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b543f8387c41-2 | emergency trigger, the left prefrontal lobe appears to be part of the
brain’s “off” switch for disturbing emotion: the amygdala proposes,
the prefrontal lobe disposes. These prefrontal-limbic connections are
crucial in mental life far beyond fine-tuning emotion; they are
essential for navigating us through the decisions that matter most in
life. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a5d778d5a18f-0 | HARMONIZING EMOTION AND THOUGHT
The connections between the amygdala (and related limbic structures)
and the neocortex are the hub of the battles or cooperative treaties
struck between head and heart, thought and feeling. This circuitry
explains why emotion is so crucial to effective thought, both in
making wise decisions and in simply allowing us to think clearly.
Take the power of emotions to disrupt thinking itself.
Neuroscientists use the term “working memory” for the capacity of
attention that holds in mind the facts essential for completing a given
task or problem, whether it be the ideal features one seeks in a house
while touring several prospects, or the elements of a reasoning
problem on a test. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region
responsible for working memory.
17
But circuits from the limbic brain
to the prefrontal lobes mean that the signals of strong emotion—
anxiety, anger, and the like—can create neural static, sabotaging the
ability of the prefrontal lobe to maintain working memory. That is
why when we are emotionally upset we say we “just can’t think
straight”—and why continual emotional distress can create deficits in
a child’s intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a5d778d5a18f-1 | These deficits, if more subtle, are not always tapped by IQ testing,
though they show up through more targeted neuropsychological
measures, as well as in a child’s continual agitation and impulsivity.
In one study, for example, primary school boys who had above-
average IQ scores but nevertheless were doing poorly in school were
found via these neuropsychological tests to have impaired frontal
cortex functioning.
18
They also were impulsive and anxious, often
disruptive and in trouble—suggesting faulty prefrontal control over
their limbic urges. Despite their intellectual potential, these are the
children at highest risk for problems like academic failure, alcoholism,
and criminality—not because their intellect is deficient, but because
their control over their emotional life is impaired. The emotional
brain, quite separate from those cortical areas tapped by IQ tests,
controls rage and compassion alike. These emotional circuits are
sculpted by experience throughout childhood—and we leave those
experiences utterly to chance at our peril.
Consider, too, the role of emotions in even the most “rational”
decision-making. In work with far-reaching implications for | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
a5d778d5a18f-2 | decision-making. In work with far-reaching implications for
understanding mental life, Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the
University of Iowa College of Medicine, has made careful studies of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dc3525c22da5-0 | just what is impaired in patients with damage to the prefrontal-
amygdala circuit.
19
Their decision-making is terribly flawed—and yet
they show no deterioration at all in IQ or any cognitive
ability.
Despite their intact intelligence, they make disastrous choices in
business and their personal lives, and can even obsess endlessly over a
decision so simple as when to make an appointment.
Dr. Damasio argues that their decisions are so bad because they
have lost access to their
emotional
learning. As the meeting point
between thought and emotion, the prefrontal-amygdala circuit is a
crucial doorway to the repository for the likes and dislikes we acquire
over the course of a lifetime. Cut off from emotional memory in the
amygdala, whatever the neocortex mulls over no longer triggers the
emotional reactions that have been associated with it in the past—
everything takes on a gray neutrality. A stimulus, be it a favorite pet
or a detested acquaintance, no longer triggers either attraction or
aversion; these patients have “forgotten” all such emotional lessons
because they no longer have access to where they are stored in the
amygdala.
Evidence like this leads Dr. Damasio to the counter-intuitive
position that feelings are typically | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dc3525c22da5-1 | position that feelings are typically
indispensable
for rational decisions;
they point us in the proper direction, where dry logic can then be of
best use. While the world often confronts us with an unwieldy array
of choices (How should you invest your retirement savings? Whom
should you marry?), the emotional learning that life has given us
(such as the memory of a disastrous investment or a painful breakup)
sends signals that streamline the decision by eliminating some options
and highlighting others at the outset. In this way, Dr. Damasio argues,
the emotional brain is as involved in reasoning as is the thinking
brain.
The emotions, then, matter for rationality. In the dance of feeling
and thought the emotional faculty guides our moment-to-moment
decisions, working hand-in-hand with the rational mind, enabling—or
disabling—thought itself. Likewise, the thinking brain plays an
executive role in our emotions—except in those moments when
emotions surge out of control and the emotional brain runs rampant.
In a sense we have two brains, two minds—and two different kinds
of intelligence: rational and emotional. How we do in life is
determined by both—it is not just IQ, but
emotional
intelligence that | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dc3525c22da5-2 | emotional
intelligence that
matters. Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional
intelligence. Ordinarily the complementarity of limbic system and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
949d0fa528ff-0 | neocortex, amygdala and prefrontal lobes, means each is a full partner
in mental life. When these partners interact well, emotional
intelligence rises—as does intellectual ability.
This turns the old understanding of the tension between reason and
feeling on its head: it is not that we want to do away with emotion
and put reason in
its place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the
intelligent balance of the two. The old paradigm held an ideal of
reason freed of the pull of emotion. The new paradigm urges us to
harmonize head and heart. To do that well in our lives means we
must first understand more exactly what it means to use emotion
intelligently. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ace35d7efc48-0 | PART TWO
THE NATURE OF
EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4fd98e340567-0 | 3
When Smart Is Dumb
Exactly why David Pologruto, a high-school physics teacher, was
stabbed with a kitchen knife by one of his star students is still
debatable. But the facts as widely reported are these:
Jason H., a sophomore and straight-A student at a Coral Springs,
Florida, high school, was fixated on getting into medical school. Not
just any medical school—he dreamt of Harvard. But Pologruto, his
physics teacher, had given Jason an 80 on a quiz. Believing the grade
—a mere B—put his dream in jeopardy, Jason took a butcher knife to
school and, in a confrontation with Pologruto in the physics lab,
stabbed his teacher in the collarbone before being subdued in a
struggle.
A judge found Jason innocent, temporarily insane during the
incident—a panel of four psychologists and psychiatrists swore he was
psychotic during the fight. Jason claimed he had been planning to
commit suicide because of the test score, and had gone to Pologruto to
tell him he was killing himself because of the bad grade. Pologruto
told a different story: “I think he tried to completely do me in with the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
4fd98e340567-1 | knife” because he was infuriated over the bad grade.
After transferring to a private school, Jason graduated two years
later at the top of his class. A perfect grade in regular classes would
have given him a straight-A, 4.0 average, but Jason had taken enough
advanced courses to raise his grade-point average to 4.614—way
beyond A+. Even as Jason graduated with highest honors, his old
physics teacher, David Pologruto, complained that Jason had never
apologized or even taken responsibility for the attack.
1
The question is, how could someone of such obvious intelligence do
something so irrational—so downright dumb? The answer: Academic
intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among
us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly
impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their
private lives.
One of psychology’s open secrets is the relative inability of grades, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d603f6f777ef-0 | IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular mystique, to predict
unerringly who will succeed in life. To be sure, there is a relationship
between IQ and life circumstances for large groups as a whole: many
people with very low IQs end up in menial jobs, and those with high
IQs tend to become well-paid—but by no means always.
There are widespread exceptions to the myth that IQ predicts
success—many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule. At
best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life
success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.
2
As one observer
notes, “The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is
determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.”
Even Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose book
The Bell
Curve
imputes a primary importance to IQ, acknowledge this; as they
point out, “Perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had
better not have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead
he wants to run his own business, become a U.S. Senator or make a
million dollars, he should not put aside his dreams.… The link | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d603f6f777ef-1 | between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality
of other characteristics that he brings to life.”
3
My concern is with a key set of these “other characteristics,”
emotional intelligence:
abilities such as being able to motivate oneself
and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay
gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from
swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. Unlike IQ,
with its nearly one-hundred-year history of research with hundreds of
thousands of people, emotional intelligence is a new concept. No one
can yet say exactly how much of the variability from person to person
in life’s course it accounts for. But what data exist suggest it can be as
powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ. And while there are
those who argue that IQ cannot be changed much by experience or
education, I will show in Part Five that the crucial emotional
competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children—
if we bother to teach them.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND DESTINY
I remember the fellow in my own class at Amherst College who had
attained five perfect 800 scores on the SAT and other achievement | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
d603f6f777ef-2 | attained five perfect 800 scores on the SAT and other achievement
tests he took before entering. Despite his formidable intellectual | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
909eb3271ae0-0 | abilities, he spent most of his time hanging out, staying up late, and
missing classes by sleeping until noon. It took him almost ten years to
finally get his degree.
IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with
roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity. When ninety-five
Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s—a time when people
with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is presently
the case—were followed into middle age, the men with the highest
test scores in college were not particularly successful compared to
their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in
their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the
most happiness with friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
4
A similar follow-up in middle age was done with 450 boys, most
sons of immigrants, two thirds from families on welfare, who grew up
in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the time a “blighted slum” a few
blocks from Harvard. A third had IQs below 90. But again IQ had
little relationship to how well they had done at work or in the rest of
their lives; for instance, 7 percent of men with IQs under 80 were | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
909eb3271ae0-1 | unemployed for ten or more years, but so were 7 percent of men with
IQs over 100. To be sure, there was a general link (as there always is)
between IQ and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood
abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions,
and get on with other people made the greater difference.
5
Consider also data from an ongoing study of eighty-one
valedictorians and salutatorians from the 1981 class in Illinois high
schools. All, of course, had the highest grade-point averages in their
schools. But while they continued to achieve well in college, getting
excellent grades, by their late twenties they had climbed to only
average levels of success. Ten years after graduating from high school,
only one in four were at the highest level of young people of
comparable age in their chosen profession, and many were doing
much less well.
Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University, one of
the researchers tracking the valedictorians, explains, “I think we’ve
discovered the ‘dutiful’—people who know how to achieve in the
system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
909eb3271ae0-2 | that a person is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is
exceedingly good at achievement as
measured by grades. It tells you
nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”
6
And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
836a15e0516c-0 | preparation for the turmoil—or opportunity—life’s vicissitudes bring.
Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or
happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic
abilities, ignoring
emotional
intelligence, a set of traits—some might
call it character—that also matters immensely for our personal
destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading,
can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its unique set
of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to
understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal
intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a
meta-ability
, determining
how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw
intellect.
Of course, there are many paths to success in life, and many
domains in which other aptitudes are rewarded. In our increasingly
knowledge-based society, technical skill is certainly one. There is a
children’s joke: “What do you call a nerd fifteen years from now?”
The answer: “Boss.” But even among “nerds” emotional intelligence
offers an added edge in the workplace, as we shall see in Part Three. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
836a15e0516c-1 | Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept—who
know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal
effectively with other people’s feelings—are at an advantage in any
domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking
up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.
People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be
content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that
foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some
control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their
ability for focused work and clear thought.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE
To the casual observer, four-year-old Judy might seem a wallflower
among her more gregarious playmates. She hangs back from the
action at playtime, staying on the margins of games rather than
plunging into the center. But Judy is actually a keen observer of the
social politics of her preschool classroom, perhaps the most
sophisticated of her playmates in her insights into the tides of feeling
within the others.
Her sophistication is not apparent until Judy’s teacher gathers the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fb873b93830b-0 | four-year-olds
around to play what they call the Classroom Game. The
Classroom Game—a dollhouse replica of Judy’s own preschool
classroom, with stick figures who have for heads small photos of the
students and teachers—is a test of social perceptiveness. When Judy’s
teacher asks her to put each girl and boy in the part of the room they
like to play in most—the art corner, the blocks corner, and so on—
Judy does so with complete accuracy. And when asked to put each
boy and girl with the children they like to play with most, Judy shows
she can match best friends for the entire class.
Judy’s accuracy reveals that she has a perfect social map of her
class, a level of perceptiveness exceptional for a four-year-old. These
are the skills that, in later life, might allow Judy to blossom into a star
in any of the fields where “people skills” count, from sales and
management to diplomacy.
That Judy’s social brilliance was spotted at all, let alone this early,
was due to her being a student at the Eliot-Pearson Preschool on the
campus of Tufts University, where Project Spectrum, a curriculum
that intentionally cultivates a variety of kinds of intelligence, was
then being developed. Project Spectrum recognizes that the human | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fb873b93830b-1 | then being developed. Project Spectrum recognizes that the human
repertoire of abilities goes far beyond the three R’s, the narrow band
of word-and-number skills that schools traditionally focus on. It
acknowledges that capacities such as Judy’s social perceptiveness are
talents that an education can nurture rather than ignore or even
frustrate. By encouraging children to develop a full range of the
abilities that they will actually draw on to succeed, or use simply to
be fulfilled in what they do, school becomes an education in life skills.
The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is Howard Gardner,
a psychologist at the Harvard School of Education.
7
“The time has
come,” Gardner told me, “to broaden our notion of the spectrum of
talents. The single most important contribution education can make to
a child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents
best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We’ve
completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an
education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a
college professor. And we evaluate everyone along the way according
to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fb873b93830b-2 | to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should
spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to
identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many,
many different abilities that will help you get there.”
8 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b8ccdf7a9fbb-0 | If anyone sees the limits of the old ways of thinking about
intelligence, it is Gardner. He points out that the glory days of the IQ
tests began during World War I, when two million American men
were sorted out through the first mass
paper-and-pencil form of the IQ
test, freshly developed by Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford.
This led to decades of what Gardner calls the “IQ way of thinking”:
“that people are either smart or not, are born that way, that there’s
nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you
are one of the smart ones or not. The SAT test for college admissions
is based on the same notion of a single kind of aptitude that
determines your future. This way of thinking permeates society.”
Gardner’s influential 1983 book
Frames of Mind was
a manifesto
refuting the IQ view; it proposed that there was not just one,
monolithic kind of intelligence that was crucial for life success, but
rather a wide spectrum of intelligences, with seven key varieties. His
list includes the two standard academic kinds, verbal and
mathematical-logical alacrity, but it goes on to include the spatial | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b8ccdf7a9fbb-1 | capacity seen in, say, an outstanding artist or architect; the kinesthetic
genius displayed in the physical fluidity and grace of a Martha
Graham or Magic Johnson; and the musical gifts of a Mozart or YoYo
Ma. Rounding out the list are two faces of what Gardner calls “the
personal intelligences”: interpersonal skills, like those of a great
therapist such as Carl Rogers or a world-class leader such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., and the “intrapsychic” capacity that could emerge,
on the one hand, in the brilliant insights of Sigmund Freud, or, with
less fanfare, in the inner contentment that arises from attuning one’s
life to be in keeping with one’s true feelings.
The operative word in this view of intelligences is
multiple:
Gardner’s model pushes way beyond the standard concept of IQ as a
single, immutable factor. It recognizes that the tests that tyrannized us
as we went through school—from the achievement tests that sorted us
out into those who would be shunted toward technical schools and
those destined for college, to the SATs that determined what, if any,
college we would be allowed to attend—are based on a limited notion
of intelligence, one out of touch with the true range of skills and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b8ccdf7a9fbb-2 | of intelligence, one out of touch with the true range of skills and
abilities that matter for life over and beyond IQ.
Gardner acknowledges that seven is an arbitrary figure for the
variety of intelligences; there is no magic number to the multiplicity
of human talents. At one point, Gardner and his research colleagues
had stretched these seven to a list of twenty different varieties of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1758e2f93e21-0 | intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence, for example, broke down into
four distinct abilities: leadership, the ability to nurture relationships
and keep friends, the ability to resolve conflicts, and skill at the kind
of social analysis that four-year-old Judy excels at.
This multifaceted view of intelligence offers a richer picture of a
child’s ability and potential for success than the standard IQ. When
Spectrum students were evaluated on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence
Scale—once the
gold standard of IQ tests—and again by a battery
designed to measure Gardner’s spectrum of intelligences, there was no
significant relationship between children’s scores on the two tests.
9
The five children with the highest IQs (from 125 to 133) showed a
variety of profiles on the ten strengths measured by the Spectrum test.
For example, of the five “smartest” children according to the IQ tests,
one was strong in three areas, three had strengths in two areas, and
one “smart” child had just one Spectrum strength. Those strengths
were scattered: four of these children’s strengths were in music, two
in the visual arts, one in social understanding, one in logic, two in
language. None of the five high-IQ kids were strong in movement, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1758e2f93e21-1 | numbers, or mechanics; movement and numbers were actually weak
spots for two of these five.
Gardner’s conclusion was that “the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
did not predict successful performance across or on a consistent subset
of Spectrum activities.” On the other hand, the Spectrum scores give
parents and teachers clear guidance about the realms that these
children will take a spontaneous interest in, and where they will do
well enough to develop the passions that could one day lead beyond
proficiency to mastery.
Gardner’s thinking about the multiplicity of intelligence continues
to evolve. Some ten years after he first published his theory, Gardner
gave these nutshell summaries of the personal intelligences:
Interpersonal
intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates
them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. Successful salespeople,
politicians, teachers, clinicians, and religious leaders are all likely to be individuals
with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence.
Intra
personal intelligence … is a
correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an accurate, veridical model
of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.
10
In another rendering, Gardner noted that the core of interpersonal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
1758e2f93e21-2 | 10
In another rendering, Gardner noted that the core of interpersonal
intelligence includes the “capacities to discern and respond | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
205fa142045c-0 | appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires
of other people.” In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-
knowledge, he included “access to one’s own feelings and the ability
to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide
behavior.”
11
SPOCK VS. DATA: WHEN COGNITION IS NOT ENOUGH
There is one dimension of personal intelligence that is broadly pointed
to, but little explored, in Gardner’s elaborations: the role of emotions.
Perhaps this is so because, as Gardner suggested to me, his work is so
strongly informed by a cognitive-science model of mind. Thus his
view of these intelligences emphasizes cognition—the
understanding
of
oneself and of others in motives, in habits of working, and in putting
that insight into use in conducting one’s own life and getting along
with others. But like the kinesthetic realm, where physical brilliance
manifests itself nonverbally, the realm of the emotions extends, too,
beyond the reach of language and cognition.
While there is ample room in Gardner’s descriptions of the personal
intelligences for insight into the play of emotions and mastery in
managing them, Gardner and those who work with him have not
pursued in great detail the role of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
205fa142045c-1 | pursued in great detail the role of
feeling
in these intelligences,
focusing more on cognitions
about
feeling. This focus, perhaps
unintentionally, leaves unexplored the rich sea of emotions that
makes the inner life and relationships so complex, so compelling, and
so often puzzling. And it leaves yet to be plumbed both the sense in
which there is intelligence
in
the emotions and the sense in which
intelligence can be brought
to
emotions.
Gardner’s emphasis on the cognitive elements in the personal
intelligences reflects the zeitgeist of psychology that has shaped his
views. Psychology’s overemphasis on cognition even in the realm of
emotion is, in part, due to a quirk in the history of that science.
During the middle decades of this century academic psychology was
dominated by behaviorists in the mold of B. F. Skinner, who felt that
only behavior that could be seen objectively, from the outside, could
be studied with scientific accuracy. The behaviorists ruled all inner
life, including emotions, out-of-bounds for science.
Then, with the coming in the late 1960s of the “cognitive
revolution,” the focus of psychological science turned to how the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ec28ecfcfd55-0 | mind registers and stores information, and the nature of intelligence.
But emotions were still off-limits. Conventional wisdom among
cognitive scientists held that intelligence entails a cold, hard-nosed
processing of fact. It is hyperrational, rather like
Star Treks
Mr. Spock,
the archetype of dry information bytes unmuddied by feeling,
embodying the idea that emotions have no place in intelligence and
only muddle our picture of mental life.
The cognitive scientists who embraced this view have been seduced
by the computer as the operative model of mind, forgetting that, in
reality, the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of
neurochemicals,
nothing like the sanitized, orderly silicon that has
spawned the guiding metaphor for mind. The predominant models
among cognitive scientists of how the mind processes information
have lacked an acknowledgment that rationality is guided by—and
can be swamped by—feeling. The cognitive model is, in this regard,
an impoverished view of the mind, one that fails to explain the Sturm
und Drang of feelings that brings flavor to the intellect. In order to
persist in this view, cognitive scientists themselves have had to ignore | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ec28ecfcfd55-1 | the relevance for their models of mind of their personal hopes and
fears, their marital squabbles and professional jealousies—the wash of
feeling that gives life its flavor and its urgencies, and which in every
moment biases exactly how (and how well or poorly) information is
processed.
The lopsided scientific vision of an emotionally flat mental life—
which has guided the last eighty years of research on intelligence—is
gradually changing as psychology has begun to recognize the essential
role of feeling in thinking. Rather like the Spockish character Data in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, psychology is coming to appreciate the
power and virtues of emotions in mental life, as well as their dangers.
After all, as Data sees (to his own dismay, could he feel dismay), his
cool logic fails to bring the right
human
solution. Our humanity is
most evident in our feelings; Data seeks to feel, knowing that
something essential is missing. He wants friendship, loyalty; like the
Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
, he lacks a heart. Lacking the lyrical
sense that feeling brings, Data can play music or write poetry with
technical virtuosity, but not feel its passion. The lesson of Data’s | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ec28ecfcfd55-2 | yearning for yearning itself is that the higher values of the human
heart—faith, hope, devotion, love—are missing entirely from the
coldly cognitive view. Emotions enrich; a model of mind that leaves
them out is impoverished. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7540fbb48d77-0 | When I asked Gardner about his emphasis on thoughts about
feelings, or metacognition, more than on emotions themselves, he
acknowledged that he tended to view intelligence in a cognitive way,
but told me, “When I first wrote about the personal intelligences, I
was
talking about emotion, especially in my notion of intrapersonal
intelligence—one component is emotionally tuning in to yourself. It’s
the visceral-feeling signals you get that are essential for interpersonal
intelligence. But as it has developed in practice, the theory of multiple
intelligence has evolved to focus more on metacognition”—that is,
awareness of one’s mental processes—“rather than on the full range of
emotional abilities.”
Even so, Gardner appreciates how crucial these emotional and
relationship abilities are in the rough-and-tumble of life. He points out
that “many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if
the former have
poor intrapersonal intelligence and the latter have a
high one. And in the day-to-day world no intelligence is more
important than the interpersonal. If you don’t have it, you’ll make
poor choices about who to marry, what job to take, and so on. We
need to train children in the personal intelligences in school.” | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7540fbb48d77-1 | need to train children in the personal intelligences in school.”
CAN EMOTIONS BE INTELLIGENT?
To get a fuller understanding of just what such training might be like,
we must turn to other theorists who agree with Gardner’s view—most
notably psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer. They have
mapped in great detail the ways in which we can bring intelligence to
our emotions.
12
This endeavor is not new; over the years even the
most ardent theorists of IQ have occasionally tried to bring emotions
within the domain of intelligence, rather than seeing “emotion” and
“intelligence” as an inherent contradiction in terms. Thus E. L.
Thorndike, an eminent psychologist who was also influential in
popularizing the notion of IQ in the 1920s and 1930s, proposed in a
Harper’s Magazine
article that one aspect of emotional intelligence,
“social” intelligence—the ability to understand others and “act wisely
in human relations”—was itself an aspect of a person’s IQ. Other
psychologists of the time took a more cynical view of social
intelligence, seeing it in terms of skills for manipulating other people
—getting them to do what you want, whether they want to or not. But | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
7540fbb48d77-2 | neither of these formulations of social intelligence held much sway | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
71b335d5ed42-0 | with theorists of IQ, and by 1960 an influential textbook on
intelligence tests pronounced social intelligence a “useless” concept.
But personal intelligence would not be ignored, mainly because it
makes both intuitive and common sense. For example, when Yale
psychologist Robert Sternberg asked people to describe an “intelligent
person,” practical people skills were among the main traits listed.
More systematic research by Sternberg led him back to Thorndike’s
conclusion: that social intelligence is both distinct from academic
abilities and a key part of what makes people do well in the
practicalities of life. Among the practical intelligences that are, for
instance, so highly valued in the workplace is the kind of sensitivity
that allows effective managers to pick up tacit messages.
13
In recent years a growing group of psychologists has come to
similar conclusions, agreeing with Gardner that the old concepts of IQ
revolved around a narrow band of linguistic and math skills, and that
doing well on IQ tests was most directly a predictor of success in the
classroom or as a professor but less and less so as life’s paths diverged
from academe. These
psychologists—Sternberg and Salovey among
them—have taken a wider view of intelligence, trying to reinvent it in | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
71b335d5ed42-1 | terms of what it takes to lead life successfully. And that line of
enquiry leads back to an appreciation of just how crucial “personal”
or emotional intelligence is.
Salovey, with his colleague John Mayer, offered an elaborated
definition of emotional intelligence, expanding these abilities into five
main domains:
14
1.
Knowing one’s emotions
. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling
as
it happens
—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As we will see in
Chapter 4
, the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is
crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to
notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater
certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a
surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from
whom to marry to what job to take.
2.
Managing emotions
. Handling feelings so they are appropriate is
an ability that builds on self-awareness.
Chapter 5
will examine the
capacity to soothe oneself, to shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or
irritability—and the consequences of failure at this basic emotional
skill. People who are poor in this ability are constantly battling | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
71b335d5ed42-2 | feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back far | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fb45dae0bdeb-0 | more quickly from life’s setbacks and upsets.
3.
Motivating oneself
. As
Chapter 6
will show, marshaling emotions
in the service of a goal is essential for paying attention, for self-
motivation and mastery, and for creativity. Emotional self-control—
delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness—underlies
accomplishment of every sort. And being able to get into the “flow”
state enables outstanding performance of all kinds. People who have
this skill tend to be more highly productive and effective in whatever
they undertake.
4.
Recognizing emotions in others
. Empathy, another ability that
builds on emotional self-awareness, is the fundamental “people skill.”
Chapter 7
will investigate the roots of empathy, the social cost of
being emotionally tone-deaf, and the reason empathy kindles
altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to the subtle
social signals that indicate what others need or want. This makes
them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales,
and management.
5.
Handling relationships
. The art of relationships is, in large part,
skill in managing emotions in others.
Chapter 8
looks at social | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
fb45dae0bdeb-1 | Chapter 8
looks at social
competence and incompetence, and the specific skills involved. These
are the abilities that undergird popularity, leadership, and
interpersonal effectiveness. People
who excel in these skills do well at
anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others; they are
social stars.
Of course, people differ in their abilities in each of these domains;
some of us may be quite adept at handling, say, our own anxiety, but
relatively inept at soothing someone else’s upsets. The underlying
basis for our level of ability is, no doubt, neural, but as we will see,
the brain is remarkably plastic, constantly learning. Lapses in
emotional skills can be remedied: to a great extent each of these
domains represents a body of habit and response that, with the right
effort, can be improved on.
IQ AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: PURE TYPES
IQ and emotional intelligence are not opposing competencies, but
rather separate ones. We all mix intellect and emotional acuity;
people with a high IQ but low emotional intelligence (or low IQ and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
59f5337a4034-0 | high emotional intelligence) are, despite the stereotypes, relatively
rare. Indeed, there is a slight correlation between IQ and some aspects
of emotional intelligence—though small enough to make clear these
are largely independent entities.
Unlike the familiar tests for IQ, there is, as yet, no single paper-and-
pencil test that yields an “emotional intelligence score” and there may
never be one. Although there is ample research on each of its
components, some of them, such as empathy, are best tested by
sampling a person’s actual ability at the task—for example, by having
them read a person’s feelings from a video of their facial expressions.
Still, using a measure for what he calls “ego resilience” which is quite
similar to emotional intelligence (it includes the main social and
emotional competences), Jack Block, a psychologist at the University
of California at Berkeley, has made a comparison of two theoretical
pure types: people high in IQ versus people high in emotional
aptitudes.
15
The differences are telling.
The high-IQ pure type (that is, setting aside emotional intelligence)
is almost a caricature of the intellectual, adept in the realm of mind
but inept in the personal world. The profiles differ slightly for men | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
59f5337a4034-1 | and women. The high-IQ male is typified—no surprise—by a wide
range of intellectual interests and abilities. He is ambitious and
productive, predictable and dogged, and untroubled by concerns
about himself. He also tends to be critical and condescending,
fastidious and inhibited, uneasy with sexuality and sensual
experience, unexpressive and detached, and emotionally bland and
cold.
By contrast, men who are high in emotional intelligence are socially
poised, outgoing and cheerful, not prone to fearfulness or worried
rumination. They have a notable capacity for commitment to people
or causes, for taking responsibility, and for having an ethical outlook;
they are sympathetic and caring in their relationships. Their
emotional life is rich, but appropriate; they are comfortable with
themselves, others, and the social universe they live in.
Purely high-IQ women have the expected intellectual confidence,
are fluent in expressing their thoughts, value intellectual matters, and
have a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic interests. They also
tend to be introspective, prone to anxiety, rumination, and guilt, and
hesitate to express their anger openly (though they do so indirectly). | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
59f5337a4034-2 | Emotionally intelligent women, by contrast, tend to be assertive and
express their feelings directly, and to feel positive about themselves; | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
eb9594491f20-0 | life holds meaning for them. Like the men, they are outgoing and
gregarious, and express their feelings appropriately (rather than, say,
in outbursts they later regret); they adapt well to stress. Their social
poise lets them easily reach out to new people; they are comfortable
enough with themselves to be playful, spontaneous, and open to
sensual experience. Unlike the women purely high in IQ, they rarely
feel anxious or guilty, or sink into rumination.
These portraits, of course, are extremes—all of us mix IQ and
emotional intelligence in varying degrees. But they offer an instructive
look at what each of these dimensions adds separately to a person’s
qualities. To the degree a person has both cognitive and emotional
intelligence, these pictures merge. Still, of the two, emotional
intelligence adds far more of the qualities that make us more fully
human. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dcc92497e9d7-0 | 4
Know Thyself
A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a
Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk
replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout—I can’t waste my time
with the likes of you!”
His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling
his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your
impertinence.” “That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.”
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about
the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed
his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”
The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state
illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling
and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates’s
injunction “Know thyself” speaks to this keystone of emotional
intelligence: awareness of one’s own feelings as they occur.
It might seem at first glance that our feelings are obvious; more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
dcc92497e9d7-1 | thoughtful reflection reminds us of times we have been all too
oblivious to what we really felt about something, or awoke to these
feelings late in the game. Psychologists use the rather ponderous term
metacognition
to refer to an awareness of thought process, and
metamood
to mean awareness of one’s own emotions. I prefer the term
self-awareness
, in the sense of an ongoing attention to one’s internal
states.
1
In this self-reflexive awareness mind observes and investigates
experience itself, including the emotions.
2
This quality of awareness is akin to what Freud described as an
“evenly hovering attention,” and which he commended to those who
would do
psychoanalysis. Such attention takes in whatever passes
through awareness with impartiality, as an interested yet unreactive
witness. Some psychoanalysts call it the “observing ego,” the capacity
of self-awareness that allows the analyst to monitor his own reactions
to what the patient is saying, and which the process of free | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
84e72f91b32c-0 | association nurtures in the patient.
3
Such self-awareness would seem to require an activated neocortex,
particularly the language areas, attuned to identify and name the
emotions being aroused. Self-awareness is not an attention that gets
carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is
perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-
reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions. William Styron seems
to be describing something like this faculty of mind in writing of his
deep depression, telling of a sense “of being accompanied by a second
self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his
double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion
struggles.”
4
At its best, self-observation allows just such an equanimous
awareness of passionate or turbulent feelings. At a minimum, it
manifests itself simply as a slight stepping-back from experience, a
parallel stream of consciousness that is “meta”: hovering above or
beside the main flow, aware of what is happening rather than being
immersed and lost in it. It is the difference between, for example,
being murderously enraged at someone and having the self-reflexive
thought “This is anger I’m feeling” even as you are enraged. In terms | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
84e72f91b32c-1 | of the neural mechanics of awareness, this subtle shift in mental
activity presumably signals that neocortical circuits are actively
monitoring the emotion, a first step in gaining some control. This
awareness of emotions is the fundamental emotional competence on
which others, such as emotional self-control, build.
Self-awareness, in short, means being “aware of both our mood and
our thoughts about that mood,” in the words of John Mayer, a
University of New Hampshire psychologist who, with Yale’s Peter
Salovey, is a coformulator of the theory of emotional intelligence.
5
Self-awareness can be a nonreactive, nonjudgmental attention to inner
states. But Mayer finds that this sensibility also can be less
equanimous; typical thoughts bespeaking emotional self-awareness
include “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I’m thinking good things to cheer
up,” and, for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting thought
“Don’t think about it” in reaction to something highly upsetting.
Although there is a logical distinction between being aware of
feelings and acting to change them, Mayer finds that for all practical
purposes the two usually go hand-in-hand: to recognize a foul mood is
to want to get out of it. This recognition, however, is distinct from the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
84e72f91b32c-2 | efforts we make to keep from
acting on an emotional impulse. When | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
849d13330eac-0 | we say “Stop that!” to a child whose anger has led him to hit a
playmate, we may stop the hitting, but the anger still simmers. The
child’s thoughts are still fixated on the trigger for the anger—“But he
stole my toy!”—and the anger continues unabated. Self-awareness has
a more powerful effect on strong, aversive feelings: the realization
“This is anger I’m feeling” offers a greater degree of freedom—not just
the option not to act on it, but the added option to try to let go of it.
Mayer finds that people tend to fall into distinctive styles for
attending to and dealing with their emotions:
6
•
Self-aware
. Aware of their moods as they are having them, these
people understandably have some sophistication about their
emotional lives. Their clarity about emotions may undergird other
personality traits: they are autonomous and sure of their own
boundaries, are in good psychological health, and tend to have a
positive outlook on life. When they get into a bad mood, they don’t
ruminate and obsess about it, and are able to get out of it sooner. In
short, their mindfulness helps them manage their emotions.
•
Engulfed | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
849d13330eac-1 | •
Engulfed
. These are people who often feel swamped by their
emotions and helpless to escape them, as though their moods have
taken charge. They are mercurial and not very aware of their feelings,
so that they are lost in them rather than having some perspective. As
a result, they do little to try to escape bad moods, feeling that they
have no control over their emotional life. They often feel
overwhelmed and emotionally out of control.
•
Accepting
. While these people are often clear about what they are
feeling, they also tend to be accepting of their moods, and so don’t try
to change them. There seem to be two branches of the accepting type:
those who are usually in good moods and so have little motivation to
change them, and people who, despite their clarity about their moods,
are susceptible to bad ones but accept them with a laissez-faire
attitude, doing nothing to change them despite their distress—a
pattern found among, say, depressed people who are resigned to their
despair.
THE PASSIONATE AND THE INDIFFERENT
Imagine for a moment that you’re on an airplane flying from New | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
849d13330eac-2 | Imagine for a moment that you’re on an airplane flying from New
York to San Francisco. It’s been a smooth flight, but as you approach | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c0f882cd8cc-0 | the Rockies the pilot’s voice comes over the plane intercom. “Ladies
and gentlemen, there’s some turbulence ahead. Please return to your
seats and fasten your seatbelts.”
And then the plane hits the
turbulence, which is rougher than you’ve ever endured—the airplane
is tossed up and down and side to side like a beach ball in the waves.
The question is, what do you do? Are you the kind of person who
buries yourself in your book or magazine, or continues watching the
movie, tuning out the turbulence? Or are you likely to take out the
emergency card and review the precautions, or watch the flight
attendants to see if they show signs of panic, or strain to hear the
engines to see if there’s anything worrisome?
Which of these responses comes more naturally to us is a sign of our
favored attentional stance under duress. The airplane scenario itself is
an item from a psychological test developed by Suzanne Miller, a
psychologist at Temple University, to assess whether people tend to be
vigilant, attending carefully to every detail of a distressing
predicament, or, in contrast, deal with such anxious moments by
trying to distract themselves. These two attentional stances toward | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c0f882cd8cc-1 | distress have very different consequences for how people experience
their own emotional reactions. Those who tune in under duress can,
by the very act of attending so carefully, unwittingly amplify the
magnitude of their own reactions—especially if their tuning in is
devoid of the equanimity of self-awareness. The result is that their
emotions seem all the more intense. Those who tune out, who distract
themselves, notice less about their own reactions, and so minimize the
experience of their emotional response, if not the size of the response
itself.
At the extremes, this means that for some people emotional
awareness is overwhelming, while for others it barely exists. Consider
the college student who, one evening, spotted a fire that had broken
out in his dorm, went to get a fire extinguisher, and put the fire out.
Nothing unusual—except that on his way to get the extinguisher and
then on the way back to the fire, he walked instead of running. The
reason? He didn’t feel there was any urgency.
This story was told to me by Edward Diener, a University of Illinois
at Urbana psychologist who has been studying the
intensity
with
which people experience their emotions.
7
The college student stood | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5c0f882cd8cc-2 | 7
The college student stood
out in his collection of case studies as one of the least intense Diener
had ever encountered. He was, essentially, a man without passions,
someone who goes through life feeling little or nothing, even about an | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c0ce423d34db-0 | emergency like a fire.
By contrast, consider a woman at the opposite end of Diener’s
spectrum. When she once lost her favorite pen, she was distraught for
days. Another time she was so thrilled on seeing an ad for a big sale
on women’s shoes at an expensive store that she dropped what she
was doing, hopped in her car, and drove three hours to the store in
Chicago.
Diener finds that women, in general, feel both positive and negative
emotions more strongly than do men. And, sex differences aside,
emotional life is richer for those who notice more. For one thing, this
enhanced emotional sensitivity means that for such people the least
provocation unleashes emotional storms, whether heavenly or hellish,
while those at the other extreme barely experience any feeling even
under the most dire circumstances.
THE MAN WITHOUT FEELINGS
Gary infuriated his fiancée, Ellen, because even though he was
intelligent, thoughtful, and a successful surgeon, Gary was
emotionally flat, completely unresponsive to any and all shows of
feeling. While Gary could speak brilliantly of science and art, when it
came to his feelings—even for Ellen—he fell silent. Try as she might | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c0ce423d34db-1 | to elicit some passion from him, Gary was impassive, oblivious. “I
don’t naturally express my feelings,” Gary told the therapist he saw at
Ellen’s insistence. When it came to emotional life, he added, “I don’t
know what to talk about; I have no strong feelings, either positive or
negative.”
Ellen was not alone in being frustrated by Gary’s aloofness; as he
confided to his therapist, he was unable to speak openly about his
feelings with anyone in his life. The reason: He did not know what he
felt in the first place. So far as he could tell, he had no angers, no
sadnesses, no joys.
8
As his own therapist observes, this emotional blankness makes Gary
and others like him colorless, bland: “They bore everybody. That’s
why their wives send them into treatment.” Gary’s emotional flatness
exemplifies what psychiatrists call
alexithymia
, from the Greek
a
-for
“lack,”
lexis for
“word,” and
thymos for
“emotion.” Such people lack
words for their feelings. Indeed, they seem to lack feelings altogether, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
c0ce423d34db-2 | although this may actually be because of their inability to
express | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
324549eb3a06-0 | emotion rather than from an absence of emotion altogether. Such
people were first noticed by psychoanalysts puzzled by a class of
patients who were untreatable by that method because they reported
no feelings, no fantasies, and colorless dreams—in short, no inner
emotional life to talk about at all.
9
The clinical features that mark
alexithymics include having difficulty describing feelings—their own
or anyone else’s—and a sharply limited emotional vocabulary.
10
What’s more, they have trouble discriminating among emotions as
well as between emotion and bodily sensation, so that they might tell
of having butterflies in the stomach, palpitations,
sweating, and
dizziness—but they would not know they are feeling anxious.
“They give the impression of being different, alien beings, having
come from an entirely different world, living in the midst of a society
which is dominated by feelings,” is the description given by Dr. Peter
Sifneos, the Harvard psychiatrist who in 1972 coined the term
alexithymia
.
11
Alexithymics rarely cry, for example, but if they do
their tears are copious. Still, they are bewildered if asked what the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
324549eb3a06-1 | tears are all about. One patient with alexithymia was so upset after
seeing a movie about a woman with eight children who was dying of
cancer that she cried herself to sleep. When her therapist suggested
that perhaps she was upset because the movie reminded her of her
own mother, who was in actuality dying of cancer, the woman sat
motionless, bewildered and silent. When her therapist then asked her
how she felt at that moment, she said she felt “awful,” but couldn’t
clarify her feelings beyond that. And, she added, from time to time
she found herself crying, but never knew exactly what she was crying
about.
12
And that is the nub of the problem. It is not that alexithymics never
feel, but that they are unable to know—and especially unable to put
into words—precisely what their feelings are. They are utterly lacking
in the fundamental skill of emotional intelligence, self-awareness—
knowing what we are feeling as emotions roil within us. Alexithymics
belie the common-sense notion that it is perfectly self-evident what
we are feeling: they haven’t a clue. When something—or more likely, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
324549eb3a06-2 | someone—does move them to feeling, they find the experience
baffling and overwhelming, something to avoid at all costs. Feelings
come to them, when they come at all, as a befuddling bundle of
distress; as the patient who cried at the movie put it, they feel
“awful,” but can’t say exactly which
kind
of awful it is they feel.
This basic confusion about feelings often seems to lead them to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
884271484913-0 | complain of vague medical problems when they are actually
experiencing emotional distress—a phenomenon known in psychiatry
as
somaticizing
, mistaking an emotional ache for a physical one (and
different from a psychosomatic disease, in which emotional problems
cause genuine medical ones). Indeed, much of the psychiatric interest
in alexithymics is in weeding them out from among those who come
to doctors seeking help, for they are prone to lengthy—and fruitless—
pursuit of a medical diagnosis and treatment for what is actually an
emotional problem.
While no one can as yet say for sure what causes alexithymia, Dr.
Sifneos proposes a disconnection between the limbic system and the
neocortex, particularly its verbal centers, which fits well with what we
are learning about
the emotional brain. Patients with severe seizures
who had that connection surgically severed to relieve their symptoms,
notes Sifneos, became emotionally flat, like people with alexithymia,
unable to put their feelings into words and suddenly devoid of fantasy
life. In short, though the circuits of the emotional brain may react
with feelings, the neocortex is not able to sort out these feelings and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
884271484913-1 | add the nuance of language to them. As Henry Roth observed in his
novel
Call It Sleep
about this power of language, “If you could put
words to what you felt, it was yours.” The corollary, of course, is the
alexithymic’s dilemma: having no words for feelings means not
making the feelings your own.
IN PRAISE OF GUT FEELING
Elliot’s tumor, growing just behind his forehead, was the size of a
small orange; surgery removed it completely. Although the surgery
was declared a success, afterward people who knew him well said that
Elliot was no longer Elliot—he had undergone a drastic personality
change. Once a successful corporate lawyer, Elliot could no longer
hold a job. His wife left him. Squandering his savings in fruitless
investments, he was reduced to living in a spare bedroom at his
brother’s home.
There was a puzzling pattern to Elliot’s problem. Intellectually he
was as bright as ever, but he used his time terribly, getting lost in
minor details; he seemed to have lost all sense of priority. Reprimands
made no difference; he was fired from a succession of legal jobs. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
884271484913-2 | Though extensive intellectual tests found nothing wrong with Elliot’s | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
896420ecd725-0 | mental faculties, he went to see a neurologist anyway, hoping that
discovery of a neurological problem might get him the disability
benefits to which he felt he was entitled. Otherwise the conclusion
seemed to be that he was just a malingerer.
Antonio Damasio, the neurologist Elliot consulted, was struck by
one element missing from Elliot’s mental repertoire: though nothing
was wrong with his logic, memory, attention, or any other cognitive
ability, Elliot was virtually oblivious to his feelings about what had
happened to him.
13
Most strikingly, Elliot could narrate the tragic
events of his life with complete dispassion, as though he were an
onlooker to the losses and failures of his past—without a note of
regret or sadness, frustration or anger at life’s unfairness. His own
tragedy brought him no pain; Damasio felt more upset by Elliot’s story
than did Elliot himself.
The source of this emotional unawareness, Damasio concluded, was
the
removal, along with the brain tumor, of part of Elliot’s prefrontal
lobes. In effect, the surgery had severed ties between the lower | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
896420ecd725-1 | centers of the emotional brain, especially the amygdala and related
circuits, and the thinking abilities of the neocortex. Elliot’s thinking
had become computerlike, able to make every step in the calculus of a
decision, but unable to assign
values
to differing possibilities. Every
option was neutral. And that overly dispassionate reasoning,
suspected Damasio, was the core of Elliot’s problem: too little
awareness of his own feelings about things made Elliot’s reasoning
faulty.
The handicap showed up even in mundane decisions. When
Damasio tried to choose a time and date for the next appointment
with Elliot, the result was a muddle of indecisiveness: Elliot could find
arguments for and against every date and time that Damasio
proposed, but could not choose among them. At the rational level,
there were perfectly good reasons for objecting to or accepting
virtually every possible time for the appointment. But Elliot lacked
any sense of how
he felt
about any of the times. Lacking that
awareness of his own feelings, he had no preferences at all.
One lesson from Elliot’s indecisiveness is the crucial role of feeling
in navigating the endless stream of life’s personal decisions. While | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
896420ecd725-2 | strong feelings can create havoc in reasoning, the
lack
of awareness of
feeling can also be ruinous, especially in weighing the decisions on
which our destiny largely depends: what career to pursue, whether to
stay with a secure job or switch to one that is riskier but more | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5cff61dd3d24-0 | interesting, whom to date or marry, where to live, which apartment to
rent or house to buy—and on and on through life. Such decisions
cannot be made well through sheer rationality; they require gut
feeling, and the emotional wisdom garnered through past experiences.
Formal logic alone can never work as the basis for deciding whom to
marry or trust or even what job to take; these are realms where reason
without feeling is blind.
The intuitive signals that guide us in these moments come in the
form of limbic-driven surges from the viscera that Damasio calls
“somatic markers”—literally, gut feelings. The somatic marker is a
kind of automatic alarm, typically calling attention to a potential
danger from a given course of action. More often than not these
markers steer us
away
from some choice that experience warns us
against, though they can also alert us to a golden opportunity. We
usually do not, at that moment, recall what specific experiences
formed this negative feeling; all we need is the signal that a given
potential course of action could be disastrous. Whenever such a gut
feeling rises up, we can immediately drop or pursue that avenue of
consideration
with greater confidence, and so pare down our array of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5cff61dd3d24-1 | with greater confidence, and so pare down our array of
choices to a more manageable decision matrix. The key to sounder
personal decision-making, in short: being attuned to our feelings.
PLUMBING THE UNCONSCIOUS
Elliot’s emotional vacuity suggests that there may be a spectrum of
people’s ability to sense their emotions as they have them. By the
logic of neuroscience, if the absence of a neural circuit leads to a
deficit in an ability, then the relative strength or weakness of that
same circuit in people whose brains are intact should lead to
comparable levels of competence in that same ability. In terms of the
role of prefrontal circuits in emotional attunement, this suggests that
for neurological reasons some of us may more easily detect the
stirring of fear or joy than do others, and so be more emotionally self-
aware.
It may be that a talent for psychological introspection hinges on this
same circuitry. Some of us are naturally more attuned to the
emotional mind’s special symbolic modes: metaphor and simile, along
with poetry, song, and fable, are all cast in the language of the heart.
So too are dreams and myths, in which loose associations determine | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce016344910b-0 | the flow of narrative, abiding by the logic of the emotional mind.
Those who have a natural attunement to their own heart’s voice—the
language of emotion—are sure to be more adept at articulating its
messages, whether as a novelist, songwriter, or psychotherapist. This
inner attunement should make them more gifted in giving voice to the
“wisdom of the unconscious”—the felt meanings of our dreams and
fantasies, the symbols that embody our deepest wishes.
Self-awareness is fundamental to psychological insight; this is the
faculty that much of psychotherapy means to strengthen. Indeed,
Howard Gardner’s model for intrapsychic intelligence is Sigmund
Freud, the great mapper of the psyche’s secret dynamics. As Freud
made clear, much of emotional life is unconscious; feelings that stir
within us do not always cross the threshold into awareness. Empirical
verification of this psychological axiom comes, for instance, from
experiments on unconscious emotions, such as the remarkable finding
that people form definite likings for things they do not even realize
they have seen before. Any emotion can be—and often is—
unconscious.
The physiological beginnings of an emotion typically occur before a
person is consciously aware of the feeling itself. For example, when | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce016344910b-1 | people who fear snakes are shown pictures of snakes, sensors on their
skin will detect
sweat breaking out, a sign of anxiety, though they say
they do not feel any fear. The sweat shows up in such people even
when the picture of a snake is presented so rapidly that they have no
conscious idea of what, exactly, they just saw, let alone that they are
beginning to get anxious. As such preconscious emotional stirrings
continue to build, they eventually become strong enough to break into
awareness. Thus there are two levels of emotion, conscious and
unconscious. The moment of an emotion coming into awareness
marks its registering as such in the frontal cortex.
14
Emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of awareness can have
a powerful impact on how we perceive and react, even though we
have no idea they are at work. Take someone who is annoyed by a
rude encounter early in the day, and then is peevish for hours
afterward, taking affront where none is intended and snapping at
people for no real reason. He may well be oblivious to his continuing
irritability and will be surprised if someone calls attention to it, | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
ce016344910b-2 | though it stews just out of his awareness and dictates his curt replies.
But once that reaction is brought into awareness—once it registers in
the cortex—he can evaluate things anew, decide to shrug off the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
8825233d7e0b-0 | feelings left earlier in the day, and change his outlook and mood. In
this way emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next
fundamental of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad
mood. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
120c5d1b25bc-0 | 5
Passion’s Slaves
Thou hast been …
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Has taken with equal thanks
…
. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, aye, in my heart of hearts
As I do thee
.…
—H
AMLET TO HIS FRIEND
H
ORATIO
A sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the emotional
storms that the buffeting of Fortune brings rather than being
“passion’s slave,” has been praised as a virtue since the time of Plato.
The ancient Greek word for it was
sophrosyne
, “care and intelligence
in conducting one’s life; a tempered balance and wisdom,” as Page
DuBois, a Greek scholar, translates it. The Romans and the early
Christian church called it
temperantia
, temperance, the restraining of
emotional excess. The goal is balance, not emotional suppression:
every feeling has its value and significance. A life without passion
would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the
richness of life itself. But, as Aristotle observed, what is wanted is
appropriate
emotion, feeling proportionate to circumstance. When | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
120c5d1b25bc-1 | emotion, feeling proportionate to circumstance. When
emotions are too muted they create dullness and distance; when out
of control, too extreme and persistent, they become pathological, as in
immobilizing depression, overwhelming anxiety, raging anger, manic
agitation.
Indeed, keeping our distressing emotions in check is the key to
emotional well-being; extremes—emotions that wax too intensely or
for too long-undermine our stability. Of course, it is not that we
should feel only one kind
of emotion; being happy all the time
somehow suggests the blandness of those smiley-face badges that had
a faddish moment in the 1970s. There is much to be said for the
constructive contribution of suffering to creative and spiritual life;
suffering can temper the soul. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27e2f32e1928-0 | Downs as well as ups spice life, but need to be in balance. In the
calculus of the heart it is the ratio of positive to negative emotions
that determines the sense of well-being—at least that is the verdict
from studies of mood in which hundreds of men and women have
carried beepers that reminded them at random times to record their
emotions at that moment.
1
It is not that people need to avoid
unpleasant feelings to feel content, but rather that stormy feelings not
go unchecked, displacing all pleasant moods. People who have strong
episodes of anger or depression can still feel a sense of well-being if
they have a countervailing set of equally joyous or happy times. These
studies also affirm the independence of emotional from academic
intelligence, finding little or no relationship between grades or IQ and
people’s emotional well-being.
Just as there is a steady murmur of background thoughts in the
mind, there is a constant emotional hum; beep someone at six
A.M
. or
seven
P.M
. and he will always be in some mood or other. Of course, on
any two mornings someone can have very different moods; but when
people’s moods are averaged over weeks or months, they tend to | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27e2f32e1928-1 | reflect that person’s overall sense of well-being. It turns out that for
most people, extremely intense feelings are relatively rare; most of us
fall into the gray middle range, with mild bumps in our emotional
roller coaster.
Still, managing our emotions is something of a full-time job: much
of what we do—especially in our free time—is an attempt to manage
mood. Everything from reading a novel or watching television to the
activities and companions we choose can be a way to make ourselves
feel better. The art of soothing ourselves is a fundamental life skill;
some psychoanalytic thinkers, such as John Bowlby and D. W.
Winnicott, see this as one of the most essential of all psychic tools.
The theory holds that emotionally sound infants learn to soothe
themselves by treating themselves as their caretakers have treated
them, leaving them less vulnerable to the upheavals of the emotional
brain.
As we have seen, the design of the brain means that we very often
have little or no control over
when
we are swept by emotion, nor over
what
emotion it will be. But we can have some say in
how long
an | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
27e2f32e1928-2 | how long
an
emotion will last. The issue arises not with garden-variety sadness,
worry, or anger; normally such moods pass with time and patience.
But when these emotions are of
great intensity and linger past an | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
24bc3f16a471-0 | appropriate point, they shade over into their distressing extremes—
chronic anxiety, uncontrollable rage, depression. And, at their most
severe and intractable, medication, psychotherapy, or both may be
needed to lift them.
In these times, one sign of the capacity for emotional self-regulation
may be recognizing when chronic agitation of the emotional brain is
too strong to be overcome without pharmacologic help. For example,
two thirds of those who suffer from manic-depression have never been
treated for the disorder. But lithium or newer medications can thwart
the characteristic cycle of paralyzing depression alternating with
manic episodes that mix chaotic elation and grandiosity with irritation
and rage. One problem with manic-depression is that while people are
in the throes of mania they often feel so overly confident that they see
no need for help of any kind despite the disastrous decisions they are
making. In such severe emotional disorders psychiatric medication
offers a tool for managing life better.
But when it comes to vanquishing the more usual range of bad
moods, we are left to our own devices. Unfortunately, those devices
are not always effective—at least such is the conclusion reached by | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
24bc3f16a471-1 | are not always effective—at least such is the conclusion reached by
Diane Tice, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, who
asked more than four hundred men and women about the strategies
they used to escape foul moods, and how successful those tactics were
for them.
2
Not everyone agrees with the philosophical premise that bad moods
should be changed; there are, Tice found, “mood purists,” the 5
percent or so of people who said they never try to change a mood
since, in their view, all emotions are “natural” and should be
experienced just as they present themselves, no matter how
dispiriting. And then there were those who regularly sought to get
into unpleasant moods for pragmatic reasons: physicians who needed
to be somber to give patients bad news; social activists who nurtured
their outrage at injustice so as to be more effective in battling it; even
a young man who told of working up his anger to help his little
brother with playground bullies. And some people were positively
Machiavellian about manipulating moods—witness the bill collectors
who purposely worked themselves into a rage in order to be all the
firmer with deadbeats.
3 | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
24bc3f16a471-2 | firmer with deadbeats.
3
But these rare purposive cultivations of
unpleasantness aside, most everyone complained of being at the
mercy of their moods. People’s track records at shaking bad moods
were decidedly mixed. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0fa789190bd3-0 | THE ANATOMY OF RAGE
Say someone in another car cuts dangerously close to you as you are
driving on the freeway. If your reflexive thought is “That son of a
bitch!” it matters immensely for the trajectory of rage whether that
thought is followed by more thoughts of outrage and revenge: “He
could have hit me! That bastard—I can’t let him get away with that!”
Your knuckles whiten as you tighten your hold on the steering wheel,
a surrogate for strangling his throat. Your body mobilizes to fight, not
run—leaving you trembling, beads of sweat on your forehead, your
heart pounding, the muscles in your face locked in a scowl. You want
to kill the guy. Then, should a car behind you honk because you have
slowed down after the close call, you are apt to explode in rage at that
driver too. Such is the stuff of hypertension, reckless driving, even
freeway shootings.
Contrast that sequence of building rage with a more charitable line
of thought toward the driver who cut you off: “Maybe he didn’t see
me, or maybe he had some good reason for driving so carelessly, such | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0fa789190bd3-1 | as a medical emergency.” That line of possibility tempers anger with
mercy, or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the buildup of rage.
The problem, as Aristotle’s challenge to have only
appropriate
anger
reminds us, is that more often than not our anger surges out of
control. Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a
reason, but seldom a good one.”
There are, of course, different kinds of anger. The amygdala may
well be a main source of the sudden spark of rage we feel at the driver
whose carelessness endangers us. But the other end of the emotional
circuitry, the neocortex, most likely foments more calculated angers,
such as cool-headed revenge or outrage at unfairness or injustice.
Such thoughtful angers are those most likely, as Franklin put it, to
“have good reasons” or seem to.
Of all the moods that people want to escape, rage seems to be the
most intransigent; Tice found anger is the mood people are worst at
controlling. Indeed, anger is the most seductive of the negative
emotions; the self-righteous inner monologue that propels it along fills
the mind with the most convincing arguments for venting rage. Unlike | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
0fa789190bd3-2 | sadness, anger is energizing, even exhilarating. Anger’s seductive,
persuasive power may in itself explain why some views about it are so
common: that anger is uncontrollable, or that, at any rate, it
should
not
be controlled, and that venting anger in “catharsis” is all to the | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6153423e79bc-0 | good. A contrasting view, perhaps a reaction against the bleak picture
of these other two, holds that anger can be prevented entirely. But a
careful reading of research findings suggests that all these common
attitudes toward anger are misguided, if not outright myths.
4
The train of angry thoughts that stokes anger is also potentially the
key to one of the most powerful ways to defuse anger: undermining
the convictions that are fueling the anger in the first place. The longer
we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons”
and self-justifications for being angry we can invent. Brooding fuels
anger’s flames. But seeing things differently douses those flames. Tice
found that reframing a situation more positively was one of the most
potent ways to put anger to rest.
The Rage “Rush”
That finding squares well with the conclusions of University of
Alabama psychologist Dolf Zillmann, who, in a lengthy series of
careful experiments, has taken precise measure of anger and the
anatomy of rage.
5
Given the roots of anger in the fight wing of the
fight-or-flight response, it is no surprise that Zillmann finds that a
universal trigger for anger is the sense of being endangered. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6153423e79bc-1 | universal trigger for anger is the sense of being endangered.
Endangerment can be signaled not just by an outright physical threat
but also, as is more often the case, by a symbolic threat to self-esteem
or dignity: being treated unjustly or rudely, being insulted or
demeaned, being frustrated in pursuing an important goal. These
perceptions act as the instigating trigger for a limbic surge that has a
dual effect on the brain. One part of that surge is a release of
catecholamines, which generate a quick, episodic rush of energy,
enough for “one course of vigorous action,” as Zillmann puts it, “such
as in fight or flight.” This energy surge lasts for minutes, during which
it readies the body for a good fight or a quick flight, depending on
how the emotional brain sizes up the opposition.
Meanwhile, another amygdala-driven ripple through the
adrenocortical branch of the nervous system creates a general tonic
background of action readiness, which lasts much longer than the
catecholamine energy surge. This generalized adrenal and cortical
excitation can last for hours and even days, keeping the emotional
brain in special readiness for arousal, and becoming a foundation on
which subsequent reactions can build with particular quickness. In | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
6153423e79bc-2 | which subsequent reactions can build with particular quickness. In
general, the hair-trigger condition created by adrenocortical arousal | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
155f200375e7-0 | explains why people are so much more prone to anger if they have
already been provoked or slightly irritated by something else. Stress of
all sorts creates adrenocortical arousal, lowering the threshold for
what provokes anger. Thus someone who has had a hard day at work
is especially vulnerable to becoming enraged later at home by
something—the kids being too noisy or messy, say—that under other
circumstances would not be powerful enough to trigger an emotional
hijacking.
Zillmann comes to these insights on anger through careful
experimentation. In a typical study, for example, he had a confederate
provoke men and women who had volunteered by making snide
remarks about them. The volunteers then watched a pleasant or
upsetting film. Later the volunteers were given the chance to retaliate
against the confederate by giving an evaluation they thought would
be used in a decision whether or not to hire him. The intensity of their
retaliation was directly proportional to how aroused they had gotten
from the film they had just watched; they were angrier after seeing
the unpleasant film, and gave the worst ratings.
Anger Builds on Anger | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
155f200375e7-1 | Anger Builds on Anger
Zillmann’s studies seem to explain the dynamic at work in a familiar
domestic drama I witnessed one day while shopping. Down the
supermarket aisle drifted the emphatic, measured tones of a young
mother to her son, about three: “Put … it … back!”
“But I
want
it!” he whined, clinging more tightly to a Ninja Turtles
cereal box.
“Put it back!” Louder, her anger taking over.
At that moment the baby in her shopping cart seat dropped the jar
of jelly she had been mouthing. When it shattered on the floor the
mother yelled, “That’s it!” and, in a fury, slapped the baby, grabbed
the three-year-old’s box and slammed it onto the nearest shelf,
scooped him up by the waist, and rushed down the aisle, the shopping
cart careening perilously in front, the baby now crying, her son, his
legs dangling, protesting, “Put me
down
, put me
down
!”
Zillmann has found that when the body is already in a state of
edginess, like the mother’s, and something triggers an emotional
hijacking, the subsequent emotion, whether anger or anxiety, is of
especially great intensity. This dynamic is at work when someone | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
155f200375e7-2 | especially great intensity. This dynamic is at work when someone
becomes enraged. Zillmann sees escalating anger as “a sequence of | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
72f63c607372-0 | provocations, each triggering an excitatory reaction that dissipates
slowly.” In this sequence every successive anger-provoking thought or
perception becomes a minitrigger for amygdala-driven surges of
catecholamines, each building on the hormonal momentum of those
that went before. A second comes before the first has subsided, and a
third on top of those, and so on; each wave rides the tails of those
before, quickly escalating the body’s level of physiological arousal. A
thought that comes later in this buildup triggers a far greater intensity
of anger than one that comes at the beginning. Anger builds on anger;
the emotional brain heats up. By then rage, unhampered by reason,
easily erupts in violence.
At this point people are unforgiving and beyond being reasoned
with; their thoughts revolve around revenge and reprisal, oblivious to
what the consequences may be. This high level of excitation, Zillmann
says, “fosters an illusion of power and invulnerability that may inspire
and facilitate aggression” as the enraged person, “failing cognitive
guidance,” falls back on the most primitive of responses. The limbic
urge is ascendant; the rawest lessons of life’s brutality become guides
to action.
Balm for Anger | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
72f63c607372-1 | to action.
Balm for Anger
Given this analysis of the anatomy of rage, Zillmann sees two main
ways of intervening. One way of defusing anger is to seize on and
challenge the thoughts that trigger the surges of anger, since it is the
original appraisal of an interaction that confirms and encourages the
first burst of anger, and the subsequent reappraisals that fan the
flames. Timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle the more
effective. Indeed, anger can be completely short-circuited if the
mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on.
The power of understanding to deflate anger is clear from another
of Zillmann’s experiments, in which a rude assistant (a confederate)
insulted and provoked volunteers who were riding an exercise bike.
When the volunteers were given the chance to retaliate against the
rude experimenter (again, by giving a bad evaluation they thought
would be used in weighing his candidacy for a job) they did so with
an angry glee. But in one version of the experiment another
confederate entered after the volunteers had been provoked, and just
before the chance to retaliate; she told the provocative experimenter
he had a phone call down the hall. As he left he made a snide remark | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
98be9bd7126f-0 | to her too. But she took it in good spirits, explaining after he left that
he was under terrible pressures, upset about his upcoming graduate
orals. After that the irate volunteers, when offered the chance to
retaliate against the rude fellow, chose not to; instead they expressed
compassion for his plight.
Such mitigating information allows a reappraisal of the anger-
provoking events. But there is a specific window of opportunity for
this de-escalation. Zillmann finds it works well at moderate levels of
anger; at high levels of rage it makes no difference because of what he
calls “cognitive incapacitation”—in other words, people can no longer
think straight. When people were already highly enraged, they
dismissed the mitigating information with “That’s just too bad!” or
“the strongest vulgarities the English language has to offer,” as
Zillmann put it with delicacy.
Cooling Down
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would
never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till
gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
98be9bd7126f-1 | returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can,
and find it the best cure.
The account is by a subject in one of the very first scientific studies
of anger, done in 1899.
6
It still stands as a model of the second way of
de-escalating anger: cooling off physiologically by waiting out the
adrenal surge in a setting where there are not likely to be further
triggers for rage. In an argument, for instance, that means getting
away from the other person for the time being. During the cooling-off
period, the angered person can put the brakes on the cycle of
escalating hostile thought by seeking out distractions. Distraction,
Zillmann finds, is a highly powerful mood-altering device, for a simple
reason: It’s hard to stay angry when we’re having a pleasant time. The
trick, of course, is to get anger to cool to the point where someone can
have
a pleasant time in the first place.
Zillmann’s analysis of the ways anger escalates and de-escalates
explains many of Diane Tice’s findings about the strategies people
commonly say they use to ease anger. One such fairly effective
strategy is going off to be alone while cooling down. A large | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
98be9bd7126f-2 | proportion of men translate this into going for a drive—a finding that | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5312d39396fa-0 | gives one pause when driving (and, Tice told me, inspired her to drive
more defensively). Perhaps a safer alternative is going for a long walk;
active exercise also helps with anger. So do relaxation methods such
as deep breathing and muscle relaxation, perhaps because they
change the body’s physiology from the high arousal of anger to a low-
arousal state, and perhaps too because they distract from whatever
triggered the anger. Active exercise may cool anger for something of
the same reason: after high levels of physiological activation during
the exercise, the body rebounds to a low level once it stops.
But a cooling-down period will not work if that time is used to
pursue the train of anger-inducing thought, since each such thought is
in itself a minor trigger for more cascades of anger. The power of
distraction is that it stops that angry train of thought. In her survey of
people’s strategies for handling anger, Tice found that distractions by
and large help calm anger: TV, movies, reading, and the like all
interfere with the angry thoughts that stoke rage. But,
Tice found,
indulging in treats such as shopping for oneself and eating do not | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5312d39396fa-1 | have much effect; it is all too easy to continue with an indignant train
of thought while cruising a shopping mall or devouring a piece of
chocolate cake.
To these strategies add those developed by Redford Williams, a
psychiatrist at Duke University who sought to help hostile people,
who are at higher risk for heart disease, to control their irritability.
7
One of his recommendations is to use self-awareness to catch cynical
or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry
thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and
reappraised, though, as Zillmann found, this approach works better
before anger has escalated to rage.
The Ventilation Fallacy
As I settle into a New York City cab, a young man crossing the street
stops in front of the cab to wait for traffic to clear. The driver,
impatient to start, honks, motioning for the young man to move out of
the way. The reply is a scowl and an obscene gesture.
“You son of a bitch!” the driver yells, making threatening lunges
with the cab by hitting the accelerator and brake at the same time. At
this lethal threat, the young man sullenly moves aside, barely, and | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
5312d39396fa-2 | smacks his fist against the cab as it inches by into traffic. At this, the
driver shouts a foul litany of expletives at the man. | emotional_intelligence.pdf |
b15151598aca-0 | As we move along the driver, still visibly agitated, tells me, “You
can’t take any shit from anyone. You gotta yell back—at least it makes
you feel better!”
Catharsis—giving vent to rage—is sometimes extolled as a way of
handling anger. The popular theory holds that “it makes you feel
better.” But, as Zillmann’s findings suggest, there is an argument
against catharsis. It has been made since the 1950s, when
psychologists started to test the effects of catharsis experimentally
and, time after time, found that giving vent to anger did little or
nothing to dispel it (though, because of the seductive nature of anger,
it may
feel
satisfying).
8
There may be some specific conditions under
which lashing out in anger does work: when it is expressed directly to
the person who is its target, when it restores a sense of control or
rights an injustice, or when it inflicts “appropriate harm” on the other
person and gets him to change some grievous activity without
retaliating. But because of the incendiary nature of anger, this may be
easier to say than to do.
9
Tice found that ventilating anger is one of the worst ways to cool | emotional_intelligence.pdf |