charming” are terms
we use for people whom we like to be with because their emotional
skills make us feel good. People who are able to help others soothe
their feelings have an especially valued social commodity; they are
the souls others turn to when in greatest emotional need. We are all | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3c7d21a105cf-1 | part of each other’s tool kit for emotional change, for better or for
worse.
Consider a remarkable demonstration of the subtlety with which
emotions pass from one person to another. In a simple experiment two
volunteers filled out a checklist about their moods at the moment,
then simply sat facing each other quietly while waiting for an
experimenter to return to the room. Two minutes later she came back
and asked them to fill out a mood checklist again. The pairs were
purposely composed of one partner who was highly expressive of
emotion and one who was deadpan. Invariably the mood of the one
who was more expressive of emotions had been transferred to the
more passive partner.
4
How does this magical transmission occur? The most likely answer
is that we unconsciously imitate the emotions we see displayed by
someone else, through an out-of-awareness motor mimicry of their
facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, and other nonverbal markers
of emotion. Through this imitation people re-create in themselves the
mood of the other person—a low-key version of the Stanislavsky
method, in which actors recall gestures, movements, and other
expressions of an emotion they have felt strongly in the past in order | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3c7d21a105cf-2 | to evoke those feelings once again.
The day-to-day imitation of feeling is ordinarily quite subtle. Ulf | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c5e24b69386c-0 | Dimberg, a Swedish researcher at the University of Uppsala, found
that when people view a smiling or angry face, their own faces show
evidence of that same mood through slight changes in the facial
muscles. The changes are evident through electronic sensors but are
typically not visible to the naked eye.
When two people interact, the direction of mood transfer is from
the one
who is more forceful in expressing feelings to the one who is
more passive. But some people are particularly susceptible to
emotional contagion; their innate sensitivity makes their autonomic
nervous system (a marker of emotional activity) more easily triggered.
This lability seems to make them more impressionable; sentimental
commercials can move them to tears, while a quick chat with
someone who is feeling cheerful can buoy them (it also may make
them more empathic, since they are more readily moved by someone
else’s feelings).
John Cacioppo, the social psychophysiologist at Ohio State
University who has studied this subtle emotional exchange, observes,
“Just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood,
whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c5e24b69386c-1 | whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This
happens to us all the time—there’s a dance, a synchrony, a
transmission of emotions. This mood synchrony determines whether
you feel an interaction went well or not.”
The degree of emotional rapport people feel in an encounter is
mirrored by how tightly orchestrated their physical movements are as
they talk—an index of closeness that is typically out of awareness.
One person nods just as the other makes a point, or both shift in their
chairs at the same moment, or one leans forward as the other moves
back. The orchestration can be as subtle as both people rocking in
swivel chairs at the same rhythm. Just as Daniel Stern found in
watching the synchrony between attuned mothers and their infants,
the same reciprocity links the movements of people who feel
emotional rapport.
This synchrony seems to facilitate the sending and receiving of
moods, even if the moods are negative. For example, in one study of
physical synchrony, women who were depressed came to a laboratory
with their romantic partners, and discussed a problem in their
relationship. The more synchrony between the partners at the
nonverbal level, the worse the depressed women’s partners felt after | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c5e24b69386c-2 | the discussion—they had caught their girlfriends’ bad moods.
5
In
short, whether people feel upbeat or down, the more physically | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7955f0125403-0 | attuned their encounter, the more similar their moods will become.
The synchrony between teachers and students indicates how much
rapport they feel; studies in classrooms show that the closer the
movement coordination between teacher and student, the more they
felt friendly, happy, enthused, interested, and easygoing while
interacting. In general, a high level of synchrony in an interaction
means the people involved like each other. Frank Bernieri, the Oregon
State University psychologist who did these studies, told me, “How
awkward or comfortable you feel with someone is at
some level
physical. You need to have compatible timing, to coordinate your
movements, to feel comfortable. Synchrony reflects the depth of
engagement between the partners; if you’re highly engaged, your
moods begin to mesh, whether positive or negative.”
In short, coordination of moods is the essence of rapport, the adult
version of the attunement a mother has with her infant. One
determinant of interpersonal effectiveness, Cacioppo proposes, is how
deftly people carry out this emotional synchrony. If they are adept at
attuning to people’s moods, or can easily bring others under the sway
of their own, then their interactions will go more smoothly at the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7955f0125403-1 | emotional level. The mark of a powerful leader or performer is being
able to move an audience of thousands in this way. By the same
token, Cacioppo points out that people who are poor at receiving and
sending emotions are prone to problems in their relationships, since
people often feel uncomfortable with them, even if they can’t
articulate just why this is so.
Setting the emotional tone of an interaction is, in a sense, a sign of
dominance at a deep and intimate level: it means driving the
emotional state of the other person. This power to determine emotion
is akin to what is called in biology a
Zeitgeber
(literally, “time-
grabber”), a process (such as the day-night cycle or the monthly
phases of the moon) that entrains biological rhythms. For a couple
dancing, the music is a bodily zeitgeber. When it comes to personal
encounters, the person who has the more forceful expressivity—or the
most power—is typically the one whose emotions entrain the other.
Dominant partners talk more, while the subordinate partner watches
the other’s face more—a setup for the transmission of affect. By the
same token, the forcefulness of a good speaker—a politician or an
evangelist, say—works to entrain the emotions of the audience.
6
That | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7955f0125403-2 | 6
That
is what we mean by, “He had them in the palm of his hand.”
Emotional entrainment is the heart of influence. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60e729f10b38-0 | THE RUDIMENTS OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
It’s recess at a preschool, and a band of boys is running across the
grass. Reggie trips, hurts his knee, and starts crying, but the other
boys keep right on running—save for Roger, who stops. As Reggie’s
sobs subside Roger reaches down and rubs his own knee, calling out,
“I hurt my knee, too!”
Roger is cited as having exemplary interpersonal intelligence by
Thomas Hatch, a colleague of Howard Gardner at Spectrum, the
school based on the concept of multiple intelligences.
7
Roger, it
seems, is unusually adept at
recognizing the feelings of his playmates
and making rapid, smooth connections with them. It was only Roger
who noticed Reggie’s plight and pain, and only Roger who tried to
provide some solace, even if all he could offer was rubbing his own
knee. This small gesture bespeaks a talent for rapport, an emotional
skill essential for the preservation of close relationships, whether in a
marriage, a friendship, or a business partnership. Such skills in
preschoolers are the buds of talents that ripen through life.
Roger’s talent represents one of four separate abilities that Hatch | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60e729f10b38-1 | Roger’s talent represents one of four separate abilities that Hatch
and Gardner identify as components of interpersonal intelligence:
•
Organizing groups
—the essential skill of the leader, this involves
initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people. This is
the talent seen in theater directors or producers, in military officers,
and in effective heads of organizations and units of all kinds. On the
playground, this is the child who takes the lead in deciding what
everyone will play, or becomes team captain.
•
Negotiating solutions
—the talent of the mediator, preventing
conflicts or resolving those that flare up. People who have this ability
excel in deal-making, in arbitrating or mediating disputes; they might
have a career in diplomacy, in arbitration or law, or as middlemen or
managers of takeovers. These are the kids who settle arguments on
the playing field.
•
Personal connection
—Roger’s talent, that of empathy and
connecting. This makes it easy to enter into an encounter or to
recognize and respond fittingly to people’s feelings and concerns—the
art of relationship. Such people make good “team players,”
dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
60e729f10b38-2 | dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business
world they do well as salespeople or managers, or can be excellent
teachers. Children like Roger get along well with virtually everyone | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c861c0b853a-0 | else, easily enter into playing with them, and are happy doing so.
These children tend to be best at reading emotions from facial
expressions and are most liked by their classmates.
•
Social analysis
—being able to detect and have insights about
people’s feelings, motives, and concerns. This knowledge of how
others feel can lead to an easy intimacy or sense of rapport. At its
best, this ability makes one a competent therapist or counselor—or, if
combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or dramatist.
Taken together, these skills are the stuff of interpersonal polish, the
necessary ingredients for charm, social success, even charisma. Those
who are adept in social intelligence can connect with people quite
smoothly, be astute in reading their reactions and feelings, lead and
organize, and handle
the disputes that are bound to flare up in any
human activity. They are the natural leaders, the people who can
express the unspoken collective sentiment and articulate it so as to
guide a group toward its goals. They are the kind of people others like
to be with because they are emotionally nourishing—they leave other
people in a good mood, and evoke the comment, “What a pleasure to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c861c0b853a-1 | be around someone like that.”
These interpersonal abilities build on other emotional intelligences.
People who make an excellent social impression, for example, are
adept at monitoring their own expression of emotion, are keenly
attuned to the ways others are reacting, and so are able to continually
fine-tune their social performance, adjusting it to make sure they are
having the desired effect. In that sense, they are like skilled actors.
However, if these interpersonal abilities are not balanced by an
astute sense of one’s own needs and feelings and how to fulfill them,
they can lead to a hollow social success—a popularity won at the cost
of one’s true satisfaction. Such is the argument of Mark Snyder, a
University of Minnesota psychologist who has studied people whose
social skills make them first-rate social chameleons, champions at
making a good impression.
8
Their psychological credo might well be a
remark by W. H. Auden, who said that his private image of himself “is
very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of
others in order that they may love me.” That trade-off can be made if
social skills outstrip the ability to know and honor one’s own feelings: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c861c0b853a-2 | in order to be loved—or at least liked—the social chameleon will
seem to be whatever those he is with seem to want. The sign that
someone falls into this pattern, Snyder finds, is that they make an | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1837be5ab222-0 | excellent impression, yet have few stable or satisfying intimate
relationships. A more healthy pattern, of course, is to balance being
true to oneself with social skills, using them with integrity.
Social chameleons, though, don’t mind in the least saying one thing
and doing another, if that will win them social approval. They simply
live with the discrepancy between their public face and their private
reality. Helena Deutsch, a psychoanalyst, called such people the “as-if
personality,” shifting personas with remarkable plasticity as they pick
up signals from those around them. “For some people,” Snyder told
me, “the public and private person meshes well, while for others there
seems to be only a kaleidoscope of changing appearances. They are
like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, madly trying to fit in with
whomever they are with.”
Such people try to scan someone for a hint as to what is wanted
from them before they make a response, rather than simply saying
what they
truly feel. To get along and be liked, they are willing to
make people they dislike think they are friendly with them. And they
use their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate social | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1837be5ab222-1 | use their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate social
situations demand, so that they may act like very different people
depending on whom they are with, swinging from bubbly sociability,
say, to reserved withdrawal. To be sure, to the extent that these traits
lead to effective impression management, they are highly prized in
certain professions, notably acting, trial law, sales, diplomacy, and
politics.
Another, perhaps more crucial kind of self-monitoring seems to
make the difference between those who end up as anchorless social
chameleons, trying to impress everyone, and those who can use their
social polish more in keeping with their true feelings. That is the
capacity to be true, as the saying has it, “to thine own self,” which
allows acting in accord with one’s deepest feelings and values no
matter what the social consequences. Such emotional integrity could
well lead to, say, deliberately provoking a confrontation in order to
cut through duplicity or denial—a clearing of the air that a social
chameleon would never attempt.
THE MAKING OF
A SOCIAL INCOMPETENT
There was no doubt Cecil was bright; he was a college-trained expert | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1837be5ab222-2 | in foreign languages, superb at translating. But there were crucial | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
10f8f62d572a-0 | ways in which he was completely inept. Cecil seemed to lack the
simplest social skills. He would muff a casual conversation over
coffee, and fumble when having to pass the time of day; in short, he
seemed incapable of the most routine social exchange. Because his
lack of social grace was most profound when he was around women,
Cecil came to therapy wondering if perhaps he had “homosexual
tendencies of an underlying nature,” as he put it, though he had no
such fantasies.
The real problem, Cecil confided to his therapist, was that he feared
that nothing he could say would be of any interest to anybody. This
underlying fear only compounded a profound paucity of social graces.
His nervousness during encounters led him to snicker and laugh at the
most awkward moments, even though he failed to laugh when
someone said something genuinely funny. Cecil’s awkwardness, he
confided to his therapist, went back to childhood; all his life he had
felt socially at ease only when he was with his older brother, who
somehow helped ease things for him. But once he left home, his | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
10f8f62d572a-1 | ineptitude was overwhelming; he was socially paralyzed.
The tale is told by Lakin Phillips, a psychologist at George
Washington University, who proposes that Cecil’s plight stems from a
failure to learn in childhood the most elementary lessons of social
interaction:
What could Cecil have been taught earlier? To speak directly to others when spoken to;
to initiate social contact, not always wait for others; to carry on a conversation, not
simply fall back on yes or no or other one-word replies; to express gratitude toward
others, to let another person walk before one in passing through a door; to wait until
one is served something … to thank others, to say “please,” to share, and all the other
elementary interactions we begin to teach children from age 2 onward.
9
Whether Cecil’s deficiency was due to another’s failure to teach him
such rudiments of social civility or to his own inability to learn is
unclear. But whatever its roots, Cecil’s story is instructive because it
points up the crucial nature of the countless lessons children get in
interaction synchrony and the unspoken rules of social harmony. The
net effect of failing to follow these rules is to create waves, to make | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
10f8f62d572a-2 | those around us uncomfortable. The function of these rules, of course,
is to keep everyone involved in a social exchange at ease;
awkwardness spawns anxiety. People who lack these skills are inept
not just at social niceties, but at handling the emotions of those they | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3908262cba21-0 | encounter; they inevitably leave disturbance in their wake.
We all have known Cecils, people with an annoying lack of social
graces—people who don’t seem to know when to end a conversation
or phone call and who keep on talking, oblivious to all cues and hints
to say good-bye; people whose conversation centers on themselves all
the time, without the least interest in anyone else, and who ignore
tentative attempts to refocus on another topic; people who intrude or
ask “nosy” questions. These derailments of a smooth social trajectory
all bespeak a deficit in the rudimentary building blocks of interaction.
Psychologists have coined the term
dyssemia
(from the Greek
dys-
for “difficulty” and
semes
for “signal”) for what amounts to a learning
disability in the realm of nonverbal messages; about one in ten
children has one or more problems in this realm.
10
The problem can
be in a poor sense of personal space, so that a child stands too close
while talking or spreads their belongings into other people’s territory;
in interpreting or using body language poorly; in misinterpreting or
misusing facial expressions by, say, failing to make eye contact; or in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3908262cba21-1 | a poor sense of prosody, the emotional quality of speech, so that they
talk too shrilly or flatly.
Much research has focused on spotting children who show signs of
social
deficiency, children whose awkwardness makes them neglected
or rejected by their playmates. Apart from children who are spurned
because they are bullies, those whom other children avoid are
invariably deficient in the rudiments of face-to-face interaction,
particularly the unspoken rules that govern encounters. If children do
poorly in language, people assume they are not very bright or poorly
educated; but when they do poorly in the nonverbal rules of
interaction, people—especially playmates—see them as “strange,” and
avoid them. These are the children who don’t know how to join a
game gracefully, who touch others in ways that make for discomfort
rather than camaraderie—in short, who are “off.” They are children
who have failed to master the silent language of emotion, and who
unwittingly send messages that create uneasiness.
As Stephen Nowicki, an Emory University psychologist who studies
children’s nonverbal abilities, put it, “Children who can’t read or
express emotions well constantly feel frustrated. In essence, they don’t | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3908262cba21-2 | understand what’s going on. This kind of communication is a constant
subtext of everything you do; you can’t stop showing your facial
expression or posture, or hide your tone of voice. If you make
mistakes in what emotional messages you send, you constantly | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
91187db36ff5-0 | experience that people react to you in funny ways—you get rebuffed
and don’t know why. If you’re thinking you’re acting happy but
actually seem too hyper or angry, you find other kids getting angry at
you in turn, and you don’t realize why. Such kids end up feeling no
sense of control over how other people treat them, that their actions
have no impact on what happens to them. It leaves them feeling
powerless, depressed, and apathetic.”
Apart from becoming social isolates, such children also suffer
academically. The classroom, of course, is as much a social situation
as an academic one; the socially awkward child is as likely to misread
and misrespond to a teacher as to another child. The resulting anxiety
and bewilderment can themselves interfere with their ability to learn
effectively. Indeed, as tests of children’s nonverbal sensitivity have
shown, those who misread emotional cues tend to do poorly in school
compared to their academic potential as reflected in IQ tests.
11
“WE HATE YOU”: AT THE THRESHOLD
Social ineptitude is perhaps most painful and explicit when it comes
to one of the more perilous moments in the life of a young child: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
91187db36ff5-1 | being on the edge of a group at play you want to join. It is a moment
of peril, one when being liked
or hated, belonging or not, is made all
too public. For that reason that crucial moment has been the subject
of intense scrutiny by students of child development, revealing a stark
contrast in approach strategies used by popular children and by social
outcasts. The findings highlight just how crucial it is for social
competence to notice, interpret, and respond to emotional and
interpersonal cues. While it is poignant to see a child hover on the
edge of others at play, wanting to join in but being left out, it is a
universal predicament. Even the most popular children are sometimes
rejected—a study of second and third graders found that 26 percent of
the time the most well liked children were rebuffed when they tried to
enter a group already at play.
Young children are brutally candid about the emotional judgment
implicit in such rejections. Witness the following dialogue from four-
year-olds in a preschool.
12
Linda wants to join Barbara, Nancy, and
Bill, who are playing with toy animals and building blocks. She
watches for a minute, then makes her approach, sitting next to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
91187db36ff5-2 | Barbara and starting to play with the animals. Barbara turns to her | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
41a53b4b65af-0 | and says, “You can’t play!”
“Yes, I can,” Linda counters. “I can have some animals, too.”
“No, you can’t,” Barbara says bluntly. “We don’t like you today.”
When Bill protests on Linda’s behalf, Nancy joins the attack: “We
hate her today.”
Because of the danger of being told, either explicitly or implicitly,
“We hate you,” all children are understandably cautious on the
threshold of approaching a group. That anxiety, of course, is probably
not much different from that felt by a grown-up at a cocktail party
with strangers who hangs back from a happily chatting group who
seem to be intimate friends. Because this moment at the threshold of a
group is so momentous for a child, it is also, as one researcher put it,
“highly diagnostic … quickly revealing differences in social
skillfulness.”
13
Typically, newcomers simply watch for a time, then join in very
tentatively at first, being more assertive only in very cautious steps.
What matters most for whether a child is accepted or not is how well
he or she is able to enter into the group’s frame of reference, sensing
what kind of play is in flow, what out of place. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
41a53b4b65af-1 | what kind of play is in flow, what out of place.
The two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejection are trying
to take the lead too soon and being out of synch with the frame of
reference. But this is exactly what unpopular children tend to do: they
push their way into a group, trying to change the subject too abruptly
or too soon, or offering their own opinions, or simply disagreeing with
the others right away—all apparent attempts to draw attention to
themselves. Paradoxically, this results in
their being ignored or
rejected. By contrast, popular children spend time observing the group
to understand what’s going on before entering in, and then do
something that shows they accept it; they wait to have their status in
the group confirmed before taking initiative in suggesting what the
group should do.
Let’s return to Roger, the four-year-old whom Thomas Hatch
spotted exhibiting a high level of interpersonal intelligence.
14
Roger’s
tactic for entering a group was first to observe, then to imitate what
another child was doing, and finally to talk to the child and fully join
the activity—a winning strategy. Roger’s skill was shown, for
instance, when he and Warren were playing at putting “bombs” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
41a53b4b65af-2 | (actually pebbles) in their socks. Warren asks Roger if he wants to be
in a helicopter or an airplane. Roger asks, before committing himself,
“Are you in a helicopter?” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
233b310f7abc-0 | This seemingly innocuous moment reveals sensitivity to others’
concerns, and the ability to act on that knowledge in a way that
maintains the connection. Hatch comments about Roger, “He ‘checks
in’ with his playmate so that they and their play remain connected. I
have watched many other children who simply get in their own
helicopters or planes and, literally and figuratively, fly away from
each other.”
EMOTIONAL BRILLIANCE: A CASE
REPORT
If the test of social skill is the ability to calm distressing emotions in
others, then handling someone at the peak of rage is perhaps the
ultimate measure of mastery. The data on self-regulation of anger and
emotional contagion suggest that one effective strategy might be to
distract the angry person, empathize with his feelings and perspective,
and then draw him into an alternative focus, one that attunes him
with a more positive range of feeling—a kind of emotional judo.
Such refined skill in the fine art of emotional influence is perhaps
best exemplified by a story told by an old friend, the late Terry
Dobson, who in the 1950s was one of the first Americans ever to
study the martial art aikido in Japan. One afternoon he was riding | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
233b310f7abc-1 | home on a suburban Tokyo train when a huge, bellicose, and very
drunk and begrimed laborer got on. The man, staggering, began
terrorizing the passengers: screaming curses, he took a swing at a
woman holding a baby, sending her sprawling in the laps of an elderly
couple, who then jumped up and joined a stampede to the other end
of the car. The drunk, taking a few other swings (and, in his rage,
missing),
grabbed the metal pole in the middle of the car with a roar
and tried to tear it out of its socket.
At that point Terry, who was in peak physical condition from daily
eight-hour aikido workouts, felt called upon to intervene, lest
someone get seriously hurt. But he recalled the words of his teacher:
“Aikido is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has
broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate
people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not
how to start it.”
Indeed, Terry had agreed upon beginning lessons with his teacher
never to pick a fight, and to use his martial-arts skills only in defense.
Now, at last, he saw his chance to test his aikido abilities in real life, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7ef76c2703ac-0 | in what was clearly a legitimate opportunity. So, as all the other
passengers sat frozen in their seats, Terry stood up, slowly and with
deliberation.
Seeing him, the drunk roared, “Aha! A foreigner! You need a lesson
in Japanese manners!” and began gathering himself to take on Terry.
But just as the drunk was on the verge of making his move,
someone gave an earsplitting, oddly joyous shout: “Hey!”
The shout had the cheery tone of someone who has suddenly come
upon a fond friend. The drunk, surprised, spun around to see a tiny
Japanese man, probably in his seventies, sitting there in a kimono.
The old man beamed with delight at the drunk, and beckoned him
over with a light wave of his hand and a lilting “C’mere.”
The drunk strode over with a belligerent, “Why the hell should I
talk to you?” Meanwhile, Terry was ready to fell the drunk in a
moment if he made the least violent move.
“What’cha been drinking?” the old man asked, his eyes beaming at
the drunken laborer.
“I been drinking sake, and it’s none of your business,” the drunk
bellowed. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7ef76c2703ac-1 | bellowed.
“Oh, that’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” the old man replied
in a warm tone. “You see, I love sake, too. Every night, me and my
wife (she’s seventy-six, you know), we warm up a little bottle of sake
and take it out into the garden, and we sit on an old wooden
bench …” He continued on about the persimmon tree in his backyard,
the fortunes of his garden, enjoying sake in the evening.
The drunk’s face began to soften as he listened to the old man; his
fists unclenched. “Yeah … I love persimmons, too …,” he said, his
voice trailing off.
“Yes,” the old man replied in a sprightly voice, “and I’m sure you
have a wonderful wife.”
“No,” said the laborer. “My wife died.…” Sobbing, he launched into
a sad tale of losing his wife, his home, his job, of being ashamed of
himself.
Just then the train came to Terry’s stop, and as he was getting off
he turned to hear the old man invite the drunk to join him and tell
him all about it, and to see the drunk sprawl along the seat, his head | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7ef76c2703ac-2 | in the old man’s lap.
That is emotional brilliance. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
de531c64316b-0 | PART THREE
EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
APPLIED | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
018e26b7a412-0 | 9
Intimate Enemies
To love and to work, Sigmund Freud once remarked to his disciple
Erik Erikson, are the twin capacities that mark full maturity. If that is
the case, then maturity may be an endangered way station in life—
and current trends in marriage and divorce make emotional
intelligence more crucial than ever.
Consider divorce rates. The rate
per year
of divorces has more or
less leveled off. But there is another way of calculating divorce rates,
one that suggests a perilous climb: looking at the odds that a given
newly married couple will have their marriage
eventually
end in
divorce. Although the overall rate of divorce has stopped climbing,
the
risk
of divorce has been shifting to newlyweds.
The shift gets clearer in comparing divorce rates for couples wed in
a given year. For American marriages that began in 1890, about 10
percent ended in divorce. For those wed in 1920, the rate was about
18 percent; for couples married in 1950, 30 percent. Couples that
were newly wed in 1970 had a fifty-fifty chance of splitting up or
staying together. And for married couples starting out in 1990, the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
018e26b7a412-1 | likelihood that the marriage would end in divorce was projected to be
close to a staggering 67 percent!
1
If the estimate holds, just three in
ten of recent newlyweds can count on staying married to their new
partner.
It can be argued that much of this rise is due not so much to a
decline in emotional intelligence as to the steady erosion of social
pressures—the stigma surrounding divorce, or the economic
dependence of wives on their husbands—that used to keep couples
together in even the most miserable of matches. But if social pressures
are no longer the glue that holds a marriage together, then the
emotional forces between wife and husband are that much more
crucial if their union is to survive.
These ties between husband and wife—and the emotional fault lines
that
can break them apart—have been assayed in recent years with a
precision never seen before. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c3cbca906b76-0 | understanding what holds a marriage together or tears it apart has
come from the use of sophisticated physiological measures that allow
the moment-to-moment tracking of the emotional nuances of a
couple’s encounter. Scientists are now able to detect a husband’s
otherwise invisible adrenaline surges and jumps in blood pressure,
and to observe fleeting but telling microemotions as they flit across a
wife’s face. These physiological measures reveal a hidden biological
subtext to a couple’s difficulties, a critical level of emotional reality
that is typically imperceptible to or disregarded by the couple
themselves. These measures lay bare the emotional forces that hold a
relationship together or destroy it. The fault lines have their earliest
beginnings in the differences between the emotional worlds of girls
and boys.
HIS MARRIAGE AND HERS: CHILDHOOD ROOTS
As I was entering a restaurant on a recent evening, a young man
stalked out the door, his face set in an expression both stony and
sullen. Close on his heels a young woman came running, her fists
desperately pummeling his back while she yelled, “Goddamn you!
Come back here and be nice to me!” That poignant, impossibly self- | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c3cbca906b76-1 | contradictory plea aimed at a retreating back epitomizes the pattern
most commonly seen in couples whose relationship is distressed: She
seeks to engage, he withdraws. Marital therapists have long noted that
by the time a couple finds their way to the therapy office they are in
this pattern of engage-withdraw, with his complaint about her
“unreasonable” demands and outbursts, and her lamenting his
indifference to what she is saying.
This marital endgame reflects the fact that there are, in effect, two
emotional realities in a couple, his and hers. The roots of these
emotional differences, while they may be partly biological, also can be
traced back to childhood, and to the separate emotional worlds boys
and girls inhabit while growing up. There is a vast amount of research
on these separate worlds, their barriers reinforced not just by the
different games boys and girls prefer, but by young children’s fear of
being teased for having a “girlfriend” or “boyfriend.”
2
One study of
children’s friendships found that three-year-olds say about half their
friends are of the opposite sex; for five-year-olds it’s about 20 percent,
and by age seven almost no boys or girls say they have a best friend of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0c471eee4749-0 | the opposite sex.
3
These separate social universes intersect little until
teenagers start dating.
Meanwhile, boys and girls are taught very different lessons about
handling emotions. Parents, in general, discuss emotions—with the
exception of anger—more with their daughters than their sons.
4
Girls
are exposed to more information about emotions than are boys: when
parents make up stories to tell their preschool children, they use more
emotion words when talking to daughters than to sons; when mothers
play with their infants, they display a wider range of emotions to
daughters than to sons; when mothers talk to daughters about
feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional state itself than
they do with their sons—though with the sons they go into more
detail about the causes and consequences of emotions like anger
(probably as a cautionary tale).
Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, who have summarized the research on
differences in emotions between the sexes, propose that because girls
develop facility with language more quickly than do boys, this leads
them to be more experienced at articulating their feelings and more
skilled than boys at using words to explore and substitute for
emotional reactions such as physical fights; in contrast, they note, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0c471eee4749-1 | “boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may
become largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in
themselves and in others.”
5
At age ten, roughly the same percent of girls as boys are overtly
aggressive, given to open confrontation when angered. But by age
thirteen, a telling difference between the sexes emerges: Girls become
more adept than boys at artful aggressive tactics like ostracism,
vicious gossip, and indirect vendettas. Boys, by and large, simply
continue being confrontational when angered, oblivious to these more
covert strategies.
6
This is just one of many ways that boys—and later,
men—are less sophisticated than the opposite sex in the byways of
emotional life.
When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate groups, with
an emphasis on minimizing hostility and maximizing cooperation,
while boys’ games are in larger groups, with an emphasis on
competition. One key difference can be seen in what happens when
games boys or girls are playing get disrupted by someone getting hurt.
If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is expected to get out of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0c471eee4749-2 | the way and stop crying so the game can go on. If the same happens
among a group of girls who are playing, the
game stops
while everyone | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d594640ab9d6-0 | gathers around to help the girl who is crying. This difference between
boys and girls at play epitomizes what Harvard’s Carol Gilligan points
to as a key disparity between the sexes: boys take pride in a lone,
tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves
as part of a web of connectedness. Thus boys are threatened by
anything that might challenge their independence, while girls are
more threatened by a rupture in their relationships. And, as Deborah
Tannen has pointed out in her book
You Just Don’t Understand
, these
differing perspectives mean that men and women want and expect
very different things out of a conversation, with men content to talk
about “things,” while women seek emotional connection.
In short, these contrasts in schooling in the emotions foster very
different skills, with girls becoming “adept at reading both verbal and
nonverbal emotional signals, at expressing and communicating their
feelings,” and boys becoming adept at “minimizing emotions having
to do with vulnerability, guilt, fear and hurt”.
7
Evidence for these
different stances is very strong in the scientific literature. Hundreds of
studies have found, for example, that on average women are more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d594640ab9d6-1 | empathic than men, at least as measured by the ability to read
someone else’s unstated feelings from facial expression, tone of voice,
and other nonverbal cues. Likewise, it is generally easier to read
feelings from a woman’s face than a man’s; while there is no
difference in facial expressiveness among very young boys and girls,
as they go through the elementary-school grades boys become less
expressive, girls more so. This may partly reflect another key
difference: women, on average, experience the entire range of
emotions with greater intensity and more volatility than men—in this
sense, women
are
more “emotional” than men.
8
All of this means that, in general, women come into a marriage
groomed for the role of emotional manager, while men arrive with
much less appreciation of the importance of this task for helping a
relationship survive. Indeed, the most important element for women—
but not for men—in satisfaction with their relationship reported in a
study of 264 couples was the sense that the couple has “good
communication.”
9
Ted Huston, a psychologist at the University of
Texas who has studied couples in depth, observes, “For the wives,
intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d594640ab9d6-2 | intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the
relationship itself. The men, by and large, don’t understand what the
wives want from them. They say, ‘I want to do things with her, and all
she wants to do is talk.’ ” During courtship, Huston found, men were | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a04267ad1753-0 | much more willing to spend time talking in ways that suited the wish
for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once married, as time went on
the men—especially in more traditional couples—spent less and less
time talking in this way with their wives, finding a sense of closeness
simply in doing things like gardening together rather than talking
things over.
This growing silence on the part of husbands may be partly due to
the fact that, if anything, men are a bit Pollyannaish about the state of
their marriage,
while their wives are attuned to the trouble spots: in
one study of marriages, men had a rosier view than their wives of just
about everything in their relationship—lovemaking, finances, ties
with in-laws, how well they listened to each other, how much their
flaws mattered.
10
Wives, in general, are more vocal about their
complaints than are their husbands, particularly among unhappy
couples. Combine men’s rosy view of marriage with their aversion to
emotional confrontations, and it is clear why wives so often complain
that their husbands try to wiggle out of discussing the troubling things
about their relationship. (Of course this gender difference is a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a04267ad1753-1 | about their relationship. (Of course this gender difference is a
generalization, and is not true in every case; a psychiatrist friend
complained that in his marriage his wife is reluctant to discuss
emotional matters between them, and he is the one who is left to
bring them up.)
The slowness of men to bring up problems in a relationship is no
doubt compounded by their relative lack of skill when it comes to
reading facial expressions of emotions. Women, for example, are more
sensitive to a sad expression on a man’s face than are men in detecting
sadness from a woman’s expression.
11
Thus a woman has to be all the
sadder for a man to notice her feelings in the first place, let alone for
him to raise the question of what is making her so sad.
Consider the implications of this emotional gender gap for how
couples handle the grievances and disagreements that any intimate
relationship inevitably spawns. In fact, specific issues such as how
often a couple has sex, how to discipline the children, or how much
debt and savings a couple feels comfortable with are not what make
or break a marriage. Rather, it is
how
a couple discusses such sore
points that matters more for the fate of their marriage. Simply having | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a04267ad1753-2 | reached an agreement about
how to
disagree is key to marital survival;
men and women have to overcome the innate gender differences in
approaching rocky emotions. Failing this, couples are vulnerable to
emotional rifts that eventually can tear their relationship apart. As we | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
56a9da709186-0 | shall see, these rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both
partners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence.
MARITAL FAULT LINE
Fred: Did you pick up my dry cleaning?
Ingrid: (In a mocking tone) “Did you pick up my dry cleaning.” Pick
up your own damn dry cleaning. What am I, your maid?
Fred: Hardly. If you were a maid, at least you’d know how to clean.
If this were dialogue from a sitcom, it might be amusing. But this
painfully caustic interchange was between a couple who (perhaps not
surprisingly) divorced within the next few years.
12
Their encounter
took place in a laboratory run by John Gottman, a University of
Washington psychologist who has done perhaps the most detailed
analysis ever of the emotional glue that binds couples together and
the corrosive feelings that can destroy marriages.
13
In his laboratory,
couples’ conversations are videotaped and then subjected to hours of
microanalysis designed to reveal the subterranean emotional currents
at play. This mapping of the fault lines that may lead a couple to
divorce makes a convincing case for the crucial role of emotional
intelligence in the survival of a marriage. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
56a9da709186-1 | intelligence in the survival of a marriage.
During the last two decades Gottman has tracked the ups and
downs of more than two hundred couples, some just newlyweds,
others married for decades. Gottman has charted the emotional
ecology of marriage with such precision that, in one study, he was
able to predict which couples seen in his lab (like Fred and Ingrid,
whose discussion of getting the dry cleaning was so acrimonious)
would divorce within three years with
94 percent accuracy
, a precision
unheard of in marital studies!
The power of Gottman’s analysis comes from his painstaking
method and the thoroughness of his probes. While the couples talk,
sensors record the slightest flux in their physiology; a second-by-
second analysis of their facial expressions (using the system for
reading emotions developed by Paul Ekman) detects the most fleeting
and subtle nuance of feeling. After their session, each partner comes
separately to the lab and watches a videotape of the conversation, and
narrates his or her secret thoughts during the heated moments of the
exchange. The result is akin to an emotional X-ray of the marriage. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8814b046ac2f-0 | An early warning signal that a marriage is in danger, Gottman finds,
is harsh criticism. In a healthy marriage husband and wife feel free to
voice a complaint. But too often in the heat of anger complaints are
expressed in a destructive fashion, as an attack on the spouse’s
character. For example, Pamela and her daughter went shoe shopping
while her husband, Tom, went to a bookstore. They agreed to meet in
front of the post office in an hour, and then go to a matinee. Pamela
was prompt, but there was no sign of Tom. “Where is he? The movie
starts in ten minutes,” Pamela complained to her daughter. “If there’s
a way for your father to screw something up, he will.”
When Tom showed up ten minutes later, happy about having run
into a friend and apologizing for being late, Pamela lashed out with
sarcasm:
“That’s okay—it gave us a chance to discuss your amazing
ability to screw up every single plan we make. You’re so thoughtless
and self-centered!”
Pamela’s complaint is more than that: it is a character assassination,
a critique of the person, not the deed. In fact, Tom had apologized. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8814b046ac2f-1 | But for this lapse Pamela brands him as “thoughtless and self-
centered.” Most couples have moments like this from time to time,
where a complaint about something a partner has done is voiced as an
attack against the person rather than the deed. But these harsh
personal criticisms have a far more corrosive emotional impact than
do more reasoned complaints. And such attacks, perhaps
understandably, become more likely the more a husband or wife feels
their complaints go unheard or ignored.
The differences between complaints and personal criticisms are
simple. In a complaint, a wife states specifically what is upsetting her,
and criticizes her husband’s
action
, not her husband, saying how it
made her feel: “When you forgot to pick up my clothes at the cleaner’s
it made me feel like you don’t care about me.” It is an expression of
basic emotional intelligence: assertive, not belligerent or passive. But
in a personal criticism she uses the specific grievance to launch a
global attack on her husband: “You’re always so selfish and uncaring.
It just proves I can’t trust you to do anything right.” This kind of
criticism leaves the person on the receiving end feeling ashamed, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8814b046ac2f-2 | criticism leaves the person on the receiving end feeling ashamed,
disliked, blamed, and defective—all of which are more likely to lead
to a defensive response than to steps to improve things.
All the more so when the criticism comes laden with contempt, a
particularly destructive emotion. Contempt comes easily with anger; it
is usually expressed not just in the words used, but also in a tone of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
95c88b1472a2-0 | voice and an angry expression. Its most obvious form, of course, is
mockery or insult—“jerk,” “bitch,” “wimp.” But just as hurtful is the
body language that conveys contempt, particularly the sneer or curled
lip that are the universal facial signals for disgust, or a rolling of the
eyes, as if to say, “Oh, brother!”
Contempt’s facial signature is a contraction of the “dimpler,” the
muscle that pulls the corners of the mouth to the side (usually the
left) while the eyes roll upward. When one spouse flashes this
expression, the other, in a tacit emotional exchange, registers a jump
in heart rate of two or three beats per minute. This hidden
conversation takes its toll; if a husband shows contempt regularly,
Gottman found, his wife will be more prone to a range of health
problems, from frequent colds and flus to bladder and yeast
infections, as well as gastrointestinal symptoms. And when a wife’s
face shows disgust, a near cousin of contempt, four or more times
within a fifteen-minute conversation, it is a silent sign that the couple
is likely to separate within four years.
Of course, an occasional show of contempt or disgust will not undo | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
95c88b1472a2-1 | a marriage. Rather, such emotional volleys are akin to smoking and
high cholesterol as risk factors for heart disease—the more intense
and prolonged, the greater the danger. On the road to divorce, one of
these factors predicts the next, in an escalating scale of misery.
Habitual criticism and contempt or disgust are danger signs because
they indicate that a husband or wife has made a silent judgment for
the worse about their partner. In his or her thoughts, the spouse is the
subject of constant condemnation. Such negative and hostile thinking
leads naturally to attacks that make the partner on the receiving end
defensive—or ready to counterattack in return.
The two arms of the fight-or-flight response each represent ways a
spouse can respond to an attack. The most obvious is to fight back,
lashing out in anger. That route typically ends in a fruitless shouting
match. But the alternative response, fleeing, can be more pernicious,
particularly when the “flight” is a retreat into stony silence.
Stonewalling is the ultimate defense. The stonewaller just goes
blank, in effect withdrawing from the conversation by responding
with a stony expression and silence. Stonewalling sends a powerful,
unnerving message, something like a combination of icy distance, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
95c88b1472a2-2 | unnerving message, something like a combination of icy distance,
superiority, and distaste. Stonewalling showed up mainly in marriages
that were heading for trouble; in 85 percent of these cases it was the
husband who stonewalled in response to a wife who attacked with | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d16ea231a5db-0 | criticism and contempt.
14
As a habitual response stonewalling is
devastating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all possibility of
working out disagreements.
TOXIC THOUGHTS
The children are being rambunctious, and Martin, their father, is
getting annoyed. He turns to his wife, Melanie, and says in a sharp
tone, “Dear, don’t you think the kids could quiet down?”
His actual thought: “She’s too easy on the kids.”
Melanie, responding to his ire, feels a surge of anger. Her face
grows taut, her brows knit in a frown, and she replies, “The kids are
having a good time. Anyhow, they’ll be going up to bed soon.”
Her thought: “There he goes again, complaining all the time.”
Martin now is visibly enraged. He leans forward menacingly, his
fists clenched, as he says in an annoyed tone, “Should I put them to
bed now?”
His thought: “She opposes me in everything. I’d better take over.”
Melanie, suddenly frightened by Martin’s wrath, says meekly, “No,
I’ll put them to bed right away.”
Her thought: “He’s getting out of control—he could hurt the kids. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |