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ee8fdbdf2fb2-1 | means capturing parts of the memory
that may have been dissociated
and so are absent from conscious recall. By putting sensory details and
feelings into words, presumably memories are brought more under
control of the neocortex, where the reactions they kindle can be
rendered more understandable and so more manageable. The
emotional relearning at this point is largely accomplished through
reliving the events and their emotions, but this time in surroundings
of safety and security, in the company of a trusted therapist. This
begins to impart a telling lesson to the emotional circuitry—that
security, rather than unremitting terror, can be experienced in tandem
with the trauma memories.
The five-year-old who drew the picture of the giant eyes after he
witnessed the grisly murder of his mother did not make any more
drawings after that first one; instead he and his therapist, Spencer Eth,
played games, creating a bond of rapport. Only slowly did he begin to
retell the story of the murder, at first in a stereotyped way, reciting
each detail exactly the same in each telling. Gradually, though, his
narrative became more open and free-flowing, his body less tense as | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ee8fdbdf2fb2-2 | he told it. At the same time his nightmares of the scene came less
often, an indication, says Eth, of some “trauma mastery.” Gradually
their talk moved away from the fears left by the trauma to more of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
928f51804733-0 | what was happening in the boy’s day-to-day life as he adjusted to a
new home with his father. And finally the boy was able to talk just
about his daily life as the hold of the trauma faded.
Finally, Herman finds that patients need to mourn the loss the
trauma brought—whether an injury, the death of a loved one or a
rupture in a relationship, regret over some step not taken to save
someone, or just the shattering of confidence that people can be
trusted. The mourning that ensues while retelling such painful events
serves a crucial purpose: it marks the ability to let go of the trauma
itself to some degree. It means that instead of being perpetually
captured by this moment in the past, patients can start to look ahead,
even to hope, and to rebuild a new life free of the trauma’s grip. It is
as if the constant recycling and reliving of the trauma’s terror by the
emotional circuitry were a spell that could finally be lifted. Every
siren need not bring a flood of fear; every sound in the night need not
compel a flashback to terror.
Aftereffects or occasional recurrences of symptoms often persist,
says Herman, but there are specific signs that the trauma has largely | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
928f51804733-1 | been overcome. These include reducing the physiological symptoms to
a manageable level, and being able to bear the feelings associated
with memories of the trauma. Especially significant is no longer
having trauma memories erupt at uncontrollable moments, but rather
being able to revisit them voluntarily,
like any other memory—and,
perhaps more important, to put them aside like any other memory.
Finally, it means rebuilding a new life, with strong, trusting
relationships and a belief system that finds meaning even in a world
where such injustice can happen.
20
All of these together are markers
of success in reeducating the emotional brain.
PSYCHOTHERAPY AS AN EMOTIONAL TUTORIAL
Fortunately, the catastrophic moments in which traumatic memories
are emblazoned are rare during the course of life for most of us. But
the same circuitry that can be seen so boldly imprinting traumatic
memories is presumably at work in life’s quieter moments, too. The
more ordinary travails of childhood, such as being chronically ignored
and deprived of attention or tenderness by one’s parents,
abandonment or loss, or social rejection may never reach the fever
pitch of trauma, but they surely leave their imprint on the emotional | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6d53a1468cec-0 | brain, creating distortions—and tears and rages—in intimate
relationships later in life. If PTSD can be healed, so can the more
muted emotional scars that so many of us bear; that is the task of
psychotherapy. And, in general, it is in learning to deal skillfully with
these loaded reactions that emotional intelligence comes into play.
The dynamic between the amygdala and the more fully informed
reactions of the prefrontal cortex may offer a neuroanatomical model
for how psychotherapy reshapes deep, maladaptive emotional
patterns. As Joseph LeDoux, the neuroscientist who discovered the
amygdala’s hair-trigger role in emotional outbursts, conjectures,
“Once your emotional system learns something, it seems you never let
it go. What therapy does is teach you to control it—it teaches your
neocortex how to inhibit your amygdala. The propensity to act is
suppressed, while your basic emotion about it remains in a subdued
form.”
Given the brain architecture that underlies emotional relearning,
what seems to remain, even after successful psychotherapy, is a
vestigial reaction, a remnant of the original sensitivity or fear at the
root of a troubling emotional pattern.
21
The prefrontal cortex can | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6d53a1468cec-1 | 21
The prefrontal cortex can
refine or put the brakes on the amygdala’s impulse to rampage, but
cannot keep it from reacting in the first place. Thus while we cannot
decide
when
we have our emotional outbursts, we have more control
over
how long
they last. A quicker recovery time from such outbursts
may well be one mark of emotional maturity.
Over the course of therapy, what seems to change in the main are
the
responses
that people make once an emotional reaction is triggered
—but the tendency for the reaction to be triggered in the first place
does not disappear entirely. Evidence for this comes from a series of
studies of psychotherapy conducted by Lester Luborsky and his
colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.
22
They analyzed the
main relationship conflicts that brought dozens of patients into
psychotherapy—issues such as a deep craving to be accepted or find
intimacy, or a fear of being a failure or being overly dependent. They
then carefully analyzed the typical (always self-defeating) responses
the patients made when these wishes and fears were activated in their
relationships—responses such as being too demanding, which created
a backlash of anger or coldness in the other person, or withdrawing in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6d53a1468cec-2 | self-defense from an anticipated slight, leaving the other person
miffed by the seeming rebuff. During such ill-fated encounters, the
patients, understandably, felt flooded by upsetting feelings— | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f6110385e67f-0 | hopelessness and sadness, resentment and anger, tension and fear,
guilt and self-blame, and so on. Whatever the specific pattern of the
patient, it seemed to show up in most every important relationship,
whether with a spouse or lover, a child or parent, or peers and bosses
at work.
Over the course of long-term therapy, however, these patients made
two kinds of changes: their emotional reaction to the triggering events
became less distressing, even calm or bemused, and their overt
responses became more effective in getting what they truly wanted
from the relationship. What did not change, however, was their
underlying wish or fear, and the initial twinge of feeling. By the time
the patients had but a few sessions left in therapy, the encounters they
told about showed they had only half as many negative emotional
reactions compared to when they first started therapy, and were twice
as likely to get the positive response they deeply desired from the
other person. But what did not change at all was the particular
sensitivity at the root of these needs.
In brain terms, we can speculate, the limbic circuitry would send
alarm signals in response to cues of a feared event, but the prefrontal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f6110385e67f-1 | cortex and related zones would have learned a new, more healthy
response. In short, emotional lessons—even the most deeply
implanted habits of the heart learned in childhood—can be reshaped.
Emotional learning is lifelong. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9119ba38101e-0 | 14
Temperament Is Not Destiny
So much for altering emotional patterns that have been learned. But
what about those responses that are givens of our genetic endowment
—what of changing the habitual reactions of people who by nature
are, say, highly volatile, or painfully shy? This range of the emotional
compass falls under the sweep of temperament, the background
murmur of feelings that mark our basic disposition. Temperament can
be defined in terms of the moods that typify our emotional life. To
some degree we each have such a favored emotional range;
temperament is a given at birth, part of the genetic lottery that has
compelling force in the unfolding of life. Every parent has seen this:
from birth a child will be calm and placid or testy and difficult. The
question is whether such a biologically determined emotional set can
be changed by experience. Does our biology fix our emotional destiny,
or can even an innately shy child grow into a more confident adult?
The clearest answer to this question comes from the work of Jerome
Kagan, the eminent developmental psychologist at Harvard
University.
1
Kagan posits that there are at least four temperamental | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9119ba38101e-1 | Kagan posits that there are at least four temperamental
types—timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy—and that each is due to a
different pattern of brain activity. There are likely innumerable
differences in temperamental endowment, each based in innate
differences in emotional circuitry; for any given emotion people can
differ in how easily it triggers, how long it lasts, how intense it
becomes. Kagan’s work concentrates on one of these patterns: the
dimension of temperament that runs from boldness to timidity.
For decades mothers have been bringing their infants and toddlers
to Kagan’s Laboratory for Child Development on the fourteenth floor
of
Harvard’s William James Hall to take part in his studies of child
development. It was there that Kagan and his coresearchers noticed
early signs of shyness in a group of twenty-one-month-old toddlers
brought for experimental observations. In free play with other
toddlers, some were bubbly and spontaneous, playing with other
babies without the least hesitation. Others, though, were uncertain | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9f687ca5dba6-0 | and hesitant, hanging back, clinging to their mothers, quietly
watching the others at play. Almost four years later, when these same
children were in kindergarten, Kagan’s group observed them again.
Over the intervening years none of the outgoing children had become
timid, while two thirds of the timid ones were still reticent.
Kagan finds that children who are overly sensitive and fearful grow
into shy and timorous adults; from birth about 15 to 20 percent of
children are “behaviorally inhibited,” as he calls them. As infants,
these children are timid about anything unfamiliar. This makes them
finicky about eating new foods, reluctant to approach new animals or
places, and shy around strangers. It also renders them sensitive in
other ways—for example, prone to guilt and self-reproach. These are
the children who become paralyzingly anxious in social situations: in
class and on the playground, when meeting new people, whenever the
social spotlight shines on them. As adults, they are prone to be
wallflowers, and morbidly afraid of having to give a speech or
perform in public.
Tom, one of the boys in Kagan’s study, is typical of the shy type. At | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9f687ca5dba6-1 | every measurement through childhood—two, five, and seven years of
age—Tom was among the most timid children. When interviewed at
thirteen, Tom was tense and stiff, biting his lip and wringing his
hands, his face impassive, breaking into a tight smile only when
talking about his girlfriend; his answers were short, his manner
subdued.
2
Throughout the middle years of childhood, until about age
eleven, Tom remembers being painfully shy, breaking into a sweat
whenever he had to approach playmates. He was also troubled by
intense fears: of his house burning down, of diving into a swimming
pool, of being alone in the dark. In frequent nightmares, he was
attacked by monsters. Though he has felt less shy in the last two years
or so, he still feels some anxiety around other children, and his
worries now center on doing well at school, even though he is in the
top 5 percent of his class. The son of a scientist, Tom finds a career in
that field appealing, since its relative solitude fits his introverted
inclinations.
By contrast, Ralph was one of the boldest and most outgoing | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
9f687ca5dba6-2 | children at every age. Always relaxed and talkative, at thirteen he sat
back at ease in his
chair, had no nervous mannerisms, and spoke in a
confident, friendly tone, as though the interviewer were a peer—
though the difference in their ages was twenty-five years. During
childhood he had only two short-lived fears—one of dogs, after a big | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
839d5f9912af-0 | dog jumped on him at age three, and another of flying, when he heard
about plane crashes at age seven. Sociable and popular, Ralph has
never thought of himself as shy.
The timid children seem to come into life with a neural circuitry
that makes them more reactive to even mild stress—from birth, their
hearts beat faster than other infants’ in response to strange or novel
situations. At twenty-one months, when the reticent toddlers were
holding back from playing, heart rate monitors showed that their
hearts were racing with anxiety. That easily aroused anxiety seems to
underlie their lifelong timidity: they treat any new person or situation
as though it were a potential threat. Perhaps as a result, middle-aged
women who remember having been especially shy in childhood, when
compared with their more outgoing peers, tend to go through life with
more fears, worries, and guilt, and to suffer more from stress-related
problems such as migraine headaches, irritable bowel, and other
stomach problems.
3
THE NEUROCHEMISTRY OF TIMIDITY
The difference between cautious Tom and bold Ralph, Kagan believes,
lies in the excitability of a neural circuit centered on the amygdala. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
839d5f9912af-1 | Kagan proposes that people like Tom, who are prone to fearfulness,
are born with a neurochemistry that makes this circuit easily aroused,
and so they avoid the unfamiliar, shy away from uncertainty, and
suffer anxiety. Those who, like Ralph, have a nervous system
calibrated with a much higher threshold for amygdala arousal, are
less easily frightened, more naturally outgoing, and eager to explore
new places and meet new people.
An early clue to which pattern a child has inherited is how difficult
and irritable she is as an infant, and how distressed she becomes when
confronted with something or someone unfamiliar. While about one in
five infants falls into the timid category, about two in five have the
bold temperament—at least at birth.
Part of Kagan’s evidence comes from observations of cats that are
unusually timid. About one in seven housecats has a pattern of
fearfulness akin to the timid children’s: they draw away from novelty
(instead of exhibiting a cat’s legendary curiosity), they are reluctant to
explore new territory, and
they attack only the smallest rodents, being
too timid to take on larger ones that their more courageous feline | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2e87b78a52c7-0 | peers would pursue with gusto. Direct brain probes have found that
portions of the amygdala are unusually excitable in these timid cats,
especially when, for instance, they hear a threatening howl from
another cat.
The cats’ timidity blossoms at about one month of age, which is the
point when their amygdala matures enough to take control of the
brain circuitry to approach or avoid. One month in kitten brain
maturation is akin to eight months in a human infant; it is at eight or
nine months, Kagan notes, that “stranger” fear appears in babies—if
the baby’s mother leaves a room and there is a stranger present, the
result is tears. Timid children, Kagan postulates, may have inherited
chronically high levels of norepinephrine or other brain chemicals
that activate the amygdala and so create a low threshold of
excitability, making the amygdala more easily triggered.
One sign of this heightened sensitivity is that, for example, when
young men and women who were quite shy in childhood are
measured in a laboratory while exposed to stresses such as harsh
smells, their heart rate stays elevated much longer than for their more
outgoing peers—a sign that surging norepinephrine is keeping their | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2e87b78a52c7-1 | amygdala excited and, through connected neural circuits, their
sympathetic nervous system aroused.
4
Kagan finds that timid children
have higher levels of reactivity across the range of sympathetic
nervous system indices, from higher resting blood pressure and
greater dilation of the pupils, to higher levels of norepinephrine
markers in their urine.
Silence is another barometer of timidity. Whenever Kagan’s team
observed shy and bold children in a natural setting—in their
kindergarten classes, with other children they did not know, or talking
with an interviewer—the timid children talked less. One timid
kindergartener would say nothing when other children spoke to her,
and spent most of her day just watching the others play. Kagan
speculates that a timid silence in the face of novelty or a perceived
threat is a sign of the activity of a neural circuit running between the
forebrain, the amygdala, and nearby limbic structures that control the
ability to vocalize (these same circuits make us “choke up” under
stress).
These sensitive children are at high risk for developing an anxiety
disorder such as panic attacks, starting as early as sixth or seventh
grade. In one study of 754 boys and girls in those grades, 44 were | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2e87b78a52c7-2 | found to have already suffered at least one episode of panic, or to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ba6da820e779-0 | have had several preliminary symptoms. These anxiety episodes were
usually triggered by the ordinary alarms of early adolescence, such as
a first date or a big exam—alarms that most children
handle without
developing more serious problems. But teenagers who were timid by
temperament and who had been unusually frightened by new
situations got panic symptoms such as heart palpitations, shortness of
breath, or a choking feeling, along with the feeling that something
horrible was going to happen to them, like going crazy or dying. The
researchers believe that while the episodes were not significant
enough to rate the psychiatric diagnosis “panic disorder,” they signal
that these teenagers would be at greater risk for developing the
disorder as the years went on; many adults who suffer panic attacks
say the attacks began during their teen years.
5
The onset of the anxiety attacks was closely tied to puberty. Girls
with few signs of puberty reponed no such attacks, but of those who
had gone through puberty about 8 percent said they had experienced
panic. Once they have had such an attack, they are prone to
developing the dread of a recurrence that leads people with panic
disorder to shrink from life. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ba6da820e779-1 | disorder to shrink from life.
NOTHING BOTHERS ME: THE CHEERFUL TEMPERAMENT
In the 1920s, as a young woman, my aunt June left her home in
Kansas City and ventured on her own to Shanghai—a dangerous
journey for a solitary woman in those years. There June met and
married a British detective in the colonial police force of that
international center of commerce and intrigue. When the Japanese
captured Shanghai at the outset of World War II, my aunt and her
husband were interned in the prison camp depicted in the book and
movie
Empire of the Sun
. After surviving five horrific years in the
prison camp, she and her husband had, literally, lost everything.
Penniless, they were repatriated to British Columbia.
I remember as a child first meeting June, an ebullient elderly
woman whose life had followed a remarkable course. In her later
years she suffered a stroke that left her partly paralyzed; after a slow
and arduous recovery she was able to walk again, but with a limp. In
those years I remember going for an outing with June, then in her
seventies. Somehow she wandered off, and after several minutes I | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ba6da820e779-2 | heard a feeble yell—June crying for help. She had fallen and could | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b17ed3ebeba5-0 | not get up on her own. I rushed to help her up, and as I did so, instead
of complaining or lamenting she laughed at her predicament. Her only
comment was a lighthearted “Well, at least I can walk again.”
By nature, some people’s emotions seem, like my aunt’s, to gravitate
toward the positive pole; these people are naturally upbeat and
easygoing, while others are dour and melancholy. This dimension of
temperament—ebullience
at one end, melancholy at the other—seems
linked to the relative activity of the right and left prefrontal areas, the
upper poles of the emotional brain. That insight has emerged largely
from the work of Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin
psychologist. He discovered that people who have greater activity in
the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament
cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life
presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June
did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are
given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life’s
difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn
off their worries and depressions. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b17ed3ebeba5-1 | off their worries and depressions.
In one of Davidson’s experiments volunteers with the most
pronounced activity in the left frontal areas were compared with the
fifteen who showed most activity on the right. Those with marked
right frontal activity showed a distinctive pattern of negativity on a
personality test: they fit the caricature portrayed by Woody Allen’s
comedy roles, the alarmist who sees catastrophe in the smallest thing
—prone to funks and moodiness, and suspicious of a world they saw
as fraught with overwhelming difficulties and lurking dangers. By
contrast to their melancholy counterparts, those with stronger left
frontal activity saw the world very differently. Sociable and cheerful,
they typically felt a sense of enjoyment, were frequently in good
moods, had a strong sense of self-confidence, and felt rewardingly
engaged in life. Their scores on psychological tests suggested a lower
lifetime risk for depression and other emotional disorders.
6
People who have a history of clinical depression, Davidson found,
had lower levels of brain activity in the left frontal lobe, and more on
the right, than did people who had never been depressed. He found
the same pattern in patients newly diagnosed with depression. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b17ed3ebeba5-2 | the same pattern in patients newly diagnosed with depression.
Davidson speculates that people who overcome depression have
learned to increase the level of activity in their left prefrontal lobe—a
speculation awaiting experimental testing.
Though his research is on the 30 percent or so of people at the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bbfec6b77dce-0 | extremes, just about anyone can be classified by their brain wave
patterns as tending toward one or the other type, says Davidson. The
contrast in temperament between the morose and the cheerful shows
up in many ways, large and small. For example, in one experiment
volunteers watched short film clips. Some were amusing—a gorilla
taking a bath, a puppy at play. Others, like an instructional film for
nurses featuring grisly details of surgery, were quite distressing. The
right-hemisphere, somber folks found the happy movies only mildly
amusing, but they felt extreme fear and disgust in reaction to the
surgical blood and gore. The cheerful group had minimal reactions to
the
surgery; their strongest reactions were of delight when they saw
the upbeat films.
Thus we seem by temperament primed to respond to life in either a
negative or a positive emotional register. The tendency toward a
melancholy or upbeat temperament—like that toward timidity or
boldness—emerges within the first year of life, a fact that strongly
suggests it too is genetically determined. Like most of the brain, the
frontal lobes are still maturing in the first few months of life, and so | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
bbfec6b77dce-1 | their activity cannot be reliably measured until the age of ten months
or so. But in infants that young, Davidson found that the activity level
of the frontal lobes predicted whether they would cry when their
mothers left the room. The correlation was virtually 100 percent: of
dozens of infants tested this way, every infant who cried had more
brain activity on the right side, while those who did not had more
activity on the left.
Still, even if this basic dimension of temperament is laid down from
birth, or very nearly from birth, those of us who have the morose
pattern are not necessarily doomed to go through life brooding and
crotchety. The emotional lessons of childhood can have a profound
impact on temperament, either amplifying or muting an innate
predisposition. The great plasticity of the brain in childhood means
that experiences during those years can have a lasting impact on the
sculpting of neural pathways for the rest of life. Perhaps the best
illustration of the kinds of experiences that can alter temperament for
the better is in an observation that emerged from Kagan’s research
with timid children.
TAMING THE OVEREXCITABLE AMYGDALA | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d7cd972aac67-0 | The encouraging news from Kagan’s studies is that not all fearful
infants grow up hanging back from life—temperament is not destiny.
The overexcitable amygdala can be tamed, with the right experiences.
What makes the difference are the emotional lessons and responses
children learn as they grow. For the timid child, what matters at the
outset is how they are treated by their parents, and so how they learn
to handle their natural timidness. Those parents who engineer gradual
emboldening experiences for their children offer them what may be a
lifelong corrective to their fearfulness.
About one in three infants who come into the world with all the
signs of an overexcitable amygdala have lost their timidness by the
time they reach kindergarten.
7
From observations of these once-
fearful children at home, it is
clear that parents, and especially
mothers, play a major role in whether an innately timid child grows
bolder with time or continues to shy away from novelty and become
upset by challenge. Kagan’s research team found that some of the
mothers held to the philosophy that they should protect their timid
toddlers from whatever was upsetting; others felt that it was more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d7cd972aac67-1 | important to help their timid child learn how to cope with these
upsetting moments, and so adapt to life’s small struggles. The
protective belief seems to have abetted the fearfulness, probably by
depriving the youngsters of opportunities for learning how to
overcome their fears. The “learn to adapt” philosophy of childrearing
seems to have helped fearful children become braver.
Observations in the homes when the babies were about six months
old found that the protective mothers, trying to soothe their infants,
picked them up and held them when they fretted or cried, and did so
longer than those mothers who tried to help their infants learn to
master these moments of upset. The ratio of times the infants were
held when calm and when upset showed that the protective mothers
held their infants much longer during the upsets than the calm
periods.
Another difference emerged when the infants were around one year
old: the protective mothers were more lenient and indirect in setting
limits for their toddlers when they were doing something that might
be harmful, such as mouthing an object they might swallow. The
other mothers, by contrast, were emphatic, setting firm limits, giving | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d7cd972aac67-2 | direct commands, blocking the child’s actions, insisting on obedience.
Why should firmness lead to a reduction in fearfulness? Kagan
speculates that there is something learned when a baby has his steady | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2148f1513232-0 | crawl toward what seems to him an intriguing object (but to his
mother a dangerous one) interrupted by her warning, “Get away from
that!” The infant is suddenly forced to deal with a mild uncertainty.
The repetition of this challenge hundreds and hundreds of times
during the first year of life gives the infant continual rehearsals, in
small doses, of meeting the unexpected in life. For fearful children
that is precisely the encounter that has to be mastered, and
manageable doses are just right for learning the lesson. When the
encounter takes place with parents who, though loving, do not rush to
pick up and soothe the toddler over every little upset, he gradually
learns to manage such moments on his own. By age two, when these
formerly fearful toddlers are brought back to Kagan’s laboratory, they
are far less likely to break out into tears when a stranger frowns at
them, or an experimenter puts a blood-pressure cuff around their arm.
Kagan’s conclusion: “It appears that mothers who protect their
high[ly] reactive infants from frustration and anxiety in the hope of
effecting a benevolent outcome seem to exacerbate the infant’s
uncertainty and produce the opposite effect.”
8 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2148f1513232-1 | uncertainty and produce the opposite effect.”
8
In other words, the
protective strategy backfires by depriving timid toddlers of the very
opportunity to learn to calm themselves in the face of the unfamiliar,
and so gain some small mastery of their fears. At the neurological
level, presumably, this means their prefrontal circuits missed the
chance to learn alternate responses to knee-jerk fear; instead, their
tendency for unbridled fearfulness may have been strengthened
simply through repetition.
In contrast, as Kagan told me, “Those children who had become less
timid by kindergarten seem to have had parents who put gentle
pressure on them to be more outgoing. Although this temperamental
trait seems slightly harder than others to change—probably because of
its physiological basis—no human quality is beyond change.”
Throughout childhood some timid children grow bolder as
experience continues to mold the key neural circuitry. One of the
signs that a timid child will be more likely to overcome this natural
inhibition is having a higher level of social competence: being
cooperative and getting along with other children; being empathic,
prone to giving and sharing, and considerate; and being able to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
2148f1513232-2 | develop close friendships. These traits marked a group of children first
identified as having a timid temperament at age four, who shook it off
by the time they were ten years old.
9
By contrast, those timid four-year-olds whose temperament changed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7ecd555c6934-0 | little over the same six years tended to be less able emotionally:
crying and falling apart under stress more easily; being emotionally
inappropriate; being fearful, sulky, or whiny; overreacting to minor
frustration with anger; having trouble delaying gratification; being
overly sensitive to criticism, or mistrustful. These emotional lapses
are, of course, likely to mean their relationships with other children
will be troubled, should they be able to overcome their initial
reluctance to engage.
By contrast, it is easy to see why the more emotionally competent—
though shy by temperament—children spontaneously outgrew their
timidity. Being more socially skilled, they were far more likely to have
a succession of positive experiences with other children. Even if they
were tentative about, say, speaking to a new playmate, once the ice
was broken they were able to shine socially. The regular repetition of
such social success over many years would naturally tend to make the
timid more sure of themselves.
These advances toward boldness are encouraging; they suggest that
even
innate emotional patterns can change to some degree. A child
who comes into the world easily frightened can learn to be calmer, or | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7ecd555c6934-1 | even outgoing, in the face of the unfamiliar. Fearfulness—or any other
temperament—may be part of the biological givens of our emotional
lives, but we are not necessarily limited to a specific emotional menu
by our inherited traits. There is a range of possibility even within
genetic constraints. As behavioral geneticists observe, genes alone do
not determine behavior; our environment, especially what we
experience and learn as we grow, shapes how a temperamental
predisposition expresses itself as life unfolds. Our emotional capacities
are not a given; with the right learning, they can be improved. The
reasons for this lie in how the human brain matures.
CHILDHOOD: A
WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to
shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring
during childhood. Children are born with many more neurons than
their mature brain will retain; through a process known as “pruning”
the brain actually loses the neuronal connections that are less used,
and forms strong connections in those synaptic circuits that have been
utilized the most. Pruning, by doing away with extraneous synapses, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a23b0d9d1e75-0 | improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the brain by removing the cause
of the “noise.” This process is constant and quick; synaptic
connections can form in a matter of hours or days. Experience,
particularly in childhood, sculpts the brain.
The classic demonstration of the impact of experience on brain
growth was by Nobel Prize-winners Thorsten Wiesel and David Hubel,
both neuroscientists.
10
They showed that in cats and monkeys, there
was a critical period during the first few months of life for the
development of the synapses that carry signals from the eye to the
visual cortex, where those signals are interpreted. If one eye was kept
closed during that period, the number of synapses from that eye to the
visual cortex dwindled away, while those from the open eye
multiplied. If after the critical period ended the closed eye was
reopened, the animal was functionally blind in that eye. Although
nothing was wrong with the eye itself, there were too few circuits to
the visual cortex for signals from that eye to be interpreted.
In humans the corresponding critical period for vision lasts for the
first six years of life. During this time normal seeing stimulates the
formation of increasingly complex neural circuitry for vision that
begins in the eye and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a23b0d9d1e75-1 | begins in the eye and
ends in the visual cortex. If a child’s eye is taped
closed for even a few weeks, it can produce a measurable deficit in
the visual capacity of that eye. If a child has had one eye closed for
several months during this period, and later has it restored, that eye’s
vision for detail will be impaired.
A vivid demonstration of the impact of experience on the
developing brain is in studies of “rich” and “poor” rats.
11
The “rich”
rats lived in small groups in cages with plenty of rat diversions such
as ladders and treadmills. The “poor” rats lived in cages that were
similar but barren and lacking diversions. Over a period of months the
neocortices of the rich rats developed far more complex networks of
synaptic circuits interconnecting the neurons; the poor rats’ neuronal
circuitry was sparse by comparison. The difference was so great that
the rich rats’ brains were heavier, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they
were far smarter at solving mazes than the poor rats. Similar
experiments with monkeys show these differences between those
“rich” and “poor” in experience, and the same effect is sure to occur
in humans. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a23b0d9d1e75-2 | in humans.
Psychotherapy—that is, systematic emotional relearning—stands as
a case in point for the way experience can both change emotional
patterns and shape the brain. The most dramatic demonstration comes | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e64b98b28ed2-0 | from a study of people being treated for obsessive-compulsive
disorder.
12
One of the more common compulsions is hand washing,
which can be done so often, even hundreds of times in a day, that the
person’s skin cracks. PET scan studies show that obsessive-
compulsives have greater than normal activity in the prefrontal
lobes.
13
Half of the patients in the study received the standard drug
treatment, fluoxetine (better known by the brand name Prozac), and
half got behavior therapy. During the therapy they were
systematically exposed to the object of their obsession or compulsion
without performing it; patients with hand-washing compulsions were
put at a sink, but not allowed to wash. At the same time they learned
to question the fears and dreads that spurred them on—for example,
that failure to wash would mean they would get a disease and die.
Gradually, through months of such sessions, the compulsions faded,
just as they did with the medication.
The remarkable finding, though, was a PET scan test showing that
the behavior therapy patients had as significant a decrease in the
activity of a key part of the emotional brain, the caudate nucleus, as
did the patients successfully treated with the drug fluoxetine. Their | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
e64b98b28ed2-1 | did the patients successfully treated with the drug fluoxetine. Their
experience had changed brain function—and relieved symptoms—as
effectively as the medication!
CRUCIAL WINDOWS
Of all species we humans take the longest for our brains to fully
mature. While each area of the brain develops at a different rate
during childhood, the onset of puberty marks one of the most
sweeping periods of pruning throughout the brain. Several brain areas
critical for emotional life are among the slowest to mature. While the
sensory areas mature during early childhood, and the limbic system
by puberty, the frontal lobes—seat of emotional self-control,
understanding, and artful response—continue to develop into late
adolescence, until somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years of
age.
14
The habits of emotional management that are repeated over and
over again during childhood and the teenage years will themselves
help mold this circuitry. This makes childhood a crucial window of
opportunity for shaping lifelong emotional propensities; habits | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
61264a145e41-0 | acquired in childhood become set in the basic synaptic wiring of
neural architecture, and are harder to change later in life. Given the
importance of the prefrontal lobes for managing emotion, the very
long window for synaptic sculpting in this brain region may well
mean that, in the grand design of the brain, a child’s experiences over
the years can mold lasting connections in the regulatory circuitry of
the emotional brain. As we have seen, critical experiences include
how dependable and responsive to the child’s needs parents are, the
opportunities and guidance a child has in learning to handle her own
distress and control impulse, and practice in empathy. By the same
token, neglect or abuse, the misattunement of a self-absorbed or
indifferent parent, or brutal discipline can leave their imprint on the
emotional circuitry.
15
One of the most essential emotional lessons, first learned in infancy
and refined throughout childhood, is how to soothe oneself when
upset. For very young infants, soothing comes from caretakers: a
mother hears her infant crying, picks him up, holds and rocks him
until he calms down. This biological attunement, some theorists
propose, helps the child begin to learn how to do the same for | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
61264a145e41-1 | propose, helps the child begin to learn how to do the same for
himself.
16
During a critical period between ten and eighteen months,
the orbitofrontal area of the prefrontal cortex is rapidly forming the
connections with the limbic brain that will make it a key on/off
switch for distress. The infant who through countless episodes of
being soothed is helped along in learning how to calm down, the
speculation goes, will have stronger connections in this circuit for
controlling distress, and so throughout life will be better at soothing
himself when upset.
To be sure, the art of soothing oneself is mastered over many years,
and
with new means, as brain maturation offers a child progressively
more sophisticated emotional tools. Remember, the frontal lobes, so
important for regulating limbic impulse, mature into adolescence.
17
Another key circuit that continues to shape itself through childhood
centers on the vagus nerve, which at one end regulates the heart and
other parts of the body, and at the other sends signals to the amygdala
via other circuits, prompting it to secrete the catecholamines, which
prime the fight-or-flight response. A University of Washington team
that assessed the impact of childrearing discovered that emotionally | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
61264a145e41-2 | that assessed the impact of childrearing discovered that emotionally
adept parenting led to a change for the better in vagus-nerve function.
As John Gottman, the psychologist who led the research, explained,
“Parents modify their children’s vagal tone”—a measure of how easily | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
627e81660480-0 | triggered the vagus nerve is—“by coaching them emotionally: talking
to children about their feelings and how to understand them, not
being critical and judgmental, problem-solving about emotional
predicaments, coaching them on what to do, like alternatives to
hitting, or to withdrawing when you’re sad.” When parents did this
well, children were better able to suppress the vagal activity that
keeps the amygdala priming the body with fight-or-flight hormones—
and so were better behaved.
It stands to reason that the key skills of emotional intelligence each
have critical periods extending over several years in childhood. Each
period represents a window for helping that child instill beneficial
emotional habits or, if missed, to make it that much harder to offer
corrective lessons later in life. The massive sculpting and pruning of
neural circuits in childhood may be an underlying reason why early
emotional hardships and trauma have such enduring and pervasive
effects in adulthood. It may explain, too, why psychotherapy can often
take so long to affect some of these patterns—and why, as we’ve seen,
even after therapy those patterns tend to remain as underlying
propensities, though with an overlay of new insights and relearned
responses. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
627e81660480-1 | responses.
To be sure, the brain remains plastic throughout life, though not to
the spectacular extent seen in childhood. All learning implies a change
in the brain, a strengthening of synaptic connection. The brain
changes in the patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder show that
emotional habits are malleable throughout life, with some sustained
effort, even at the neural level. What happens with the brain in PTSD
(or in therapy, for that matter) is an analog of the effects all repeated
or intense emotional experiences bring, for better or for worse.
Some of the most telling of such lessons come from parent to child.
There
are very different emotional habits instilled by parents whose
attunement means an infant’s emotional needs are acknowledged and
met or whose discipline includes empathy, on the one hand, or self-
absorbed parents who ignore a child’s distress or who discipline
capriciously by yelling and hitting. Much psychotherapy is, in a sense,
a remedial tutorial for what was skewed or missed completely earlier
in life. But why not do what we can to prevent that need, by giving
children the nurturing and guidance that cultivates the essential
emotional skills in the first place? | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c9fd68664843-0 | PART FIVE
EMOTIONAL
LITERACY | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
598c9f500728-0 | 15
The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
It began as a small dispute, but had escalated. Ian Moore, a senior at
Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and Tyrone Sinkler, a
junior, had had a falling-out with a buddy, fifteen-year-old Khalil
Sumpter. Then they had started picking on him and making threats.
Now it exploded.
Khalil, scared that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat him up,
brought a .38 caliber pistol to school one morning, and, fifteen feet
from a school guard, shot both boys to death at point-blank range in
the school’s hallway.
The incident, chilling as it is, can be read as yet another sign of a
desperate need for lessons in handling emotions, settling
disagreements peaceably, and just plain getting along. Educators, long
disturbed by schoolchildren’s lagging scores in math and reading, are
realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional
illiteracy.
1
And while laudable efforts are being made to raise
academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being
addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher
put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that “we care more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
598c9f500728-1 | about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether
they’ll be alive next week.”
Signs of the deficiency can be seen in violent incidents such as the
shooting of Ian and Tyrone, growing ever more common in American
schools. But these are more than isolated events; the heightening of
the turmoil of adolescence and troubles of childhood can be read for
the United States—a bellwether of world trends—in statistics such as
these:
2
In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States
saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen
arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates quadrupled,
mostly due to an increase
in shootings.
3
During those same two
decades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did the number of
children under fourteen who are murder victims.
4 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0a79662a5ea9-0 | More, and younger, teenage girls are getting pregnant. As of 1993
the birthrate among girls ten to fourteen has risen steadily for five
years in a row—some call it “babies having babies”—as has the
proportion of unwanted teen pregnancies and peer pressure to have
sex. Rates of venereal disease among teenagers have tripled over the
last three decades.
5
While these figures are discouraging, if the focus is on African-
American youth, especially in the inner city, they are utterly bleak—
all the rates are higher by far, sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled
or higher. For example, heroin and cocaine use among white youth
climbed about 300 percent over the two decades before the 1990s; for
African-American youth it jumped to a staggering
13 times
the rate of
twenty years before.
6
The most common cause of disability among teenagers is mental
illness. Symptoms of depression, whether major or minor, affect up to
one third of teenagers; for girls, the incidence of depression doubles at
puberty. The frequency of eating disorders in teenage girls has
skyrocketed.
7
Finally, unless things change, the long-term prospects for today’s | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0a79662a5ea9-1 | Finally, unless things change, the long-term prospects for today’s
children marrying and having a fruitful, stable life together are
growing more dismal with each generation. As we saw in
Chapter 9
,
while during the 1970s and 1980s the divorce rate was around 50
percent, as we entered the 1990s the rate among newlyweds predicted
that two out of three marriages of young people would end in divorce.
AN EMOTIONAL MALAISE
These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal miner’s tunnel
whose death warns of too little oxygen. Beyond such sobering
numbers, the plight of today’s children can be seen at more subtle
levels, in day-to-day problems that have not yet blossomed into
outright crises. Perhaps the most telling data of all—a direct
barometer of dropping levels of emotional competence—are from a
national sample of American children, ages seven to sixteen,
comparing their emotional condition in the mid-1970s and at the end
of the 1980s.
8
Based on parents’ and teachers’ assessments, there was
a steady worsening. No one problem stood out; all indicators simply
crept steadily in the wrong direction. Children, on average, were | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0a79662a5ea9-2 | doing more poorly in these specific ways: | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5e031e846328-0 | •
Withdrawal or social problems:
preferring to be alone; being
secretive; sulking a lot; lacking energy; feeling unhappy; being overly
dependent
•
Anxious and depressed:
being lonely; having many fears and
worries; needing to be perfect; feeling unloved; feeling nervous or sad
and depressed
•
Attention or thinking problems:
unable to pay attention or sit still;
daydreaming; acting without thinking; being too nervous to
concentrate; doing poorly on schoolwork; unable to get mind off
thoughts
•
Delinquent or aggressive:
hanging around kids who get in trouble;
lying and cheating; arguing a lot; being mean to other people;
demanding attention; destroying other people’s things; disobeying at
home and at school; being stubborn and moody; talking too much;
teasing a lot; having a hot temper
While any of these problems in isolation raises no eyebrows, taken
as a group they are barometers of a sea change, a new kind of toxicity
seeping into and poisoning the very experience of childhood,
signifying sweeping deficits in emotional competences. This emotional
malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for children. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5e031e846328-1 | malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for children.
While Americans often decry their problems as particularly bad
compared to other cultures’, studies around the world have found
rates on a par with or worse than in the United States. For example, in
the 1980s teachers and parents in the Netherlands, China, and
Germany rated children at about the same level of problems as were
found for American children in 1976. And some countries had
children in worse shape than current U.S. levels, including Australia,
France, and Thailand. But this may not remain true for long. The
larger forces that propel the downward spiral in emotional
competence seem to be picking up speed in the United States relative
to many other developed nations.
9
No children, rich or poor, are exempt from risk; these problems are
universal, occurring in all ethnic, racial, and income groups. Thus
while children in poverty have the worst record on indices of
emotional skills, their
rate
of deterioration over the decades was no
worse than for middle-class children or for wealthy children: all show
the same steady slide. There has also been a corresponding threefold
rise in the number of children who have gotten psychological help | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ae8d828c18ec-0 | (perhaps a good sign, signaling that help is more available), as well as
a near doubling of the number of children who have enough
emotional problems that they
should
get such help but have not (a bad
sign)—from about 9 percent in 1976 to 18 percent in 1989.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, the eminent Cornell University developmental
psychologist who did an international comparison of children’s well-
being, says:
“In the absence of good support systems, external stresses
have become so great that even strong families are falling apart. The
hecticness, instability, and inconsistency of daily family life are
rampant in all segments of our society, including the well-educated
and well-to-do. What is at stake is nothing less than the next
generation, particularly males, who in growing up are especially
vulnerable to such disruptive forces as the devastating effects of
divorce, poverty, and unemployment. The status of American children
and families is as desperate as ever.… We are depriving millions of
children of their competence and moral character.”
10
This is not just an American phenomenon but a global one, with
worldwide competition to drive down labor costs creating economic
forces that press on the family. These are times of financially besieged | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ae8d828c18ec-1 | families in which both parents work long hours, so that children are
left to their own devices or the TV baby-sits; when more children than
ever grow up in poverty; when the one-parent family is becoming ever
more commonplace; when more infants and toddlers are left in day
care so poorly run that it amounts to neglect. All this means, even for
well-intentioned parents, the erosion of the countless small,
nourishing exchanges between parent and child that build emotional
competences.
If families no longer function effectively to put all our children on a
firm footing for life, what are we to do? A more careful look at the
mechanics of specific problems suggests how given deficits in
emotional or social competences lay the foundation for grave
problems—and how well-aimed correctives or preventives could keep
more children on track.
TAMING AGGRESSION
In my elementary school the tough kid was Jimmy, a fourth grader
when I was in first grade. He was the kid who would steal your lunch
money, take your bike, slug you as soon as talk to you. Jimmy was the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4b3f77dfb414-0 | classic bully, starting fights with the least provocation, or none at all.
We all stood in awe of Jimmy—and we all stood at a distance.
Everyone hated and feared Jimmy; no one would play with him. It
was as though everywhere he went on the playground an invisible
bodyguard cleared kids out of his way.
Kids like Jimmy are clearly troubled. But what may be less obvious
is that being so flagrantly aggressive in childhood is a mark of
emotional and other troubles to come. Jimmy was in jail for assault
by the time he reached sixteen.
The lifelong legacy of childhood aggressiveness in kids like Jimmy
has
emerged from many studies.
11
As we have seen, the family life of
such aggressive children typically includes parents who alternate
neglect with harsh and capricious punishments, a pattern that,
perhaps understandably, makes the children a bit paranoid or
combative.
Not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn social
outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what they perceive as
slights or unfairness. But the one perceptual flaw that unites such
children is that they perceive slights where none were intended, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4b3f77dfb414-1 | children is that they perceive slights where none were intended,
imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they
actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as
threatening ones—an innocent bump is seen as a vendetta—and to
attack in return. That, of course, leads other children to shun them,
isolating them further. Such angry, isolated children are highly
sensitive to injustices and being treated unfairly. They typically see
themselves as victims and can recite a list of instances when, say,
teachers blamed them for doing something when in fact they were
innocent. Another trait of such children is that once they are in the
heat of anger they can think of only one way to react: by lashing out.
These perceptual biases can be seen at work in an experiment in
which bullies are paired with a more peaceable child to watch videos.
In one video, a boy drops his books when another knocks into him,
and children standing nearby laugh; the boy who dropped the books
gets angry and tries to hit one of those who laughed. When the boys
who watched the video talk about it afterward, the bully always sees | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4b3f77dfb414-2 | the boy who struck out as justified. Even more telling, when they
have to rate how aggressive the boys were during their discussion of
the video, the bullies see the boy who knocked into the other as more
combative, and the anger of the boy who struck out as justified.
12
This jump to judgment testifies to a deep perceptual bias in people | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8b5029237dbe-0 | who are unusually aggressive: they act on the basis of the assumption
of hostility or threat, paying too little attention to what is actually
going on. Once they assume threat, they leapfrog to action. For
instance, if an aggressive boy is playing checkers with another who
moves a piece out of turn, he’ll interpret the move as “cheating”
without pausing to find out if it had been an innocent mistake. His
presumption is of malevolence rather than innocence; his reaction is
automatic hostility. Along with the knee-jerk perception of a hostile
act is entwined an equally automatic aggression; instead of, say,
pointing out to the other boy that he made a mistake, he will jump to
accusation, yelling, hitting. And the more such children do this, the
more automatic aggression becomes for them, and the more the
repertoire of alternatives—politeness, joking—shrinks.
Such children are emotionally vulnerable in the sense that they
have a low
threshold for upset, getting peeved more often by more
things; once upset, their thinking is muddled, so that they see benign
acts as hostile and fall back on their overlearned habit of striking
out.
13 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8b5029237dbe-1 | out.
13
These perceptual biases toward hostility are already in place by the
early grades. While most children, and especially boys, are
rambunctious in kindergarten and first grade, the more aggressive
children fail to learn a modicum of self-control by second grade.
Where other children have started to learn negotiation and
compromise for playground disagreements, the bullies rely more and
more on force and bluster. They pay a social price: within two or
three hours of a first playground contact with a bully, other children
already say they dislike him.
14
But studies that have followed children from the preschool years
into the teenage ones find that up to half of first graders who are
disruptive, unable to get along with other kids, disobedient with their
parents, and resistant with teachers will become delinquents in their
teen years.
15
Of course, not all such aggressive children are on the
trajectory that leads to violence and criminality in later life. But of all
children, these are the ones most at risk for eventually committing
violent crimes.
The drift toward crime shows up surprisingly early in these
children’s lives. When children in a Montreal kindergarten were rated
for hostility and troublemaking, those highest at age five already had | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8b5029237dbe-2 | far greater evidence of delinquency just five to eight years later, in
their early teens. They were about three times as likely as other | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3b6e0ea0fec3-0 | children to admit they had beaten up someone who had not done
anything to them, to have shoplifted, to have used a weapon in a
fight, to have broken into or stolen parts from a car, and to have been
drunk—and all this before they reached fourteen years of age.
16
The prototypical pathway to violence and criminality starts with
children who are aggressive and hard to handle in first and second
grade.
17
Typically, from the earliest school years their poor impulse
control also contributes to their being poor students, seen as, and
seeing themselves as, “dumb”—a judgment confirmed by their being
shunted to special-education classes (and though such children may
have a higher rate of “hyperactivity” or learning disorders, by no
means all do). Children who on entering school already have learned
in their homes a “coercive” style—that is, bullying—are also written
off by their teachers, who have to spend too much time keeping the
children in line. The defiance of classroom rules that comes naturally
to these children means that they waste time that would otherwise be
used in learning; their destined academic failure is usually obvious by
about third grade. While boys on a trajectory toward delinquency | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3b6e0ea0fec3-1 | tend to have lower IQ scores
than their peers, their impulsivity is
more directly at cause: impulsivity in ten-year-old boys is almost three
times as powerful a predictor of their later delinquency as is their
IQ.
18
By fourth or fifth grade these kids—by now seen as bullies or just
“difficult”—are rejected by their peers and are unable to make friends
easily, if at all, and have become academic failures. Feeling
themselves friendless, they gravitate to other social outcasts. Between
grade four and grade nine they commit themselves to their outcast
group and a life of defying the law: they show a fivefold increase in
their truancy, drinking, and drug taking, with the biggest boost
between seventh and eighth grade. By the middle-school years, they
are joined by another type of “late starters,” who are attracted to their
defiant style; these late starters are often youngsters who are
completely unsupervised at home and have started roaming the streets
on their own in grade school. In the high-school years this outcast
group typically drops out of school in a drift toward delinquency,
engaging in petty crimes such as shoplifting, theft, and drug dealing. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3b6e0ea0fec3-2 | (A telling difference emerges in this trajectory between boys and
girls. A study of fourth-grade girls who were “bad”—getting in trouble
with teachers and breaking rules, but not unpopular with their peers
—found that 40 percent had a child by the time they finished the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1946b9f011ce-0 | high-school years.
19
That was three times the average pregnancy rate
for girls in their schools. In other words, antisocial teenage girls don’t
get violent—they get pregnant.)
There is, of course, no single pathway to violence and criminality,
and many other factors can put a child at risk: being born in a high-
crime neighborhood where they are exposed to more temptations to
crime and violence, coming from a family under high levels of stress,
or living in poverty. But none of these factors makes a life of violent
crime inevitable. All things being equal, the psychological forces at
work in aggressive children greatly intensify the likelihood of their
ending up as violent criminals. As Gerald Patterson, a psychologist
who has closely followed the careers of hundreds of boys into young
adulthood, puts it, “the anti-social acts of a five-year-old may be
prototypic of the acts of the delinquent adolescent.”
20
SCHOOL FOR BULLIES
The bent of mind that aggressive children take with them through life
is one that almost ensures they will end up in trouble. A study of
juvenile offenders convicted of violent crimes and of aggressive high-
school students found a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1946b9f011ce-1 | school students found a
common mind-set: When they have
difficulties with someone, they immediately see the other person in an
antagonistic way, jumping to conclusions about the other person’s
hostility toward them without seeking any further information or
trying to think of a peaceful way to settle their differences. At the
same time, the negative consequence of a violent solution—a fight,
typically—never crosses their mind. Their aggressive bent is justified
in their mind by beliefs like, “It’s okay to hit someone if you just go
crazy from anger”; “If you back down from a fight everyone will think
you’re a coward”; and “People who get beaten up badly don’t really
suffer that much.”
21
But timely help can change these attitudes and stop a child’s
trajectory toward delinquency; several experimental programs have
had some success in helping such aggressive kids learn to control their
antisocial bent before it leads to more serious trouble. One, at Duke
University, worked with anger-ridden grade-school troublemakers in
training sessions for forty minutes twice a week for six to twelve
weeks. The boys were taught, for example, to see how some of the
social cues they interpreted as hostile were in fact neutral or friendly. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4c7eabd3f34-0 | They learned to take the perspective of other children, to get a sense
of how they were being seen and of what other children might be
thinking and feeling in the encounters that had gotten them so angry.
They also got direct training in anger control through enacting scenes,
such as being teased, that might lead them to lose their temper. One
of the key skills for anger control was monitoring their feelings—
becoming aware of their body’s sensations, such as flushing or muscle
tensing, as they were getting angry, and to take those feelings as a cue
to stop and consider what to do next rather than strike out
impulsively.
John Lochman, a Duke University psychologist who was one of the
designers of the program, told me, “They’ll discuss situations they’ve
been in recently, like being bumped in the hallway when they think it
was on purpose. The kids will talk about how they might have
handled it. One kid said, for example, that he just stared at the boy
who bumped him and told him not to do it again, and walked away.
That put him in the position of exerting some control and keeping his
self-esteem, without starting a fight.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4c7eabd3f34-1 | self-esteem, without starting a fight.”
This appeals; many such aggressive boys are unhappy that they lose
their temper so easily, and so are receptive to learning to control it. In
the heat of the moment, of course, such cool-headed responses as
walking away or counting to ten so the impulse to hit will pass before
reacting are not automatic; the boys practice such alternatives in role-
playing scenes such as getting on a bus where other kids are taunting
them. That way they can try
out friendly responses that preserve their
dignity while giving them an alternative to hitting, crying, or running
away in shame.
Three years after the boys had been through the training, Lochman
compared these boys with others who had been just as aggressive, but
did not have the benefit of the anger-control sessions. He found that,
in adolescence, the boys who graduated from the program were much
less disruptive in class, had more positive feelings about themselves,
and were less likely to drink or take drugs. And the longer they had
been in the program, the less aggressive they were as teenagers.
PREVENTING DEPRESSION | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c4c7eabd3f34-2 | PREVENTING DEPRESSION
Dana, sixteen, had always seemed to get along. But now, suddenly, she just could not
relate with other girls, and, more troubling for her, she could not find a way to hold on | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3a37f3cb79fa-0 | to boyfriends, even though she slept with them. Morose and constantly fatigued, Dana
lost interest in eating, in having fun of any kind; she said she felt hopeless and helpless
to do anything to escape her mood, and was thinking of suicide.
The drop into depression had been triggered by her most recent breakup. She said
she didn’t know how to go out with a boy without getting sexually involved right away
—even if she was uncomfortable about it—and that she did not know how to end a
relationship even if it was unsatisfying. She went to bed with boys, she said, when all
she really wanted to do was get to know them better.
She had just moved to a new school, and felt shy and anxious about making friends
with girls there. For instance, she held back from starting conversations, only talking
once someone spoke to her. She felt unable to let them know what she was like, and
didn’t even feel she knew what to say after “Hello, how are you?”
22
Dana went for therapy to an experimental program for depressed
adolescents at Columbia University. Her treatment focused on helping
her learn how to handle her relationships better: how to develop a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3a37f3cb79fa-1 | friendship, how to feel more confident with other teens, how to assert
limits on sexual closeness, how to be intimate, how to express her
feelings. In essence, it was a remedial tutorial in some of the most
basic emotional skills. And it worked; her depression lifted.
Particularly in young people, problems in relationships are a trigger
for depression. The difficulty is as often in children’s relationships
with their parents as it is with their peers. Depressed children and
teenagers are
frequently unable or unwilling to talk about their
sadness. They seem unable to label their feelings accurately, showing
instead a sullen irritability, impatience, crankiness, and anger—
especially toward their parents. This, in turn, makes it harder for their
parents to offer the emotional support and guidance the depressed
child actually needs, setting in motion a downward spiral that
typically ends in constant arguments and alienation.
A new look at the causes of depression in the young pinpoints
deficits in two areas of emotional competence: relationship skills, on
the one hand, and a depression-promoting way of interpreting
setbacks, on the other. While some of the tendency to depression
almost certainly is due to genetic destiny, some of that tendency | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
3a37f3cb79fa-2 | almost certainly is due to genetic destiny, some of that tendency
seems due to reversible, pessimistic habits of thought that predispose
children to react to life’s small defeats—a bad grade, arguments with
parents, a social rejection—by becoming depressed. And there is
evidence to suggest that the predisposition to depression, whatever its
basis, is becoming ever more widespread among the young. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ef323bf9715f-0 | A
COST OF
MODERNITY: RISING RATES OF
DEPRESSION
These millennial years are ushering in an Age of Melancholy, just as
the twentieth century became an Age of Anxiety. International data
show what seems to be a modern epidemic of depression, one that is
spreading side by side with the adoption throughout the world of
modern ways. Each successive generation worldwide since the
opening of the century has lived with a higher risk than their parents
of suffering a major depression—not just sadness, but a paralyzing
listlessness, dejection, and self-pity, and an overwhelming
hopelessness—over the course of life.
23
And those episodes are
beginning at earlier and earlier ages. Childhood depression, once
virtually unknown (or, at least, unrecognized) is emerging as a fixture
of the modern scene.
Although the likelihood of becoming depressed rises with age, the
greatest increases are among young people. For those born after 1955
the likelihood they will suffer a major depression at some point in life
is, in many countries, three times or more greater than for their
grandparents. Among Americans born before 1905, the rate of those | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ef323bf9715f-1 | having a major depression over a lifetime was just 1 percent; for those
born since 1955, by age twenty-four about 6 percent had become
depressed. For those born between 1945 and 1954, the chances of
having had a major depression before age thirty-four are ten times
greater than for those born between 1905 and 1914.
24
And for each
generation
the onset of a person’s first episode of depression has
tended to occur at an ever-earlier age.
A worldwide study of more than thirty-nine thousand people found
the same trend in Puerto Rico, Canada, Italy, Germany, France,
Taiwan, Lebanon, and New Zealand. In Beirut, the rise of depression
tracked political events closely, the upward trends rocketing during
periods of civil war. In Germany, for those born before 1914 the rate
of depression by age thirty-five is 4 percent; for those born in the
decade before 1944 it is 14 percent at age thirty-five. Worldwide,
generations that came of age during politically troubled times had
higher rates of depression, though the overall upward trend holds
apart from any political events.
The lowering into childhood of the age when people first experience | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ef323bf9715f-2 | The lowering into childhood of the age when people first experience
depression also seems to hold worldwide. When I asked experts to
hazard a guess as to why, there were several theories.
Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then director of the National Institute of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b205b0c670c9-0 | Mental Health, speculated, “There’s been a tremendous erosion of the
nuclear family—a doubling of the divorce rate, a drop in parents’ time
available to children, and an increase in mobility. You don’t grow up
knowing your extended family much anymore. The losses of these
stable sources of self-identification mean a greater susceptibility to
depression.”
Dr. David Kupfer, chairman of psychiatry at the University of
Pittsburgh medical school, pointed to another trend: “With the spread
of industrialization after World War II, in a sense nobody was home
anymore. In more and more families there has been growing parental
indifference to children’s needs as they grow up. This is not a direct
cause of depression, but it sets up a vulnerability. Early emotional
stressors may affect neuron development, which can lead to a
depression when you are under great stress even decades later.”
Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist,
proposed: “For the last thirty or forty years we’ve seen the ascendance
of individualism and a waning of larger beliefs in religion, and in
supports from the community and extended family. That means a loss
of resources that can buffer you against setbacks and failures. To the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b205b0c670c9-1 | of resources that can buffer you against setbacks and failures. To the
extent you see a failure as something that is lasting and which you
magnify to taint everything in your life, you are prone to let a
momentary defeat become a lasting source of hopelessness. But if you
have a larger perspective, like a belief in God and an afterlife, and you
lose your job, it’s just a temporary defeat.”
Whatever the cause, depression in the young is a pressing problem.
In the United States, estimates vary widely for how many children and
teens are
depressed in any given year, as opposed to vulnerability
over their lifetime. Some epidemiological studies using strict criteria
—the official diagnostic symptoms for depression—have found that
for boys and girls between ten and thirteen the rate of major
depression over the course of a year is as high as 8 or 9 percent,
though other studies place it at about half that rate (and some as low
as about 2 percent). At puberty, some data suggest, the rate nearly
doubles for girls; up to 16 percent of girls between fourteen and
sixteen suffer a bout of depression, while the rate is unchanged for
boys.
25
THE COURSE OF
DEPRESSION IN THE YOUNG | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd199888dd9a-0 | That depression should not just be treated, but
prevented
, in children is
clear from an alarming discovery: Even mild episodes of depression in
a child can augur more severe episodes later in life.
26
This challenges
the old assumption that depression in childhood does not matter in
the long run, since children supposedly “grow out of it.” Of course,
every child gets sad from time to time; childhood and adolescence are,
like adulthood, times of occasional disappointments and losses large
and small with the attendant grief. The need for prevention is not for
these times, but for those children for whom sadness spirals
downward into a gloom that leaves them despairing, irritable, and
withdrawn—a far more severe melancholy.
Among children whose depression was severe enough that they
were referred for treatment, three quarters had a subsequent episode
of severe depression, according to data collected by Maria Kovacs, a
psychologist at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in
Pittsburgh.
27
Kovacs studied children diagnosed with depression when
they were as young as eight years old, assessing them every few years
until some were as old as twenty-four.
The children with major depression had episodes lasting about | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd199888dd9a-1 | The children with major depression had episodes lasting about
eleven months on average, though in one in six of them it persisted
for as long as eighteen months. Mild depression, which began as early
as age five in some children, was less incapacitating but lasted far
longer—an average of about four years. And, Kovacs found, children
who have a minor depression are more likely to have it intensify into
major depression—a so-called double depression. Those who develop
double depression are much more prone to suffer recurring episodes
as the years go on. As children who had an episode of depression grew
into adolescence and early adulthood, they suffered from depression
or manic-depressive disorder, on average, one year in three.
The cost to children goes beyond the suffering caused by depression
itself. Kovacs told me, “Kids learn social skills in their peer relations—
for example, what to do if you want something and aren’t getting it,
seeing how other children handle the situation and then trying it
yourself. But depressed kids are likely to be among the neglected
children in a school, the ones other kids don’t play with much.”
28
The sullenness or sadness such children feel leads them to avoid | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dd199888dd9a-2 | initiating social contacts, or to look away when another child is trying
to engage them—a social signal the other child only takes as a rebuff;
the end result is that depressed children end up rejected or neglected
on the playground. This lacuna in their interpersonal experience | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9962f1556da-0 | means they miss out on what they would normally learn in the rough-
and-tumble of play, and so can leave them social and emotional
laggards, with much catching up to do after the depression lifts.
29
Indeed, when depressed children have been compared to those
without depression, they have been found to be more socially inept, to
have fewer friends, to be less preferred than others as playmates, to be
less liked, and to have more troubled relationships with other
children.
Another cost to these children is doing poorly in school; depression
interferes with their memory and concentration, making it harder to
pay attention in class and retain what is taught. A child who feels no
joy in anything will find it hard to marshal the energy to master
challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in learning.
Understandably, the longer children in Kovacs’s study were depressed,
the more their grades dropped and the poorer they did on
achievement tests, so that they were more likely to be held back in
school. In fact, there was a direct correlation between the length of
time a child had been depressed and his grade-point average, with a
steady plummet over the course of the episode. All of this academic | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
f9962f1556da-1 | rough going, of course, compounds the depression. As Kovacs
observes, “Imagine you’re already feeling depressed, and you start
flunking out of school, and you sit home by yourself instead of
playing with other kids.”
DEPRESSIONOGENIC WAYS OF THOUGHT
Just as with adults, pessimistic ways of interpreting life’s defeats seem
to feed the sense of helplessness and hopelessness at the heart of
children’s depression. That people who are
already
depressed think in
these ways has long been known. What has only recently emerged,
though, is that children who are most prone to melancholy tend
toward this pessimistic outlook
before
they become depressed. This
insight suggests a window of opportunity for inoculating them against
depression before it strikes.
One line of evidence comes from studies of children’s beliefs about
their own ability to control what happens in their lives—for example,
being able to change things for the better. This is assessed by
children’s ratings of themselves in such terms as “When I have
problems at home I’m better than most kids at helping to solve the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eee705ceac6f-0 | problems” and “When I work hard I get good grades.” Children who
say none of these positive descriptions fits them have little sense that
they can do anything to change things; this sense of helplessness is
highest in those children who are most depressed.
30
A telling study looked at fifth and sixth graders in the few days after
they received report cards. As we all remember, report cards are one
of the greatest sources of elation and despair in childhood. But
researchers find a marked consequence in how children assess their
role when they get a worse grade than they expected. Those who see a
bad grade as due to some personal flaw (“I’m stupid”) feel more
depressed than those who explain it away in terms of something they
could change (“If I work harder on my math homework I’ll get a
better grade”).
31
Researchers identified a group of third, fourth, and fifth graders
whom classmates had rejected, and tracked which ones continued to
be social outcasts in their new classes the following year. How the
children explained the rejection to themselves seemed crucial to
whether they became depressed. Those who saw their rejection as due
to some flaw in themselves grew more depressed. But the optimists, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eee705ceac6f-1 | who felt that they could do something to change things for the better,
were not especially depressed despite the continuing rejection.
32
And
in a study of children making the notoriously stressful transition to
seventh grade, those who had the pessimistic attitude responded to
high levels of hassles at school and to any additional stress at home by
becoming depressed.
33
The most direct evidence that a pessimistic outlook makes children
highly susceptible to depression comes from a five-year study of
children beginning when they were in third grade.
34
Among the
younger children, the strongest predictor that they would become
depressed was a pessimistic outlook coupled with a major blow such
as parents divorcing or a death in the family, which left the child
upset, unsettled, and, presumably, with parents less able to offer a
nurturing buffer. As the children grew through the elementary-school
years, there was a telling shift in their thinking about the good and
bad events of their lives, with the children increasingly ascribing them
to their own traits: “I’m getting good grades because I’m smart”; “I
don’t have many
friends because I’m no fun.” This shift seems to set in
gradually over the third to fifth grades. As this happens those children | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eee705ceac6f-2 | who develop a pessimistic outlook—attributing the setbacks in their
lives to some dire flaw in themselves—begin to fall prey to depressed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
31c7863311a5-0 | moods in reaction to setbacks. What’s more, the experience of
depression itself seems to reinforce these pessimistic ways of thinking,
so that even after the depression lifts, the child is left with what
amounts to an emotional scar, a set of convictions fed by the
depression and solidified in the mind: that he can’t do well in school,
is unlikable, and can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods.
These fixed ideas can make the child all the more vulnerable to
another depression down the road.
SHORT-CIRCUITING DEPRESSION
The good news: there is every sign that teaching children more
productive ways of looking at their difficulties lowers their risk of
depression.
*
In a study of one Oregon high school, about one in four
students had what psychologists call a “low-level depression,” not
severe enough to say it was beyond ordinary unhappiness as yet.
35
Some may have been in the early weeks or months of what was to
become a depression.
In a special after-school class seventy-five of the mildly depressed
students learned to challenge the thinking patterns associated with
depression, to become more adept at making friends, to get along
better with their parents, and to engage in more social activities they | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
31c7863311a5-1 | found pleasant. By the end of the eight-week program, 55 percent of
the students had recovered from their mild depression, while only
about a quarter of equally depressed students who were not in the
program had begun to pull out of their depression. A year later a
quarter of those in the comparison group had gone on to fall into a
major depression, as opposed to only 14 percent of students in the
depression-prevention program. Though they lasted just eight
sessions, the classes seemed to have cut the risk of depression in
half.
36
Similarly promising findings came from a special once-a-week class
given to ten- to thirteen-year-old youngsters at odds with their parents
and showing some signs of depression. In after-school sessions they
learned some basic emotional skills, including handling
disagreements, thinking before acting, and, perhaps most important,
challenging the pessimistic beliefs associated with depression—for
example, resolving to study harder after doing poorly on an exam
instead of thinking, “I’m just not smart enough.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
00d7ea739089-0 | “What a child learns in these classes is that moods like anxiety,
sadness, and anger don’t just descend on you without your having any
control over them, but that you can change the way you feel by what
you think,” points out psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the
developers of the twelve-week program. Because disputing the
depressing thoughts vanquishes the gathering mood of gloom,
Seligman added, “it’s an instant reinforcer that becomes a habit.”
Again the special sessions lowered depression rates by one half—
and did so as long as two years later. A year after the classes ended,
just 8 percent of those who participated scored at a moderate-to-
severe level on a test of depression, versus 29 percent of children in a
comparison group. And after two years, about 20 percent of those in
the course were showing some signs of at least mild depression,
compared to 44 percent of those in the comparison group.
Learning these emotional skills at the cusp of adolescence may be
especially helpful, Seligman observes, “These kids seem to be better at
handling the routine teenage agonies of rejection. They seem to have
learned this at a crucial window for risk of depression, just as they | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
00d7ea739089-1 | enter the teen years. And the lesson seems to persist and grow a bit
stronger over the course of the years after they learn it, suggesting the
kids are actually using it in their day-to-day lives.”
Other experts on childhood depression applaud the new programs.
“If you want to make a real difference for psychiatric illness like
depression, you have to do something before the kids get sick in the
first place,” Kovacs commented. “The real solution is a psychological
inoculation.”
EATING DISORDERS
During my days as a graduate student in clinical psychology in the
late 1960s, I knew two women who suffered from eating disorders,
though I realized this only after many years had passed. One was a
brilliant graduate student in
mathematics at Harvard, a friend from
my undergraduate days; the other was on the staff at M.I.T. The
mathematician, though skeletally thin, simply could not bring herself
to eat; food, she said, repulsed her. The librarian had an ample figure
and was given to bingeing on ice cream, Sara Lee carrot cake, and
other desserts; then—as she once confided with some embarrassment
—she would secretly go off to the bathroom and make herself vomit. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d5a66ff0b356-0 | Today the mathematician would be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa,
the librarian with bulimia.
In those years there were no such labels. Clinicians were just
beginning to comment on the problem; Hilda Bruch, the pioneer in
this movement, published her seminal article on eating disorders in
1969.
37
Bruch, puzzled by women who were starving themselves to
death, proposed that one of the several underlying causes lay in an
inability to label and respond appropriately to bodily urges—notably,
of course, hunger. Since then the clinical literature on eating disorders
has mushroomed, with a multitude of hypotheses about the causes,
ranging from ever-younger girls feeling compelled to compete with
unattainably high standards of female beauty, to intrusive mothers
who enmesh their daughters in a controlling web of guilt and blame.
Most of these hypotheses suffered from one great drawback: they
were extrapolations from observations made during therapy. Far more
desirable, from a scientific viewpoint, are studies of large groups of
people over a period of several years, to see who among them
eventually comes down with the problem. That kind of study allows a | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d5a66ff0b356-1 | clean comparison that can tell, for example, if having controlling
parents predisposes a girl to eating disorders. Beyond that, it can
identify the cluster of conditions that leads to the problem, and
distinguish them from conditions that might seem to be a cause, but
which actually are found as often in people without the problem as in
those who come for treatment.
When just such a study was done with more than nine hundred girls
in the seventh through tenth grades, emotional deficits—particularly a
failure to tell distressing feelings from one another and to control
them—were found to be key among the factors leading to eating
disorders.
38
Even by tenth grade, there were sixty-one girls in this
affluent, suburban Minneapolis high school who already had serious
symptoms of anorexia or bulimia. The greater the problem, the more
the girls reacted to setbacks, difficulties, and minor annoyances with
intense negative feelings that they could not soothe, and the less their
awareness of what, exactly, they were feeling. When these two
emotional tendencies were coupled with being highly dissatisfied with
their body, then the outcome was anorexia or bulimia. Overly
controlling parents
were found not to play a prime role in causing | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d5a66ff0b356-2 | were found not to play a prime role in causing
eating disorders. (As Bruch herself had warned, theories based on
hindsight were unlikely to be accurate; for example, parents can easily
become intensely controlling
in response
to their daughter’s eating | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b6a0cc5b636a-0 | disorder, out of desperation to help her.) Also judged irrelevant were
such popular explanations as fear of sexuality, early onset of puberty,
and low self-esteem.
Instead, the causal chain this prospective study revealed began with
the effects on young girls of growing up in a society preoccupied with
unnatural thinness as a sign of female beauty. Well in advance of
adolescence, girls are already self-conscious about their weight. One
six-year-old, for example, broke into tears when her mother asked her
to go for a swim, saying she’d look fat in a swimsuit. In fact, says her
pediatrician, who tells the story, her weight was normal for her
height.
39
In one study of 271 young teenagers, half the girls thought
they were too fat, even though the vast majority of them were normal
in weight. But the Minneapolis study showed that an obsession with
being overweight is not in and of itself sufficient to explain why some
girls go on to develop eating disorders.
Some obese people are unable to tell the difference between being
scared, angry, and hungry, and so lump all those feelings together as
signifying hunger, which leads them to overeat whenever they feel | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b6a0cc5b636a-1 | upset.
40
Something similar seems to be happening in these girls.
Gloria Leon, the University of Minnesota psychologist who did the
study of young girls and eating disorders, observed that these girls
“have poor awareness of their feelings and body signals; that was the
strongest single predictor that they would go on to develop an eating
disorder within the next two years. Most children learn to distinguish
among their sensations, to tell if they’re feeling bored, angry,
depressed, or hungry—it’s a basic part of emotional learning. But
these girls have trouble distinguishing among their most basic
feelings. They may have a problem with their boyfriend, and not be
sure whether they’re angry, or anxious, or depressed—they just
experience a diffuse emotional storm that they do not know how to
deal with effectively. Instead they learn to make themselves feel
better by eating; that can become a strongly entrenched emotional
habit.”
But when this habit for soothing themselves interacts with the
pressures girls feel to stay thin, the way is paved for eating disorders
to develop. “At first she might start with binge eating,” Leon observes.
“But to stay thin she may turn to vomiting or laxatives, or intense | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b6a0cc5b636a-2 | physical exertion to undo the weight gain from overeating. Another
avenue this struggle to handle emotional
confusion can take is for the
girl not to eat at all—it can be a way to feel you have at least some | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a79339280a05-0 | control over these overwhelming feelings.”
The combination of poor inner awareness and weak social skills
means that these girls, when upset by friends or parents, fail to act
effectively to soothe either the relationship or their own distress.
Instead their upset triggers the eating disorder, whether it be that of
bulimia or anorexia, or simply binge eating. Effective treatments for
such girls, Leon believes, need to include some remedial instruction in
the emotional skills they lack. “Clinicians find,” she told me, “that if
you address the deficits therapy works better. These girls need to
learn to identify their feelings and learn ways to soothe themselves or
handle their relationships better, without turning to their maladaptive
eating habits to do the job.”
ONLY THE LONELY: DROPOUTS
It’s a grade-school drama: Ben, a fourth grader with few friends, has
just heard from his one buddy, Jason, that they aren’t going to play
together this lunch period—Jason wants to play with another boy,
Chad, instead. Ben, crushed, hangs his head and cries. After his sobs
subside, Ben goes over to the lunch table where Jason and Chad are
eating. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a79339280a05-1 | eating.
“I hate your guts!” Ben yells at Jason.
“Why?” Jason asks.
“Because you lied,” Ben says, his tone accusatory. “You said this
whole week that you were gonna play with me and you lied.”
Ben then stalks off to his empty table, crying quietly. Jason and
Chad go over to him and try to talk to him, but Ben puts his fingers in
his ears, determinedly ignoring them, and runs out of the lunchroom
to hide behind the school Dumpster. A group of girls who have
witnessed the exchange try to play a peacemaker role, finding Ben
and telling him that Jason is willing to play with him too. But Ben
will have none of it, and tells them to leave him alone. He nurses his
wounds, sulking and sobbing, defiantly alone.
41
A poignant moment, to be sure; the feeling of being rejected and
friendless is one most everyone goes through at some point in
childhood or adolescence. But what is most telling about Ben’s
reaction is his failure to respond to Jason’s efforts to repair their
friendship, a stance that extends his plight when it might have ended. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a79339280a05-2 | Such an inability to seize key cues is typical of children who are | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
185d6146ee4a-0 | unpopular; as we saw in
Chapter 8
, socially rejected children
typically
are poor at reading emotional and social signals; even when they do
read such signals, they may have limited repertoires for response.
Dropping out of school is a particular risk for children who are
social rejects. The dropout rate for children who are rejected by their
peers is between two and eight times greater than for children who
have friends. One study found, for example, that about 25 percent of
children who were unpopular in elementary school had dropped out
before completing high school, compared to a general rate of 8
percent.
42
Small wonder: imagine spending thirty hours a week in a
place where no one likes you.
Two kinds of emotional proclivities lead children to end up as social
outcasts. As we have seen, one is the propensity to angry outbursts
and to perceive hostility even where none is intended. The second is
being timid, anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these
temperamental factors, it is children who are “off”—whose
awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfortable—who tend to
be shunted aside.
One way these children are “off” is in the emotional signals they | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
185d6146ee4a-1 | send. When grade schoolers with few friends were asked to match an
emotion such as disgust or anger with faces that displayed a range of
emotions, they made far more mismatches than did children who
were popular. When kindergarteners were asked to explain ways they
might make friends with someone or keep from having a fight, it was
the unpopular children—the ones others shied away from playing
with—who came up with self-defeating answers (“Punch him” for
what to do when both children wanted the same toy, for example), or
vague appeals for help from a grown-up. And when teenagers were
asked to role-play being sad, angry, or mischievous, the more
unpopular among them gave the least convincing performances. It is
perhaps no surprise that such children come to feel that they are
helpless to do any better at making friends; their social incompetence
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of learning new approaches
to making friends, they simply keep doing the same things that have
not worked for them in the past, or come up with even more inept
responses.
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In the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key emotional | emotional_intelligence.pdf |