The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) - Highlights

CHARACTERS 
# Estha

Estha, which is short for Esthappen Yako, is Rahel's twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears "beige and pointy shoes" and has an "Elvis puff". His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie's visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel's, beginning when he is sexually abused by a man at a theater. The narrator emphasizes that Estha's "Two Thoughts" in the pickle factory, stemming from this experience—that "Anything can happen to Anyone" and that "It's best to be prepared"—are critical in leading to his cousin's death.

Estha is the twin chosen by Baby Kochamma, because he is more "practical" and "responsible", to go into Velutha's cell at the end of the book and condemn him as his and Rahel's abductor. This trauma, in addition to the trauma of being shipped (or "Returned") to Calcutta to live with his father, contributes to Estha's becoming mute at some point in his childhood. He never goes to college and acquires a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He is so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives. He is repeatedly referred to as "Silent".

# Rahel

Rahel is the partial narrator of the story, and is Estha's younger sister by 18 minutes. As a girl of seven, her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a "Love-in-Tokyo" band, and she often wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims. An intelligent and straightforward person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is impulsive and wild, and it is implied that everyone but Velutha treats her as somehow lesser than her brother. In later life, she becomes something of a drifter; several times, the narrator refers to her "Emptiness". After the tragedy that forms the core of the story, she remains with her mother, later training as an architectural draftsman and engaging in a failed relationship with an American, elements of which parallel the author's own life story.

# Ammu

Ammu is Rahel's and Estha's mother. She married their father (referred to as Baba) only to get away from her family. He was an alcoholic, and she divorced him when he started to be violent toward her and her children. She went back to Ayemenem, where people avoided her on the days when the radio played "her music" and she got a wild look in her eyes. When the twins are seven, she has an affair with Velutha. This relationship is one of the cataclysmic events in the novel. She is a strict mother, and her children worry about losing her love.

# Velutha

Velutha is a Paravan, an Untouchable, who is exceptionally smart and works as a carpenter at the Ipe family's pickle factory. His name means white in Malayalam, because he is so dark. He returns to Ayemenem to help his father, Vellya Paapen, take care of his brother, who was paralyzed in an accident. He is an active member of the local Communist movement. Velutha is extremely kind to the twins, and has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally punished.

# Chacko

Chacko is Estha's and Rahel's maternal uncle. He is four years elder to Ammu. He meets Margaret in his final year at Oxford and marries her afterward. They have a daughter, Sophie, whose death in Ayemenem is central to the story.

# Baby Kochamma

Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal great aunt. She is of petite build as a young woman but becomes enormously overweight, with "a mole on her neck", by the time of Sophie's death. She maintains an attitude of superiority because of her education as a garden designer in the United States and her burning, unrequited love for an Irish Catholic priest, her relationship with whom is the only meaningful event in her life. Her own emptiness and failure spark bitter spite for her sister's children, further driven by her prudish code of conventional values. Her spite ultimately condemns the twins, the lovers, and herself to a lifetime of misery.

...

Navomi Ipe Kochamma, better known by her nickname Baby Kochamma, is an antagonist within the novel. She is the vindictive great aunt of the child protagonists Estha and Rahel. (Ref: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Baby_Kochamma)

# Mammachi

Mammachi is Chacko and Ammu's mother and Estha and Rahel's grandmother. She's nearly blind and plays a mean violin. She founded Paradise Pickles and Preserves and built it into a successful business before turning it over to Chacko, who transformed it into, um, a less successful business. Mammachi is sort of your typical cranky old-lady figure – very stubborn and set in her beliefs and habits. Her ideas of how the world works are pretty much set in stone. She is prejudiced against the lower classes, always wants to make herself look important, and hates Margaret Kochamma with a passion.

# Pappachi

Pappachi is Estha and Rahel's grandfather, Ammu's father. He was once an Imperial Entomologist, which is a frou-frou way of saying that he studied bugs for the government. His biggest failure in life came from his biggest triumph: he discovered a rare breed of moth, but he didn't get credit or even naming rights for his discovery. Pappachi was an angry, jealous man who beat Mammachi regularly. He dies before the action of the novel really kicks off, so he's referred to mostly as a memory.

# Kochu Maria
Kochu Maria is Mammachi and Baby Kochamma's housekeeper. She is short and ugly. She doesn't speak English, so whenever the twins speak English around her, she thinks they're making fun of her (and, well, sometimes they are). (Ref 2)

# Comrade Pillai
Comrade K.N.M. Pillai is the leader of the Communist Party in Ayemenem. He runs the local printing press, and one of his big responsibilities is to print the labels for Paradise Pickles and Preserves. He has big political ambitions, so even though he gets a lot of business from Chacko for printing his labels, he tries to make Chacko look like a villain to the factory workers. He figures that this way, he can rustle up their political support. (Ref 3)

PLOT 

The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel (girl) and Esthappen (boy) are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.

Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man there but later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss. She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her parents and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of Pappachi.

The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem also includes Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish priest who had come to Ayemenem. To get closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few months in the convent, she realized that her vows brought her no closer to the man she loved. Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to America. Because of her unrequited love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply embittered over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of others and constantly manipulates events to bring calamity.

The death of Margaret's second husband in a car accident prompts Chacko to invite her and Sophie (Margaret's and Chacko's daughter) to spend Christmas in Ayemenem. En route to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie, the family visits a theater. On the way to the theater, they encounter a group of Communist protesters who surround the car and force Baby Kochamma to wave a red flag and chant a Communist slogan, thus humiliating her. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle factory among the protesters. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working the snack counter. Estha's experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of the narrative.

Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor enmity toward him. Velutha is a dalit (lower caste in India). Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to love him despite his caste status. It is her children's love for Velutha that causes Ammu to realize her own attraction to him, and eventually, she comes to "love by night the man her children loved by day". Ammu and Velutha begin a short-lived affair that culminates in tragedy for the family.

When her relationship with Velutha is discovered, Ammu is locked in her room and Velutha is banished. In her rage, Ammu blames the twins for her misfortune and calls them "millstones around her neck". Distraught, Rahel and Estha decide to run away. Their cousin, Sophie also joins them. During the night, as they try to reach an abandoned house across the river, their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns. When Margaret and Chacko return from a trip, they see Sophie's body laid out on the sofa.

Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being responsible for Sophie's death. A group of policemen hunt Velutha down, savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him on the brink of death. The twins, huddling in the abandoned house, witness the horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth to the chief of police he is alarmed. He knows that Velutha is a Communist, and is afraid that if word gets out that the arrest and beating were wrongful, it will cause unrest among the local Communists. He threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Rahel and Estha into believing that the two of them would be implicated as having murdered Sophie out of jealousy and were facing sure imprisonment for them and their Ammu. She thus convinces them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had kidnapped them and had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.

After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to tell the truth about her relationship with Velutha. Afraid of being exposed, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins were responsible for his daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu out of the house and forces her to send Estha to live with his father. Estha never sees Ammu again. Ammu dies alone a few years later at the age of 31.

After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in India, Rahel gets married and goes to America. There, she divorces before returning to Ayemenem after years of working dead-end jobs. Rahel and Estha, now 31, are reunited for the first time since they were children. They had been haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden pasts. It becomes apparent that neither twin ever found another person who understood them in the way they understand each other. Toward the end of the novel, the twins have sex. The novel comes to a close with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love affair.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things

WHY SHOULD YOU READ “THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS” BY ARUNDHATI ROY? - LAURA WRIGHT

A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes and that when they do those few dozen hours like the salvaged remains of a burned clock must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. This is the premise of Arundhati Roy's 1997 novel The God of small things set in the town in Kerala, India called Ayemenem. The story revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha who are separated for 23 years after the fateful few dozen hours in which their cousin drowns their mothers illicit affair has revealed and her lover is murdered while the book is set to the point of Rahel and Estha's reunions, the narrative takes place mostly in the past. Reconstructing the details around the tragic events that led to the separation. Roy's rich language and masterful storytelling earned her the prestigious Booker prize for the god of small things. In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India, including its social mores and Colonial history. One of our focuses is the caste system, a way of classifying people by hereditary social class that is thousands of years old. By the mid 20th century, the original five casts associated with specific occupations have been divided into some 3,000 sub-casts.

Brahmins / Priestly / Academic class
Kshatriyas / Rulers / Administrators / Warriors
Vaishyas / Artisans / Tradesmenm / Farmers / Merchants
Shudras / Servants / Manual laborers
Dalits / Street cleaners / Untouchables

Though the caste system was constitutionally abolished in 1950, it continued to shape social life in India routinely marginalizing people of lower castes. In the novel Rahel and Estha have a close relationship with the Velutha a worker in their family's Pickle Factory and member of the so-called Untouchable caste. When the Velutha and the twins mother Ammu embark on an affair, they violate what Roy describes as the love laws forbidding intimacy between different castes. Roy warns that the tragic consequences of their relationship would lurk forever in ordinary things like coat hangers, the tar on roads and the absence of words. Roy's writing makes constant use of these ordinary things bringing lush detail to even the most tragic moments. The book opens at the funeral of the twins half-British cousin Sophie after her drowning. As the family mourns, lilies curl and crisp in the hot Church, a baby bat crawls up a funeral. Sorry tears drip from a chin like raindrops from a roof. The novel forays into the past to explore the characters' struggles to operate in a world where they don't quite fit alongside their nation's political turmoil. Ammu struggles not to lash out at her beloved children when she feels particularly trapped in her parents small town home when neighbors judge and shun her for being divorced. The Velutha meanwhile balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins not only with his employment to their family, but also with his membership to a budding communist counter-movement to Indira Gandhi's Green Revolution. In the 1960s, the misleadingly named Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the damming of rivers to India. While these policies produced high yield crops that staved off famine, they also forced people from lower castes off their land and caused widespread environmental damage. When the twins return to Ayemenem as adults the consequences of the Green Revolution are all around them. The river that was bursting with life in their childhood greets them with a ghastly skull smile with holes where teeth had been and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed. As Roy probes the depth of human experience, she never loses sight of the way her characters are shaped by the time and the place where they live. In the world of the god of small things various kinds Of despair competed for primacy, personal despair could never be desperate enough. Personal turmoil dropped by at the Wayside Shrine of the vast violent circling driving ridiculous insane unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.
 
Ref: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-should-you-read-the-god-of-small-things-by-arundhati-roy-laura-wright

THEMES 

1. Family

The God of Small Things is probably more than anything else a novel about family. It explores the relationship between brother and sister, mother and child, grandparent and grandchild, aunt and niece/nephew, and cousins. It looks at the ways families are forced to stick together and also how they fall apart. Unconditional family love is a major issue on the table here. Sometimes we feel obligated to love our family members. On the other hand, just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you'll love them or that they'll have your back. Just like in real life, family relationships in the novel can be complicated, confusing, and frustrating.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to people obligated to each other because of blood, regardless of whether or not they actually care about one another.

- In The God of Small Things, "family" refers to the people one cares about.

2. Society and class

The characters in The God of Small Things are constantly coming up against the forces of society and class. Indian society was structured for centuries according to very rigid social classes and boundaries, through what is known as the caste system. Even though the novel takes place after the caste system stopped being a legal social policy, its characters still find themselves limited by what is and isn't deemed socially acceptable for them. Social rules dictate who can love whom, which occupations people can adopt, and who is considered to be better than whom. (Sounds a little like an extreme version of high school, doesn't it?)

Chew on This
- The characters of The God of Small Things are ultimately constrained and held back by class boundaries.

- In the end, the characters of The God of Small Things show us that class boundaries are breakable.

3. Versions of reality

Throughout The God of Small Things, we get to see how things look from different characters' points of view – different versions of the same reality. We see Estha and Rahel at two very different points in their lives, 23 years apart. There is a stark difference between their perspectives as 7-year-olds and as 31-year-olds. As kids, we see them learning about the world as they go; as adults, they are trying to make sense of the past.

Chew on This
- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives helps us get at the one true story.

- Viewing one event from multiple perspectives shows us that there is no single "correct" version of things.

4. Memory and the past

Time in The God of Small Things doesn't unfold in a linear way; we don't start at Point A and watch the story progress until we get to Point B. Instead, we move back and forth between 1969 and 1993, with a few other episodes thrown in for flavor. The story is told through a series of memories and flashbacks. From the moment the novel begins, we know what's going to happen, we just don't know how. We start at the end, and the narrator uses the characters' memories to put the pieces together for us. (Check out "Writing Style" for more on this.)

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, memories tend to be extremely painful to recall.

- In The God of Small Things, memories of better times help the characters make sense of the troubles they're going through.

5. Guilt and Blame

Guilt and blame are a tricky duo in this book, lurking around every corner. Some really horrible things happen here: Estha is molested; Sophie Mol drowns; a family breaks apart. Even though the narrator sometimes suggests that these things might have been destined to happen, the only way for the characters to make sense of the tragedies they are living through is to find someone to blame. Margaret Kochamma, for instance, finds it easiest to blame Estha for Sophie Mol's death, while Chacko blames Ammu.

Along with blame, guilt is an emotion all too familiar to our characters. Unfortunately, we often see instances of guilt, or shame, where there should be none. For example, Estha feels incredibly guilty after the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man molests him, convinced that he did something wrong.

Chew on This
- Even though it was unintentional, one could argue that Estha and Rahel are directly responsible for Sophie Mol's death.

- There is no one person to blame for what happens to Sophie Mol; her death is a product of many circumstances.

6. Innocence

One of the most interesting aspects of The God of Small Things is how the narrator helps us see and understand the world from a kid's perspective. This ranges from everyday things (like what certain words mean) to the most shocking and horrific events imaginable (like Sophie Mol's death). Usually when we think about innocence, we think about a world of simplicity. When you're innocent, what you don't know can't hurt you – you can be blissfully naïve. This book puts a different spin on innocence – here, it's not about what Estha and Rahel don't know, but rather the way they make sense of what they do know, see, or experience.

Estha and Rahel, both separately and together, lose their innocence throughout the course of the novel. One of the most touching aspects of Estha's loss of innocence – when he is molested, and when he is forced to condemn Velutha – is how he tries to prevent the same thing from happening to Rahel. While both children undergo a loss of innocence through painful experiences, Estha is the more profoundly affected of the two. He watches his world change and tries to prevent his sister from having to share that experience.

Chew on This
- By portraying the twins as cute and innocent, the narrator shows us that they don't fully understand what's happening around them.

- Portraying the twins as cute and innocent helps emphasize how horrible the events happening to them are.

7. Love

"OK," you yawn, "another book with love as a theme. Can't anyone write anything different?" Well, friends, it's true, The God of Small Things is about love. The novel puts it right out there on the table, repeatedly invoking the "Love Laws" that dictate "who should be loved, and how. And how much" (1.209-210). Love and rules are constantly butting heads in the book. Ammu and Velutha's love is forbidden because of their caste (social status) differences. Rahel and Estha's love is expressed physically at the end of the book, resulting in the taboo of incest. Mammachi's feelings toward her son, Chacko, also blur the lines between familial and romantic love. (See "Family" under "Quotes by Theme.") And Baby Kochamma is in love with Father Mulligan, a priest who can never marry. In The God of Small Things, love constantly violates social rules.

Chew on This
- The God of Small Things is about what happens when love is thwarted and not allowed to flourish.

- Love that breaks "The Love Laws" is the only successful love.

8. Fear

In a novel in which so many bad things happen, it's not all that surprising that fear comes to the forefront. It's hard to think of even one character who doesn't demonstrate fear at some point. The thing to keep in mind about fear in The God of Small Things is that it isn't just a reaction to something scary; it's a powerful motivator that pushes characters to act in particular, often dangerous, ways.

Estha's fear of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and Rahel's fear that Ammu doesn't love her anymore provoke the twins to run away across the river. Baby Kochamma and Mammachi's fear of social disgrace push them to lock Ammu away and send the police after Velutha. Fear is a mechanism behind many of the major, life-changing moments of the novel, and the result is often more terrifying than the thing that was originally feared.

Chew on This
- In The God of Small Things, fear causes people to act in ways that lead to bad things happening.

- In The God of Small Things, fear is a natural response to bad things that are inevitable.

9. Identity

The question of identity ("Who am I?") is important to all the characters in The God of Small Things, but especially to Estha and Rahel. On one level, they have a very good idea of who they are: they are extensions of one another. When they are together, they are a whole being. Nevertheless, the more Estha and Rahel learn about the world around them, the more we see them taking on alternate identities and imagining themselves as someone else. Ambassador E. Pelvis, Ambassador Stick Insect, and The Airport Fairy are all versions of themselves they identify with in different situations. Part of what makes their reunion in 1993 so important is that for the first time in 23 years they can consider themselves whole again.

Chew on This
- As kids, Estha and Rahel share one identity.

- As kids, Estha and Rahel each have a separate identity that balances the other out.

10. Mortality

Mortality, or death, resonates throughout The God of Small Things. We find out from the very beginning that Sophie Mol is going to die, and our anticipation of and eventual reaction to her death keeps us on edge from the first to the very last page. But Sophie Mol isn't the only person who comes face to face with death; Velutha dies in an incredibly graphic and violent way, and Ammu's death scene is full of anguish and fear. The novel asks us to consider not just the experience of death, but also that of witnessing it.

Chew on This
- Sophie Mol's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

- Velutha's death has the greatest effect on the rest of Estha's life.

Ref: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/themes#versions-of-reality-theme

QUOTES 

1. 
D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. 'When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.'

2.
“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”

3.
“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

4.
“People always loved best what they identified most with.”

5.
“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.”

6.
“If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts... "If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?”

7.
“Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”

8.
“Humans are animals of habit.”

9.
“The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.

She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.”

10.
“Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).”

Ref 1: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/810135-the-god-of-small-things?page=3
Ref 2: https://www.shmoop.com/god-of-small-things/kochu-maria.html
Ref 3: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/god-of-small-things/comrade-knm-pillai

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Highlights

CHARACTERS

# Elizabeth Bennet

The second eldest of the Bennet daughters, she is twenty years old and intelligent, lively, playful, attractive, and witty – but with a tendency to form tenacious and prejudicial first impressions. As the story progresses, so does her relationship with Mr Darcy. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading them both to surrender to their love for each other.

# Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy 

Mr Bingley's friend and the wealthy, twenty-eight-year-old owner of the family estate of Pemberley in Derbyshire, rumoured to be worth at least £10,000 a year (equivalent to £796,000 or $1,045,000 in 2018). While he is handsome, tall, and intelligent, Darcy lacks ease and social graces, and so others frequently mistake his initially haughty reserve and rectitude as proof of excessive pride (which, in part, it is). A new visitor to the village, he is ultimately Elizabeth Bennet's love interest.

# Mr Bennet 

A late-middle-aged landed gentleman of a modest income of £2000 per annum, and the dryly sarcastic patriarch of the now-dwindling Bennet family (a family of Hertfordshire landed gentry), with five unmarried daughters. His estate, Longbourn, is entailed to the male line.

# Mrs Bennet (née Gardiner) 

The middle-aged wife of her social superior, Mr Bennet, and the mother of their five daughters. Mrs Bennet is a hypochondriac who imagines herself susceptible to attacks of tremors and palpitations (her "poor nerves"), whenever things are not going her way. Her main ambition in life is to marry her daughters off to wealthy men. Whether or not any such matches will give her daughters happiness is of little concern to her.

# Jane Bennet 

The eldest Bennet sister. Twenty-two years old when the novel begins, she is considered the most beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood and is inclined to see only the good in others (but can be persuaded otherwise on sufficient evidence). She falls in love with Charles Bingley, a rich young gentleman recently moved to Hertfordshire and a close friend of Mr Darcy.

# Mary Bennet 

The middle Bennet sister, and the plainest of her siblings. Mary has a serious disposition and mostly reads and plays music, although she is often impatient to display her accomplishments and is rather vain about them. She frequently moralises to her family. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary ended up marrying one of her Uncle Philips' law clerks and moving into Meryton with him.

# Catherine "Kitty" Bennet 

The fourth Bennet daughter at 17 years old. Though older than Lydia, she is her shadow and follows her in her pursuit of the officers of the militia. She is often portrayed as envious of Lydia and is described a "silly" young woman. However, it is said that she improved when removed from Lydia's influence. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Kitty later married a clergyman who lived near Pemberley.

# Lydia Bennet 

The youngest Bennet sister, aged 15 when the novel begins. She is frivolous and headstrong. Her main activity in life is socializing, especially flirting with the officers of the militia. This leads to her running off with George Wickham, although he has no intention of marrying her. Lydia shows no regard for the moral code of her society; as Ashley Tauchert says, she "feels without reasoning."

# Charles Bingley 

A handsome, amiable, wealthy young gentleman from the north of England (possibly Yorkshire, as Scarborough is mentioned, and there is, in fact, a real-life town called Bingley in West Yorkshire), who leases Netherfield Park, an estate three miles from Longbourn, with the hopes of purchasing it. He is contrasted with Mr Darcy for having more generally pleasing manners, although he is reliant on his more experienced friend for advice. An example of this is the prevention of Bingley and Jane's romance because of Bingley's undeniable dependence on Darcy's opinion. He lacks resolve and is easily influenced by others; his two sisters, Miss Caroline Bingley and Mrs Louisa Hurst, both disapprove of Bingley's growing affection for Miss Jane Bennet.

# Caroline Bingley 

The vainglorious, snobbish sister of Charles Bingley, with a dowry of £20,000. Miss Bingley harbours designs upon Mr Darcy, and therefore is jealous of his growing attachment to Elizabeth. She attempts to dissuade Mr Darcy from liking Elizabeth by ridiculing the Bennet family and criticising Elizabeth's comportment. Miss Bingley also disapproves of her brother's esteem for Jane Bennet, and is disdainful of society in Meryton. Her wealth (her dowry gives her an income of £1,000 per annum, which she overspends) and her expensive education seem to be the two greatest sources of Miss Bingley's vanity and conceit; likewise, she is very insecure about the fact that her and her family's money all comes from trade, and is eager both for her brother to purchase an estate, ascending the Bingleys to the ranks of the Gentry, and for herself to marry a landed gentleman (i.e. Mr Darcy). The dynamic between Miss Bingley and her sister, Louisa Hurst, seems to echo that of Lydia and Kitty Bennet's; that one is no more than a follower of the other, with Caroline in the same position as Lydia, and Louisa in Kitty's (though, in Louisa's case, as she's already married, she's not under the same desperation as Caroline). Louisa is married to Mr Hurst, who has a house in Grosvenor Square, London.

# George Wickham 

Wickham has been acquainted with Mr Darcy since infancy, being the son of Mr Darcy's father's steward. An officer in the militia, he is superficially charming and rapidly forms an attachment with Elizabeth Bennet. He later runs off with Lydia with no intention of marriage, which would have resulted in her and her family's complete disgrace, but for Darcy's intervention to bribe Wickham to marry her by paying off his immediate debts.

# Mr William Collins 

Mr Collins, aged 25 years old as the novel begins, is Mr Bennet's distant second cousin, a clergyman, and the current heir presumptive to his estate of Longbourn House. He is an obsequious and pompous man who is excessively devoted to his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

# Lady Catherine de Bourgh 

The overbearing aunt of Mr Darcy. Lady Catherine is the wealthy owner of Rosings Park, where she resides with her daughter Anne and is fawned upon by her rector, Mr Collins. She is haughty, pompous, domineering, and condescending, and has long planned to marry off her sickly daughter to Darcy, to 'unite their two great estates', claiming it to be the dearest wish of both her and her late sister, Lady Anne Darcy (née Fitzwilliam).

~ * ~

PLOT 

The novel is set in rural England in the early 19th century. Mrs Bennet attempts to persuade Mr Bennet to visit Mr Bingley, a rich bachelor recently arrived in the neighbourhood. After some verbal sparring with her husband, Mrs Bennet believes he will not call on Mr Bingley. Shortly after, he visits Netherfield, Mr Bingley's rented residence, much to Mrs Bennet's delight. The visit is followed by an invitation to a ball at the local assembly rooms that the entire neighbourhood will attend.

At the ball, Mr Bingley’s friendly and cheerful manner makes him popular with guests. He appears attracted to Jane Bennet (the Bennets' eldest daughter), with whom he dances twice. Bingley's friend, Mr Darcy, reputed to be twice as wealthy, is haughty and aloof, causing a decided dislike of him. He declines to dance with Elizabeth (the Bennets' second eldest daughter), stating she is not attractive enough to tempt him.[5] Elizabeth finds this amusing and jokes about it with her sisters.

Mr Bingley's sister, Caroline, later invites Jane to Netherfield for dinner. On her way there, Jane is caught in a rain shower and develops a bad cold, forcing her to stay at Netherfield to recuperate. When Elizabeth goes to see Jane, Mr Darcy finds himself becoming attracted to Elizabeth, while Miss Bingley grows jealous, as she herself has designs on Mr Darcy.

Mr Collins, Mr Bennet's cousin and heir to the Longbourn estate, visits the Bennet family. He is a pompous, obsequious clergyman who intends to marry one of the Bennet girls. After learning that Jane may soon be engaged, he quickly decides on Elizabeth, the next daughter in both age and beauty.

Elizabeth and her family meet the dashing and charming army officer, George Wickham, who singles out Elizabeth. He says he is connected to the Darcy family and claims Mr Darcy deprived him of an occupation (a permanent position as a clergyman in a prosperous parish with good revenue) promised to him by Mr Darcy's late father. Elizabeth's dislike of Mr Darcy is confirmed.

At the ball at Netherfield, Mr Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance, and, despite her vow never to dance with him, she accepts. Excluding Jane and Elizabeth, several Bennet family members display a distinct lack of decorum. Mrs Bennet hints loudly that she fully expects Jane and Bingley to become engaged, and the younger Bennet sisters expose the family to ridicule by their silliness.

Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth. She rejects him, to her mother's fury and her father's relief. Shortly after, the Bingleys suddenly depart for London with no plans to return. After Elizabeth's rejection, Mr Collins proposes to Charlotte Lucas, a sensible young woman and Elizabeth's friend. Charlotte, older (27), is grateful for a proposal that guarantees her a comfortable home. Elizabeth is aghast at such pragmatism in matters of love. Meanwhile, a heartbroken Jane visits her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London. It soon is clear that Miss Bingley has no intention of resuming their acquaintance leaving Jane upset, though composed.

In the spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte and Mr Collins in Kent. Elizabeth and her hosts are invited to Rosings Park, the imposing home of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, patroness of Mr Collins and Mr Darcy's wealthy aunt. Lady Catherine expects Mr Darcy to marry her daughter. Mr Darcy and his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, are also visiting at Rosings Park. Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth how Mr Darcy recently saved a friend from an undesirable match. Elizabeth realises this was Jane and is horrified that Mr Darcy interfered. Later, Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, declaring his love for her despite her inferior social rank. She rejects him angrily, stating she could never love a man who caused her sister such unhappiness and further accuses him of treating Wickham unjustly. The latter accusation angers Mr Darcy and he accuses her family of lacking propriety and suggests he has been kinder to Bingley than to himself.

Later, Mr Darcy gives Elizabeth a letter, explaining that Wickham, the son of his late father's steward, had refused the living his father arranged for him, and was instead given money for it. Wickham quickly squandered the money and when impoverished, asked for the living again. After being refused, he tried to elope with Darcy's 15-year-old sister, Georgiana, for her considerable dowry. Mr Darcy also writes that he believed Jane, due to her reserved behaviour, was indifferent to Bingley. Mr Darcy apologises for hurting Jane and Elizabeth.

Some months later, Elizabeth accompanies the Gardiners on a tour of Derbyshire. They visit Pemberley, the Darcy estate (after Elizabeth ascertains Mr Darcy's absence). The housekeeper there describes Mr Darcy as kind and generous. When Mr Darcy returns unexpectedly, he is exceedingly gracious and later invites Elizabeth and the Gardiners to meet his sister, and Mr Gardiner to go fishing. Elizabeth is surprised and delighted by their treatment. She then receives news that her sister Lydia has run off with Wickham. She tells Mr Darcy immediately, then departs in haste, believing she will never see him again as Lydia has ruined the family's good name.

After an agonising interim, Wickham has agreed to marry Lydia. With some veneer of decency restored, Lydia visits the family and tells Elizabeth that Mr Darcy was at her and Wickham's wedding. Though Mr Darcy had sworn everyone involved to secrecy, Mrs Gardiner now feels obliged to inform Elizabeth that he secured the match, at great expense and trouble to himself. She hints that he may have had "another motive" for having done so.

Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy return to Netherfield. Bingley proposes to Jane who accepts. Lady Catherine, having heard rumours that Elizabeth intends to marry Mr Darcy, visits Elizabeth and demands she promise never to accept Mr Darcy's proposal. Elizabeth refuses and the outraged Lady Catherine leaves. Darcy, heartened by Elizabeth's response, again proposes to her and is accepted. Elizabeth has difficulty in convincing her father that she is marrying for love, not position and wealth, but Mr Bennet is finally convinced.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNT FROM JANE AUSTEN'S "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE" 

#A 
First Impressions Don't Make The Man (or Woman)

One can never forget the first time Elizabeth and Darcy met while attending an assembly at Meryton. Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy referring to her as only "tolerable." I hated him, to say the least. How can a man be so absolutely consumed in his own pride? More importantly, how can he be so rude towards a woman so congenial as Elizabeth Bennet? It wasn't until later in the story where the woes of Mr. Darcy's past and the love he holds for his younger sister are revealed, that I started liking the man behind the mask. First impressions often leave us in want of something more--whether that impression is good or bad. The more I learned about Mr. Darcy's true character, the more I realized how quick we are to judge others on the first encounter.

Ref: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/the-most-important-lessons-learned-from-pride-and-prejudice

#B
The importance of planning.

In this easily-readable novel, Ms. Austen underscores the importance of planning.  Pride and Prejudice as perfectly-structured a novel as ever was written: from the initial tension in Elizabeth and Darcy’s meeting to the disastrous anticlimax of the first proposal, the upward trajectory of Elizabeth’s feelings for the man she’d judged poorly, Darcy’s climactic saving of the Bennet family’s reputation, and his subsequent successful proposal of marriage to Elizabeth, the novel moves quickly and deliberately in precisely-plotted chapters.  Austen wastes no time with frivolous details: everything ties together; each scene has a purpose.

Take a page from Austen’s book as you plan your lessons.  Careful preparation can lead to centuries of success!

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#C 
A little humor goes a long way.

Despite the conviction of certain seventeen-year-old boys, Pride and Prejudice is not just Victorian chick lit.  It’s a romantic tale with a marriage plot, to be sure, but it’s also a comedy.  From the sycophantic Mr. Collins to the drily sarcastic Mr. Bennet, the novel is filled with jokes, little nods from Austen to the reader.  The book is really funny.

When faced with a potentially gloomy future, Mrs. Bennet breaks down.  Elizabeth, however, learns to laugh.  It is her humor, in large part, which melts the icy exterior of the shy Mr. Darcy and leads to their mutual happiness.  Keep her success in mind–and bring this sense of humor to the classroom.  When facing issues, take a minute to step back.  If you can learn to laugh at a problem, you might remedy it more effectively.

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#D 
If at first you don’t succeed…try again

There’s no shame in failure. Mr. Darcy failed miserably in his first attempt at proposing to the object of his affection, but he tried again.  And look at him now: a timeless hunky archetype with 200 years of admirers to his name.

Austen, too, met with failure. She first drafted the novel in 1796—seventeen years before it was finally published. Her refusal to be disheartened led to the publication of a novel that proved truly timeless.

You’ll have failures in the classroom, and so will your students. But don’t let these failures discourage you. Look to your Victorian counterparts—if at first you don’t succeed, try again.

Ref: https://www.carneysandoe.com/blog-post/5-lessons-teachers-can-learn-pride-prejudice

#E
It is good to honor thy parents

Familial relationships in the novel express the importance of honor and respect. Jane and Lizzie exemplify what it looks like to their parents this way. Barrs explains:

Despite the many flaws in their parents, particularly their mother, they are unfailingly polite and respectful in their presence and when speaking about them. They maintain this respect even when they finally feel the need to express problems, for example, when Elizabeth talks to her father about his failure to restrain Lydia.

Ref: https://www.crossway.org/articles/6-lessons-from-pride-and-prejudice/

#F 
You Can Judge a Man by the Size of His Library

In Austen’s world, size matters. The size of one’s book collection, that is.

While stuck at Netherfield because her sister has fallen ill there, the hospitable Mr. Bingley offers Elizabeth access to his books, to “all that his library afforded.” Elizabeth assures him she is content with what she has. He admits, “I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my own credit; but I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more than I ever looked into."

Then coy Miss Bingley attempts to converse with Darcy while he is engaged in reading. “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library," Miss Bingley proclaims. "I am astonished that my father should have left so small a collection of books. What a delightful library you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!"

"It ought to be good," he replies. "It has been the work of many generations."

"And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books,” Miss Bingley says flirtatiously.

Later, after Elizabeth has shed her initial false impressions about Darcy, she recollects the evolution of her feelings toward him. She explains that her love for Darcy “has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Indeed.

Ref:  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/i-learned-everything-i-needed-to-know-about-marriage-from-pride-and-prejudice/281110/

#G
28 LESSONS WE’VE LEARNED FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

1. Beware of truths universally acknowledged.
2. Be persistent in the face of rejection.
3. There is great joy in a long walk.
4. Don’t set too much stock in first impressions.
5. There are worse things than being single…like being married to Mr. Collins.
6. A six-hour movie isn’t too long if it’s the right story.
7. You can learn a lot about a man by the way he treats his sister.
8. You can’t hide in the library forever.
9. Sharp wit and a pair of fine eyes are worth far more than an expensive dress.
10. The man of your dreams will love you even when you have a terrible cold.
11. When in doubt, say it in a letter.
12. Never play dumb to attract a man.
13. Don’t make important life choices just to soothe your mother’s nerves.
14. Men, always keep your home ready for unexpected guests. You never know when the love of your life will show up.
15. Bad boys are not worth it.
16. Gorge all you want at a banquet as long as you’re wearing an empire-waist dress.
17. It’s not the end of the world if your little sister gets married before you do.
18. A dashing uniform does not make the man.
19. “Obstinate, headstrong girl!” really is a compliment.
20. Don’t be stingy about giving others a second chance. You never know when your own happiness may depend on one.
21. When it comes to a man’s library, size matters.
22. An intelligent woman should never tolerate a disrespectful man…no matter how rich he is.
23. A great love story is always in style.
24. It really is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.
25. Marrying your true love means marrying his or her entire family.
26. Men may leave you, but your sisters never will.
27. Happy relationships are based on more than romance.
28. Colin Firth then, Colin Firth now, Colin Firth forever.

Ref: https://blog.basbleu.com/2015/01/28/28-lessons-weve-learned-from-pride-and-prejudice/

#H
Five Life Lessons We Can Learn from Elizabeth Bennet

1. She Learns from Her Mistakes.
When Elizabeth reads Darcy’s letter and finds out that she has misjudged Wickham and Darcy’s characters, she says to herself, “How despicably have I acted! I, who have prided myself on my discernment! … I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself!” Elizabeth could have justified her actions, but she recognizes that she was wrong. Even though – at the time – she hates Darcy, she acknowledges that he’s right in many respects; she acknowledges that she jumped to conclusions, and let prejudice cloud the truth. Elizabeth’s ability to recognize her faults and correct them requires a lot of humility and self-awareness we should all aspire to achieve.

2. She Does Not Settle.
Elizabeth turns down both Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy’s proposals without hesitation. She is open and honest in her refusals, and she does not care that her mother and society essentially demand her to accept them. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she doesn’t want. Only when Darcy actually gains some manners does she finally accept him.

3. She Boldly Voices Her Opinions.
Elizabeth is not afraid to state her opinions or contradict someone - regardless of who they may be. When Lady Catherine De Bourgh insults herself and her family, Elizabeth rebukes her. When Lady Catherine asks Elizabeth to promise to never become engaged to Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth refuses. When a man of Mr. Darcy’s standing states his opinion of her low rank and then proposes to her, she reprimands him. One classic example:  ``You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.'' Now if that’s not bold, I don’t know what is.

4. She Takes Care of Her Family.
Throughout the novel, Elizabeth repeatedly mentions her concern for her family’s welfare – especially Jane’s. Even though her mother has no filter, and her sister, Lydia, only lives and breathes to flirt with officers, Elizabeth still defends them to Mr. Darcy and Lady Catherine. And who can forget how she walks from Longbourn to Netherfield in the mud and dirt just to take care of Jane?

5. She is Not Afraid to Defy Society’s Expectations.
Elizabeth does not care how Miss Bingley or Mr. Darcy perceive her after she comes to Netherfield with her skirt “six inches deep in mud.” She does not care that a man who has 10,000 pounds a year asks her to marry him. She is very forward thinking, she reads, and she doesn’t care much for the typical accomplishments that women of her day were supposed to have. Instead of sewing pin cushions or painting tables, she cultivates her mind through reading and engaging with others.

Elizabeth Bennett is a strong, independent woman who never changes who she is. Even though she’s a 19th-century fictional character, her character is a wonderful example of what a strong female is.

Ref: https://www.hercampus.com/school/utah/five-life-lessons-we-can-learn-elizabeth-bennet

#I

Here are 4 Gentlemanly Lessons from Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice:

1. He is Self-Aware
This may seem like an odd quality to attribute to Mr. Darcy. In the novel, pride is his blind spot. When reading the book, or watching his brilliant portrayal by Colin Firth in the film Pride & Prejudice, you will find a moment when Mr. Darcy acknowledges his awareness of his pride.

Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will always be under good regulation.”

In the arrogance of the statement it is possible to miss the subtlety of the sentence. I have considered this quote frequently. When he refers to a superiority of mind, Mr. Darcy means an understanding of his place in the world. He is aware of himself, and who he is, as master of Pemberly, and 10,000 pounds per annum. This situation places him in a high station, with responsibilities and privileges greater than most men.

Self awareness does not entitle anyone to arrogance, but having a settled belief of who you are may at times rub others the wrong way. Confidence in your character, introversion, even quietness, can often mistake you as cold and uncaring by others. Learn to be aware not only of your qualities and faults, but also how they effect those around you.

2. He looks out for his friend
Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and Mr. Darcy’s friend, Mr. Bingley, begin to fall in love through the first portion of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy, having the benefit of a detached view of the situation, sees the dangers to his friend in a alliance with a family as foolish and silly as the Bennet girls. He does his best to distance his friend from the Bennet family in London, and continues to prevent Mr. Bingley from accidentally meeting Jane when she visits the city.

When he proposes to Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy acknowledges his hypocrisy saying when she confronts him with his actions. “I have no wish of denying that I did every thing in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.”

While this does nothing to endear Elizabeth to accept the proposal, it does reveal the depth of Mr. Darcy’s care for his friend.

Good friends are hard to come by, whenever you find one he should be as a brother. While few of us would intentionally do wrong by a friend, how frequently do we put their interests before our own?

3. He learns from criticism
When his proposal to Elizabeth is rejected, and she criticizes his arrogance and faults, he doesn’t ignore them. Instead, he honestly examines his behavior to see the truth in her words. Most importantly, he acts upon the reflection rather than ignoring it.

My object then, was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to.”

Frequently, as a young man it is possible to believe you’ve reached the heights and see your faults and virtues honestly, but that’s not always the case. Others, friends and enemies, will point out faults we might not have seen from time to time. It can be easy to ignore them, discrediting their words because of their own faults or abilities. But those criticisms can be invaluable measures of how you are perceived and judged by the world.

4. He doesn’t take credit
Even after saving Elizabeth’s sister from disgrace, paying Mr. Wickham off to marry Lydia, Darcy doesn’t say anything of his involvement. He actively tries to hide his role in the situation from Elizabeth and her family, considering it a matter of honor.

For a person of skill or talent, it can genuinely be difficult to not take credit for your actions. Credit is tempting, allowing you to shine in the light of a hero, even if temporarily. The problem is, that in doing so you reduce the value of your actions, allowing the motives of your deeds to become questionable. More than once I have wished that I had let my good deeds remain a secret.

To sum up: Mr. Darcy is most appealing on paper, or in a film. Fiction is more forgiving than reality. I’ve found that some of his lesser qualities are less charming to the opposite sex when demonstrated in real life. But the lessons above are real, in both fact and fiction. Becoming a better man isn’t easy, and it isn’t always romantic, but it is something to be proud of.

Ref: http://goodguyswag.com/pride-and-prejudice-gentlemanly-lessons/

#J

Themes of Pride & Prejudice
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is said to be a satirical and social critique on social status and the expectations of women during the eighteenth century. Throughout the book, the strong themes of prejudice, reputation, and class are explored as the romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy develops. In this lesson, we will look at the themes to get a better understanding of Pride and Prejudice.

Prejudice
As the title suggests, prejudice is one of the main themes of the novel. Prejudice is one of many obstacles that gets in the way of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy from connecting quickly. For example, Mr. Darcy's prejudice toward Elizabeth is largely because of her social standing. He does not notice the strength of her character for a long time since he is above her in class. The narrator says, 'Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty... and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.'

Here, the narrator demonstrates how Mr. Darcy's initial prejudice initially clouds his ability to see Elizabeth for the strong, intelligent woman that she is. Once he is able to disregard their social differences, he allows himself to fall in love with her. Austen's attention to Mr. Darcy's prejudice and subsequent transformation into a humbler perspective shows the issues that social prejudice can cause, and the good that can come from removing those prejudices from society.

Reputation
During eighteenth century England, a woman's reputation and femininity were considered incredibly important. Women were expected to adhere to certain rules and exhibit pristine behavior in the public sphere. Many of the Bennet sisters step out of these expectations in ways that potentially harm their reputations.

A good example of this is the story line of Elizabeth's sister, Lydia. Lydia makes an irrational decision by running away with Wickham and living with him out of wedlock. Her decision could result in irreparable damage to her entire family's reputation if Wickham refuses to marry her. In fact, Lydia's decision to forgo her own reputation threatens the rest of her sisters' reputations. Elizabeth speaks to her father about Lydia's behavior and its consequences by saying, 'Our importance, our respectability in the world must be affected by the wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of all restraint, which mark Lydia's character. . . she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.'

Ref: https://study.com/academy/lesson/literary-themes-in-pride-and-prejudice.html

MAJOR THEMES: 
Marriage, Wealth, Class, Self-knowledge (Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice)

QUOTES:
#1
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

#2
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Caroline Bingley, Pride and Prejudice

#3
“My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.”
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#4
"Your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.""And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.”
— Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

#5
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
— Mary Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#6
"One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#7
"A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then."
— Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#8
"People themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever."
— Mr. Bingley, Pride and Prejudice

#9
"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
— Mr. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

#10
"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."
— Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

Ref: https://www.bustle.com/articles/158113-16-pride-and-prejudice-quotes-that-will-make-you-understand-why-its-universally-adored

#11
He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security.

Ref: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice

REFERENCES

Ref for characters, plot and 'major themes' section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice

Benefits of reading in general, of fiction, of nonfiction and what about a mix of both

Contents

A) BENEFITS OF READING IN GENERAL
B) BENEFITS OF READING FICTION
C) BENEFITS OF READING NONFICTION
D) AND WHAT ABOUT A MIXTURE OF BOTH FICTION AND NONFICTION

...

A) BENEFITS OF READING IN GENERAL:

1. Cognitive Mental Stimulation And Brain Exercising

Reading sharpens your mind through stimulation of the brain. By causing you to focus intensely on the words, your brain takes in a significant amount of information, which can improve both your critical thinking and analyzation skills as well. 

2. Vocabulary And Knowledge Expansion

3. Lower Levels Of Stress And Tension Relief

The very act of reading and focusing on the written word can help relieve your mind of anxiety and the pressures of the day. By pulling your mind away from the stress at hand, you can relax and let the stress melt away.

4. Helps With Depression And Dysthymia

Reading, especially self-help books, can help ward off depressive occurrences. Just like with lowering your stress levels, it stimulates the part of the brain that deals with depression as well. Self-help books, full of information about how to better yourself and your state of mind, can help ease depression. Reading books can be extremely beneficial for someone who might suffer from depressive tendencies but not enough to need medication.

5. Memory Improvement And Better Focus

Simple comprehension improves your memory function. Remember the tests in elementary school where you were tested to see how much you retained while reading those short stories. Well, the comprehension as an adult works the same way. While reading, your brain is constantly retaining pieces of information about the story. Because the part of the brain that controls memory is stimulated, it acts like exercise for this part of the brain, resulting in improved memory.

6. Strengthens Your Writing Abilities

Writers are often big readers as well because they seek the fulfilment of reading. By concentrating on the way novels and other books are set up and written, you can mimic these styles, thus improving your writing skills considerably. Studying the writing of others is a great tool, especially if you enjoy writing. Even best-selling authors use this tool for studying writing styles and themes.

7. Enhances Your Imagination And Empathy

Although the enhancement of your imagination is not one of the more common benefits, reading can significantly increase your imagination. Consider the worlds that you are immersed to and the characters you come across while going through a novel. Because of these worlds and characters, the part of your brain which houses your imagination is stimulated, causing you to imagine what the places and people look like just by picturing the words.

8. Boosts Your Sleep

Did you know that reading can also help with your sleep? No, this doesn’t mean that it helps you fall asleep, but it does contribute to improving your overall sleep pattern and restfulness. Reading, since it enables you to relax and de-stress, can help pull you into a deep and peaceful sleep. That sounds like it might be too good to be true, but reading can, in fact, help you sleep.

9. Enjoy Your Entertainment And Peace

Perhaps the most well-known benefit of reading is the entertainment value of opening a book with crisp, white pages. Of course, the entertainment is typically what draws avid readers to pick up the next great book. In fact, it has been a solid form of entertainment for many years. Though reading is perfect for entertainment, there’s more to it than just the entertainment factor.

Any reader knows that going through a book can be peaceful and induce a relaxing state of mind. By immersing yourself in a good book, you can almost feel any stress or worry melt away. You are both entertained and relaxed just by reading, which is just one of the many great things about books.

10. Helps You To Broaden Your Mind

Books allow you to see things from a completely different perspective. Reading about a certain culture, for example, can help you to understand how that culture differs from your own. You might not agree with that culture’s perspective, but at least you’ll look at things from a new angle.

Books give you new ideas. You’re constantly learning when you’re reading, and you can start to look at the world from a more balanced perspective. In the absence of other viewpoints, we tend to have a very one-dimensional type of thinking based on our upbringing.

We act the way we do because that’s what we learned during our formative years. We look at things from the angle of our own experience. Using this lens, it is easy to assume that our way is the correct way. Books can help us see things in a new light, allowing us to let go of the notions of “correct” or “incorrect” and seeing instead different ways of being human.

Reference for the above points: https://www.selfdevelopmentsecrets.com/benefits-importance-reading-books/

11. Reading is Contagious

If you have made it to the bottom of this list, you are now aware of many of the benefits of reading. Did you know that you can help others by reading? Many parents and adults wish that their family read more. Exposing them to your reading habits can be a great way to help encourage them to pick up a book. If you have children in elementary school, consider reading out loud to them even if they can read on their own. Studies show that doing so can help inspire them to become frequent readers. 

Reference for 11th point: Ref: https://www.cc-pl.org/10-benefits-of-reading

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

B) BENEFITS OF READING FICTION:

2 science-backed ways reading fiction makes you smarter

1. It improves your vocabulary and language skills

Books, no matter the type, increase language comprehension, a larger vocabulary and increased brain activity, studies show.

“If ‘smarter’ means having a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge... then reading may well make people smarter,” psychologist Keith Stanovich writes in the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.

In separate research, brain scans of college students after reading a thriller showed increased activity in the areas of the brain related to language comprehension and sensation.

2. It boosts your emotional intelligence

People who read literary fiction show higher levels of empathy and emotional intelligence, according to studies published in the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Research in Personality and The European Journal of Communication Research.

And emotional intelligence plays an important role in the workplace.

Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/28/how-reading-fiction-makes-you-smarter.html

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

C) BENEFITS OF READING NONFICTION:

4 Reasons Children Need More Non-Fiction Books

1. Prepares students for later grades

The bulk of books read in the higher grades are informational texts that focus on a particular subject. The earlier students are introduced to this writing style and tone, the easier they’ll transition to higher grades.

2. Aids second language learners

With realistic pictures and locally contextualized content, students learning to read in a second language can connect familiar images with words from the new language. 

3. Offers solutions to real-world problems

Many students in Tanzania and other countries we work in struggle daily with hunger, child labor, or staying in school. Non-fiction books provide children with information, new perspectives, and life skills that can be used to address challenges in their lives.

4. Teaches children more about the world they live in

For nearly two decades, Room to Read has published culturally-relevant books that specifically include characters, settings, and lifestyle details children see regularly. But non-fiction books allow children to further expand their horizons beyond the familiar.

Ref: https://www.roomtoread.org/the-latest/5-reasons-children-need-more-non-fiction-books/

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D) AND WHAT ABOUT A MIXTURE OF BOTH FICTION AND NONFICTION:

As its famously quoted 'Reality is stranger than fiction'.

Fiction is primarily about how one feels about things, but nonfictions prefer to focus on how the world actually works. Fiction is all about empathy and emotional meaning, purpose and values. Nonfictions prefer to teach you about the infinitely complex nature of reality. History tells us more about human nature than psychology. The Past is Prologue.

Along with history I love reading biographies, memoirs, argumentative essays, investigative journalism reports etc. I find them more compelling and interesting. In my early stages of reading I loved fiction, however now I feel Wings of Fire by Abdul Kalam is more appealing and teaches me the true essence of hardwork and self belief than Harry Potter. After reading its an amazing feeling to know that such a person actually existed and faced such situations. There are innumerable real people who have left me in awe than any fictional character.

Fictional stories based on real events are a perfect amalgam of both. for eg.

1. The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh is a story based on the background of India’s and Bangladesh’s (formerly east Pakistan) partition.

2. The Boy with the stripped Pyjama by John Boyne is about a kids innocent understanding and friendship with a jew in the background of Hitler’s anti semitism.

3. All Dan Brown books are more insightful about history and symbolism than all history text books ever combined.

4. The Kite Runner and Thousand splendid suns by Khaleed Hosseini talks about the situations in Afganistan with well etched characters like Hassan and Mariam respectively. It shows the humane and alluring scenic beauty behind the bloodthirsty country.

Ref 1: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-of-reading-non-fiction
Ref 2: https://www.quora.com/profile/Sanchita-Lohot

- - - - -

1. Fiction & Non-Fiction both are two eyes for a reader. He will miss something if he drops one and stick to the other one permanently.
2. Fiction helps you develop imagination and Non-Fiction helps you acquire lessons from successful people in the form of biographies.
3. Too much Fiction will make you feel bored and dreaming
4. Too much Non-Fiction may feel like rubbing of the personal opinions of an author upon you. So both should be balanced.

Ref: https://medium.com/aryas-books/fiction-vs-non-fiction-a-handful-guide-for-better-reading-7ea841549f1f

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Reference for this image: https://www.selfdevelopmentsecrets.com/benefits-importance-reading-books/

One flew over the cuckoo's nest (Ken Kesey) - Highlights

Main Characters:

Chief Bromden:

The novel's half-Native American narrator has been in the mental hospital since the end of World War II. Bromden is presumed by staff and patients alike to be deaf and mute, and through this guise he becomes privy to many of the ward's dirtiest secrets. As a young man, the Chief was a high school football star, a college student, and a war hero. After seeing his father, a Native American chieftain, humiliated at the hands of the U.S. government and his (white) wife, Chief Bromden descends into clinical depression and begins hallucinating. Soon he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He believes society is controlled by a large, mechanized system which he calls "The Combine."

Randle McMurphy:

A free-spirited, rebellious con man, sent to the hospital from a prison work farm. He is guilty of battery and gambling. McMurphy is transferred from a prison work farm to the hospital, thinking it will be an easy way to serve out his sentence in comfort. In the end, McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched, sacrificing his freedom and his health in exchange for freeing the previously shackled spirits of the cowed patients on the ward.

Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse):

The tyrannical head nurse of the mental institution, who exercises near-total control over those in her care, including her subordinates. She will not hesitate to restrict her patients' access to medication, amenities, and basic human necessities if it suits her manipulative whims. Her favorite informant is the timid Billy Bibbit, whom she coerces into divulging the unit's secrets by threatening to complain about him to his mother. McMurphy's fun-loving, rebellious presence in Ratched's institution is a constant annoyance, as neither threats nor punishment nor shock therapy will stop him or the patients under his sway. Eventually, after McMurphy nearly chokes her to death in a fit of rage, Nurse Ratched has him lobotomized. However, the damage has already been done, and Nurse Ratched's rule is broken after McMurphy's attack leaves her nearly unable to speak, which renders her unable to intimidate her patients, subordinates and superiors.

The "Black Boys" Washington, Williams and Warren (Part of staff):

Three black men who work as aides in the ward. Williams is a dwarf, his growth stunted after witnessing his mother being raped by white men. The Chief says Nurse Ratched hired them for their sadistic nature.

Billy Bibbit (Acute):

A nervous, shy, and boyish patient with an extreme speech impediment, Billy cuts and burns himself, and has attempted suicide numerous times. Billy has a fear of women, especially those with authority such as his mother. To alleviate this, McMurphy sneaks a prostitute into the ward so Billy can lose his virginity. The next morning, Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother; fearing the loss of his mother's love, Billy has an emotional breakdown and commits suicide by cutting his own throat.

Dale Harding (Acute):

The unofficial leader of the patients before McMurphy arrives, he is an intelligent, good-looking man who's ashamed of his repressed homosexuality. Harding's beautiful yet malcontent wife is a source of shame for him.

Charlie Cheswick (Acute):

A loud-mouthed patient who always demands changes in the ward, but never has the courage to see anything through. He finds a friend in McMurphy, who's able to voice his opinions for him. At one point McMurphy decides to fall in line when he learns his stay in the ward is indefinite and his release is solely determined by the Big Nurse. As a result, Cheswick drowns himself in the ward's swimming pool when he decides he himself will never escape the relentless Big Nurse.

Acutes:

The acutes are patients who officials believe can still be cured. With few exceptions, they are there voluntarily, a fact that angers McMurphy when he first learns of it, then later causes him to feel further pity for the patients, thus further inspiring him to prove to them they can still be strong despite their seeming willingness to be weak.

Chronics:

The chronics are patients who will never be cured. Many of the chronics are elderly and/or in vegetative states.

Plot:

The book is narrated by "Chief" Bromden, a gigantic yet docile half-Native American patient at a psychiatric hospital, who presents himself as deaf and mute. Bromden’s tale focuses mainly on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, who faked insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in the hospital rather than at a prison work farm. The head administrative nurse, Nurse Ratched, rules the ward with absolute authority and little medical oversight. She is assisted by her three day-shift orderlies and her assistant doctors.

McMurphy constantly antagonizes Nurse Ratched and upsets the routines of the ward, leading to endless power struggles between the inmate and the nurse. He runs a card table, captains the ward's basketball team, comments on Nurse Ratched's figure, incites the other patients to conduct a vote about watching the World Series on television, and organizes an unsupervised deep-sea fishing trip. His reaction after claiming to be able to and subsequently failing to lift a heavy control panel in the defunct hydrotherapy room (referred to as the "tub room") – "But at least I tried" – gives the men incentive to try to stand up for themselves, instead of allowing Nurse Ratched to take control of every aspect of their lives. The Chief opens up to McMurphy, revealing late one night that he can speak and hear. A disturbance after the fishing trip results in McMurphy and the Chief being sent for electroshock therapy sessions, but such punishment does little to curb McMurphy's rambunctious behavior.

One night, after bribing the night orderly, McMurphy smuggles two prostitute girlfriends with liquor onto the ward and breaks into the pharmacy for codeine cough syrup and unnamed psychiatric medications. McMurphy persuades one of the women to seduce Billy Bibbit, a timid, boyish patient with a terrible stutter and little experience with women, so he can lose his virginity. Although McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift starts, he and the other patients instead fall asleep without cleaning up the mess of the group’s antics, and the morning staff discovers the ward in complete disarray. Nurse Ratched finds Billy and the prostitute in each other's arms, partially dressed, and admonishes him. Billy asserts himself for the first time, answering Nurse Ratched without stuttering. Ratched calmly threatens to tell Billy's mother what she has seen. Billy has an emotional breakdown, and once left alone in the doctor's office, commits suicide by cutting his throat. Nurse Ratched blames McMurphy for the loss of Billy's life. Enraged at what she has done to Billy, McMurphy attacks Ratched, attempting to strangle her to death, tearing off her uniform and revealing her breasts to the patients and aides who are watching. McMurphy is physically restrained and moved to the Disturbed ward.

Nurse Ratched misses a week of work due to her injuries, during which time many of the patients either transfer to other wards or check out of the hospital forever. When she returns she cannot speak and is thus deprived of her most potent tool to keep the men in line. With Bromden, Martini, and Scanlon the only patients who attended the boat trip left on the ward, McMurphy is brought back in. He has received a lobotomy, and is now in a vegetative state, rendering him silent and motionless. The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow during the night in an act of mercy before lifting the tub room control panel that McMurphy could not lift earlier, throwing it through a window and escaping the hospital.

Quotes:

1. “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”

Meaning (1):

To me: This quote, to me, means more than laughter being good medicine. Its about being happy with yourself so you don't lose yourself. Laughter and being happy provides you with a light for your dark path called life. Without it, you'll get lost.

To Ken Kesey: I believe that this particular quote meant something deep to the author. Maybe he was in a certain place in his life where he needed laughter, her needed to be happy. He used McMurphy to express that.

To anyone: Anyone who read this quote could relate to it immediately. Anyone knows what laughter can do and what it can mend. Reading this quote will only remind them of that. But it's deeper than "laughter is the best medicine." It's about using laughter to find your foothold in life.

Meaning (2):

The quote is central to understanding McMurphy's character and the way he deals with and sees life. Being able to laugh and poke fun is central to rebellion and fun, the very antithesis of Nurse Ratchet and the ward.

The other patients have lost their footing, lost the ability to stand for themselves because they've been robbed of this very quality through routine, medication and oppression.

McMurphy's the agent of chaos who's going to give it back to them or die trying. He persists beyond when things seem possible. Like when they switch off the TV during the big baseball game so McMurphy just carries on narrating like an excitable commentator. By doing so the others come to life and get involved, they re-find their footing even if it's briefly.

2. “All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”

3. “He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”

4. You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

5. This world... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

6. But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

7. They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

8. He won't let the pain blot out the humor no more than he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

Meaning: Basically this means that McMurphy will try to get the best of this situation and won't live it down like he had throughout most of the play.

9. What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.

References for characters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randle_McMurphy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_Ratched

Reference for plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(novel)

References for quotes:

https://prezi.com/9e-wpvrvnsd7/man-when-you-lose-your-laugh-you-lose-your-footing/

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/156766?ref=one-flew-over-the-cuckoo%27s-nest

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/598763?ref=one-flew-over-the-cuckoo%27s-nest

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/473065?ref=one-flew-over-the-cuckoo%27s-nest

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/347944?ref=one-flew-over-the-cuckoo%27s-nest

Ref for Quote 1, Meaning 2: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-understand-man-when-you-lose-your-laugh-you-lose-your-footing-by-Ken-Kesey-Are-there-any-examples-to-explain/answer/J-Carthy

Ref for quote 7: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2100252-one-flew-over-the-cuckoo-s-nest

Ref for quote 8: https://prezi.com/r9boum20bjpq/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest/

Emotional Intelligence - Why it Can Matter More Than IQ (Daniel Goleman, 2009) - Summary

PREFACE

Aristotle's Challenge

Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy.

ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics

As Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression. The question is, how can we bring intelligence to our emotions—and civility to our streets and caring to our communal life?

PART ONE

THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN

CHAPTER 1: What are emotions for?

In our emotional repertoire each emotion plays a unique role, as revealed by their distinctive biological signatures. With new methods to peer into the body and brain, researchers are discovering more physiological details of how each emotion prepares the body for a very different kind of response:

• With ANGER blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous action.

• With FEAR blood goes to the large skeletal muscles, such as in the legs, making it easier to flee— and making the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it (creating the feeling that the blood "runs cold"). At the same time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction. Circuits in the brain's emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand, the better to evaluate what response to make.

• Among the main biological changes in HAPPINESS is an increased activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy, and a quieting of those that generate worrisome thought. But there is no particular shift in physiology save a quiescence, which makes the body recover more quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emotions. This configuration offers the body a general rest, as well as readiness and enthusiasm for whatever task is at hand and for striving toward a great variety of goals.

• LOVE, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction entail parasympathetic arousal—the physiological opposite of the "fight-or-flight" mobilization shared by fear and anger. The parasympathetic pattern, dubbed the "relaxation response," is a body wide set of reactions that generates a general state of calm and contentment, facilitating cooperation.

• The lifting of the eyebrows in SURPRISE allows the taking in of a larger visual sweep and also permits more light to strike the retina. This offers more information about the unexpected event, making it easier to figure out exactly what is going on and concoct the best plan for action.

• Around the world an expression of DISGUST looks the same, and sends the identical message: something is offensive in taste or smell, or metaphorically so. The facial expression of disgust—the upper lip curled to the side as the nose wrinkles slightly—suggests a primordial attempt, as Darwin observed, to close the nostrils against a noxious odor or to spit out a poisonous food.

• A main function for SADNESS is to help adjust to a significant loss, such as the death of someone close or a major disappointment. Sadness brings a drop in energy and enthusiasm for life's activities, particularly diversions and pleasures, and, as it deepens and approaches depression, slows the body's metabolism. This introspective withdrawal creates the opportunity to mourn a loss or frustrated hope, grasp its consequences for one's life, and, as energy returns, plan new beginnings. This loss of energy may well have kept saddened—and vulnerable—early humans close to home, where they were safer.

CHAPTER 2: Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking

A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional centers. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centers have fully understood what is happening.

PART TWO

THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

CHAPTER 3: When Smart Is Dumb

Salovey subsumes Gardner's personal intelligences in his basic definition of emotional intelligence, expanding these abilities into five main domains:

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 feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back far 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 reasons 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 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.

CHAPTER 4: KNOW THYSELF

Mayer finds that people tend to fall into distinctive styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions:

• 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. 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.

***

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 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.

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, 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 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.

CHAPTER 5: PASSION'S SLAVES

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 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.

Balm for Anger

Given the 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.

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 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. 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 proportion of men translate this into going for a drive—a finding that 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.

***

SOOTHING ANXIETY: WHAT, ME WORRY?

Borkovec discovered some simple steps that can help even the most chronic worrier control the habit.

The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as near their beginning as possible—ideally, as soon as or just after the fleeting catastrophic image triggers the worry-anxiety cycle. Borkovec trains people in this approach by first teaching them to monitor cues for anxiety, especially learning to identify situations that trigger worry, or the fleeting thoughts and images that initiate the worry, as well as the accompanying sensations of anxiety in the body. With practice, people can identify the worries at an earlier and earlier point in the anxiety spiral. People also learn relaxation methods that they can apply at the moment they recognize the worry beginning, and practice the relaxation method daily so they will be able to use it on the spot, when they need it the most. The relaxation method, though, is not enough in itself. Worriers also need to actively challenge the worrisome thoughts; failing this, the worry spiral will keep coming back. So the next step is to take a critical stance toward their assumptions: Is it very probable that the dreaded event will occur? Is it necessarily the case that there is only one or no alternative to letting it happen? Are there constructive steps to be taken? Does it really help to run through these same anxious thoughts over and over?

This combination of mindfulness and healthy skepticism would, presumably, act as a brake on the neural activation that underlies low-grade anxiety. Actively generating such thoughts may prime the circuitry that can inhibit the limbic driving of worry; at the same time, actively inducing a relaxed state counters the signals for anxiety the emotional brain is sending throughout the body.

Indeed, Borkovec points out, these strategies establish a train of mental activity that is incompatible with worry. When a worry is allowed to repeat over and over unchallenged, it gains in persuasive power; challenging it by contemplating a range of equally plausible points of view keeps the one worried thought from being naively taken as true. Even some people whose worrying is serious enough to qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis have been relieved of the worrying habit this way.

On the other hand, for people with worries so severe they have flowered into phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or panic disorder, it may be prudent—indeed, a sign of self-awareness—to turn to medication to interrupt the cycle. A retraining of the emotional circuitry through therapy is still called for, however, in order to lessen the likelihood that anxiety disorders will recur when medication is stopped.

***

MANAGING MELANCHOLY

Crying, one theory holds, may be nature's way of lowering levels of the brain chemicals that prime distress. While crying can sometimes break a spell of sadness, it can also leave the person still obsessing about the reasons for despair. The idea of a "good cry" is misleading: crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery. Distractions break the chain of sadness-maintaining thinking; one of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for the most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory—patients feel better because they can't remember why they were so sad. At any rate, to shake garden-variety sadness, Diane Tice found, many people reported turning to distractions such as reading, TV and movies, video games and puzzles, sleeping, and daydreams such as planning a fantasy vacation. Wenzlaff would add that the most effective distractions are ones that will shift your mood—an exciting sporting event, a funny movie, an uplifting book.

Aerobic exercise, Tice found, is one of the more effective tactics for lifting mild depression, as well as other bad moods. But the caveat here is that the mood-lifting benefits of exercise work best for the lazy, those who usually do not work out very much. For those with a daily exercise routine, whatever mood-changing benefits it offers were probably strongest when they first took up the exercise habit. In fact, for habitual exercisers there is a reverse effect on mood: they start to feel bad on those days when they skip their workout. Exercise seems to work well because it changes the physiological state the mood evokes: depression is a low-arousal state, and aerobics pitches the body into high arousal. By the same token, relaxation techniques, which put the body into a low-arousal state, work well for anxiety, a high-arousal state, but not so well for depression. Each of these approaches seems to work to break the cycle of depression or anxiety because it pitches the brain into a level of activity incompatible with the emotional state that has had it in its grip.

Cheering oneself up through treats and sensual pleasures was another fairly popular antidote to the blues. Common ways people soothed themselves when depressed ranged from taking hot baths or eating favorite foods, to listening to music or having sex. Buying oneself a gift or treat to get out of a bad mood was particularly popular among women, as was shopping in general, even if only window shopping. Among those in college, Tice found that eating was three times as common a strategy for soothing sadness among women than men; men, on the other hand, were five times as likely to turn to drinking or drugs when they felt down. The trouble with overeating or alcohol as antidotes, of course, is that they can easily backfire: eating to excess brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression itself.

A more constructive approach to mood-lifting, Tice reports, is engineering a small triumph or easy success: tackling some long-delayed chore around the house or getting to some other duty they've been wanting to clear up. By the same token, lifts to self-image also were cheering, even if only in the form of getting dressed up or putting on makeup.

One of the most potent—and, outside therapy, little used—antidotes to depression is seeing things differently, or cognitive reframing. It is natural to bemoan the end of a relationship and to wallow in self-pitying thoughts such as the conviction that "this means I'll always be alone," but it's sure to thicken the sense of despair. However, stepping back and thinking about the ways the relationship wasn't so great, and ways you and your partner were mismatched—in other words, seeing the loss differently, in a more positive light—is an antidote to the sadness. By the same token, cancer patients, no matter how serious their condition, were in better moods if they were able to bring to mind another patient who was in even worse shape ("I'm not so bad off—at least I can walk"); those who compared themselves to healthy people were the most depressed. Such downward comparisons are surprisingly cheering: suddenly what had seemed quite dispiriting doesn't look all that bad.

Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in need. Since depression feeds on ruminations and preoccupations with the self, helping others lifts us out of those preoccupations as we empathize with people in pain of their own. Throwing oneself into volunteer work—coaching Little League, being a Big Brother, feeding the homeless—was one of the most powerful mood-changers in Tice's study. But it was also one of the rarest.

Finally, at least some people are able to find relief from their melancholy in turning to a transcendent power. Tice told me, "Praying, if you're very religious, works for all moods, especially depression."

CHAPTER 6: The Master Aptitude

IMPULSE CONTROL: THE MARSHMALLOW TEST

At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratification is twice as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as is IQ at age four; IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT only after children learn to read. This suggests that the ability to delay gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood is also a powerful predictor of later delinquency, again more so than IQ. As we shall see in Part Five, while some argue that IQ cannot be changed and so represents an unbendable limitation on a child's life potential, there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as impulse control and accurately reading a social situation can be learned.

What Walter Mischel, who did the study, describes with the rather infelicitous phrase "goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING

Hope, modern researchers are finding, does more than offer a bit of solace amid affliction; it plays a surprisingly potent role in life, offering an advantage in realms as diverse as school achievement and bearing up in onerous jobs. Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines it with more specificity as "believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be."

People tend to differ in the general degree to which they have hope in this sense. Some typically think of themselves as able to get out of a jam or find ways to solve problems, while others simply do not see themselves as having the energy, ability, or means to accomplish their goals. People with high levels of hope, Snyder finds, share certain traits, among them being able to motivate themselves, feeling resourceful enough to find ways to accomplish their objectives, reassuring themselves when in a tight spot that things will get better, being flexible enough to find different ways to get to their goals or to switch goals if one becomes impossible, and having the sense to break down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces.

From the perspective of emotional intelligence, having hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks. Indeed, people who are hopeful evidence less depression than others as they maneuver through life in pursuit of their goals, are less anxious in general, and have fewer emotional distresses.

OPTIMISM: THE GREAT MOTIVATOR

Optimism and hope—like helplessness and despair—can be learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the events of one's life and can meet challenges as they come up. Developing a competency of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding challenges. And surmounting those challenges in turn increases the sense of self-efficacy. This attitude makes people more likely to make the best use of whatever skills they may have—or to do what it takes to develop them.

Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: "People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong."

FLOW: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EXCELLENCE?

Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless. Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task. And although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them. There are several ways to enter flow. One is to intentionally focus a sharp attention on the task at hand; a highly concentrated state is the essence of flow. There seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone: it can require considerable effort to get calm and focused enough to begin the task—this first step takes some discipline. But once focus starts to lock in, it takes on a force of its own, both offering relief from emotional turbulence and making the task effortless.

Entry to this zone can also occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability. As Csikszentmihalyi told me, "People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety."

The spontaneous pleasure, grace, and effectiveness that characterize flow are incompatible with emotional hijackings, in which limbic surges capture the rest of the brain. The quality of attention in flow is relaxed yet highly focused. It is a concentration very different from straining to pay attention when we are tired or bored, or when our focus is under siege from intrusive feelings such as anxiety or anger.

Flow is a state devoid of emotional static, save for a compelling, highly motivating feeling of mild ecstasy. That ecstasy seems to be a by-product of the attentional focus that is a prerequisite of flow. Indeed, the classic literature of contemplative traditions describes states of absorption that are experienced as pure bliss: flow induced by nothing more than intense concentration.

A strained concentration—a focus fueled by worry—produces increased cortical activation. But the zone of flow and optimal performance seems to be an oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare minimum of mental energy expended. That makes sense, perhaps, in terms of the skilled practice that allows people to get into flow: having mastered the moves of a task, whether a physical one such as rock climbing or a mental one such as computer programming, means that the brain can be more efficient in performing them. Well-practiced moves require much less brain effort than do ones just being learned, or those that are still too hard. Likewise, when the brain is working less efficiently because of fatigue or nervousness, as happens at the end of a long, stressful day, there is a blurring of the precision of cortical effort, with too many superfluous areas being activated—a neural state experienced as being highly distracted.30 The same happens in boredom. But when the brain is operating at peak efficiency, as in flow, there is a precise relation between the active areas and the demands of the task. In this state even hard work can seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining.

CHAPTER 7: The Roots of Empathy

EMPATHY AND ETHICS: THE ROOTS OF ALTRUISM

"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" is one of the most famous lines in English literature. John Donne's sentiment speaks to the heart of the link between empathy and caring: another's pain is one's own. To feel with another is to care. In this sense, the opposite of empathy is antipathy. The empathic attitude is engaged again and again in moral judgments, for moral dilemmas involve potential victims: Should you lie to keep from hurting a friend's feelings? Should you keep a promise to visit a sick friend or accept a last-minute invitation to a dinner party instead? When should a life-support system be kept going for someone who would otherwise die?

These moral questions are posed by the empathy researcher Martin Hoffman, who argues that the roots of morality are to be found in empathy, since it is empathizing with the potential victims— someone in pain, danger, or deprivation, say—and so sharing their distress that moves people to act to help them. Beyond this immediate link between empathy and altruism in personal encounters, Hoffman proposes that the same capacity for empathic affect, for putting oneself in another's place, leads people to follow certain moral principles.

Hoffman sees a natural progression in empathy from infancy onward. As we have seen, at one year of age a child feels in distress herself when she sees another fall and start to cry; her rapport is so strong and immediate that she puts her thumb in her mouth and buries her head in her mother's lap, as if she herself were hurt. After the first year, when infants become more aware that they are distinct from others, they actively try to soothe another crying infant, offering them their teddy bears, for example. As early as the age of two, children begin to realize that someone else's feelings differ from their own, and so they become more sensitive to cues revealing what another actually feels; at this point they might, for example, recognize that another child's pride might mean that the best way to help them deal with their tears is not to call undue attention to them.

By late childhood the most advanced level of empathy emerges, as children are able to understand distress beyond the immediate situation, and to see that someone's condition or station in life may be a source of chronic distress. At this point they can feel for the plight of an entire group, such as the poor, the oppressed, the outcast. That understanding, in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions centered on wanting to alleviate misfortune and injustice.

Empathy underlies many facets of moral judgment and action. One is "empathic anger," which John Stuart Mill described as "the natural feeling of retaliation. rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to . . . those hurts which wound us through wounding others"; Mill dubbed this the "guardian of justice." Another instance in which empathy leads to moral action is when a bystander is moved to intervene on behalf of a victim; the research shows that the more empathy a bystander feels for the victim, the more likely it is that she will intervene. There is some evidence that the level of empathy people feel shades their moral judgments as well. For example, studies in Germany and the United States found that the more empathic people are, the more they favor the moral principle that resources should be allocated according to people's need.

CHAPTER 8: The Social Arts

Four separate abilities that Hatch and Gardner identify as components of interpersonal intelligence:

• Organizing groups —the essential skill of the leader, this involves initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people. This is the talent seen in theater directors or producers, in military officers, and in effective heads of organizations and units of all kinds. On the playground, this is the child who takes the lead in deciding what everyone will play, or becomes team captain.

• Negotiating solutions —the talent of the mediator, preventing conflicts or resolving those that flare up. People who have this ability excel in deal-making, in arbitrating or mediating disputes; they might have a career in diplomacy, in arbitration or law, or as middlemen or managers of takeovers. These are the kids who settle arguments on the playing field.

• Personal connection —Roger's talent, that of empathy and connecting. This makes it easy to enter into an encounter or to recognize and respond fittingly to people's feelings and concerns—the art of relationship. Such people make good "team players," dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business world they do well as salespeople or managers, or can be excellent teachers. Children like Roger get along well with virtually everyone else, easily enter into playing with them, and are happy doing so. These children tend to be best at reading emotions from facial expressions and are most liked by their classmates.

• Social analysis —being able to detect and have insights about people's feelings, motives, and concerns. This knowledge of how others feel can lead to an easy intimacy or sense of rapport. At its best, this ability makes one a competent therapist or counselor—or, if combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or dramatist.

PART THREE

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED

CHAPTER 9: Intimate Enemies

A chapter about husband-wife relationship.

HIS MARRIAGE AND HERS: CHILDHOOD ROOTS

Little boys and girls are taught very different lessons about handling emotions. Parents, in general, discuss emotions—with the exception of anger—more with their daughters than their sons. Girls are exposed to more information about emotions than are boys: when parents make up stories to tell their preschool children, they use more emotion words when talking to daughters than to sons; when mothers play with their infants, they display a wider range of emotions to daughters than to sons; when mothers talk to daughters about feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional state itself than they do with their sons—though with the sons they go into more detail about the causes and consequences of emotions like anger (probably as a cautionary tale).

MARITAL FAULT LINES

That's the formula. You simply fill in the blanks with your particular gripe. "When we are on the road (X), and you change the radio station without asking me (Y), I feel like I don't even matter to you (Z)." That's very different from saying, "Who made you king of the radio?" Or "Last Thursday on our date night (X), when you called your mom and talked for a half hour (Y), I felt hurt because it took away from our special time with each other (Z)." That's far more productive than saying, "You always mess up our date nights." Using the XYZ formula will help you avoid insults and character assassination, allowing you instead to simply state how your partner's behavior affects your feelings. It helps you to own your feelings rather than project your frustrations onto your partner.

Ref: The Good Fight - How Conflict Can Bring You Closer (By Dr. Leslie Parrott, Dr. Les Parrott)

TOXIC THOUGHTS

Thoughts of being an innocent victim or of righteous indignation are typical of partners in troubled marriages, continually fueling anger and hurt. Once distressing thoughts such as righteous indignation become automatic, they are self-confirming: the partner who feels victimized is constantly scanning everything his partner does that might confirm the view that she is victimizing him, ignoring or discounting any acts of kindness on her part that would question or disconfirm that view.

These thoughts are powerful; they trip the neural alarm system. Once the husband's thought of being victimized triggers an emotional hijacking, he will for the time being easily call to mind and ruminate on a list of grievances that remind him of the ways she victimizes him, while not recalling anything she may have done in their entire relationship that would disconfirm the view that he is an innocent victim. It puts his spouse in a no-win situation: even things she does that are intentionally kind can be reinterpreted when viewed through such a negative lens and dismissed as feeble attempts to deny she is a victimizes

FLOODING: THE SWAMPING OF A MARRIAGE

The net effect of these distressing attitudes is to create incessant crisis, since they trigger emotional hijackings more often and make it harder to recover from the resulting hurt and rage. Gottman uses the apt term flooding for this susceptibility to frequent emotional distress; flooded husbands or wives are so overwhelmed by their partner's negativity and their own reaction to it that they are swamped by dreadful, out-of-control feelings. People who are flooded cannot hear without distortion or respond with clear-headedness; they find it hard to organize their thinking, and they tall back on primitive reactions. They just want things to stop, or want to run or, sometimes, to strike back. Flooding is a self-perpetuating emotional hijacking.

Ref: Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (John Gottman)

MEN: THE VULNERABLE SEX

Husbands are prone to flooding at a lower intensity of negativity than are their wives; more men than women react to their spouse's criticism with flooding. Once flooded, husbands secrete more adrenaline into their bloodstream, and the adrenaline flow is triggered by lower levels of negativity on their wife's part; it takes husbands longer to recover physiologically from flooding.21 This suggests the possibility that the stoic, Clint Eastwood type of male imperturbability may represent a defense against feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

The reason men are so likely to stonewall, Gottman proposes, is to protect themselves from flooding; his research showed that once they began stonewalling, their heart rates dropped by about ten beats per minute, bringing a subjective sense of relief. But—and here's a paradox—once the men started stonewalling, it was the wives whose heart rate shot up to levels signaling high distress. This limbic tango, with each sex seeking comfort in opposing gambits, leads to a very different stance toward emotional confrontations: men want to avoid them as fervently as their wives feel compelled to seek them.

HIS AND HERS: MARITAL ADVICE

Men and women, in general, need different emotional fine-tuning. For men, the advice is not to sidestep conflict, but to realize that when their wife brings up some grievance or disagreement, she may be doing it as an act of love, trying to keep the relationship healthy and on course (although there may well be other motives for a wife's hostility). When grievances simmer, they build and build in intensity until there's an explosion; when they are aired and worked out, it takes the pressure off. But husbands need to realize that anger or discontent is not synonymous with personal attack—their wives' emotions are often simply under-liners, emphasizing the strength of her feelings about the matter.

Men also need to be on guard against short-circuiting the discussion by offering a practical solution too early on—it's typically more important to a wife that she feel her husband hears her complaint and empathizes with her feelings about the matter (though he need not agree with her). She may hear his offering advice as a way of dismissing her feelings as inconsequential. Husbands who are able to stay with their wives through the heat of anger, rather than dismissing their complaints as petty, help their wives feel heard and respected. Most especially, wives want to have their feelings acknowledged and respected as valid, even if their husbands disagree. More often than not, when a wife feels her view is heard and her feelings registered, she calms down.

As for women, the advice is quite parallel. Since a major problem for men is that their wives are too intense in voicing complaints, wives need to make a purposeful effort to be careful not to attack their husbands—to complain about what they did, but not criticize them as a person or express contempt. Complaints are not attacks on character, but rather a clear statement that a particular action is distressing. An angry personal attack will almost certainly lead to a husband's getting defensive or stonewalling, which will be all the more frustrating, and only escalate the fight. It helps, too, if a wife's complaints are put in the larger context of reassuring her husband of her love for him.

CALMING DOWN

Ambitious couples can learn to monitor their pulse rates every five minutes or so during a troubling encounter, feeling the pulse at the carotid artery a few inches below the earlobe and jaw (people who do aerobic workouts learn to do this easily). Counting the pulse for fifteen seconds and multiplying by four gives the pulse rate in beats per minute. Doing so while feeling calm gives a baseline; if the pulse rate rises more than, say, ten beats per minute above that level, it signals the beginning of flooding. If the pulse climbs this much, a couple needs a twenty-minute break from each other to cool down before resuming the discussion. Although a five-minute break may feel long enough, the actual physiological recovery time is more gradual. As we saw in Chapter 5, residual anger triggers more anger; the longer wait gives the body more time to recover from the earlier arousal.

DETOXIFYING SELF-TALK

Because flooding is triggered by negative thoughts about the partner, it helps if a husband or wife who is being upset by such harsh judgments tackles them head-on. Sentiments like "I'm not going to take this anymore" or "I don't deserve this kind of treatment" are innocent-victim or righteous-indignation slogans. As cognitive therapist Aaron Beck points out, by catching these thoughts and challenging them—rather than simply being enraged or hurt by them—a husband or wife can begin to become free of their hold.

This requires monitoring such thoughts, realizing that one does not have to believe them, and making the intentional effort to bring to mind evidence or perspectives that put them in question. For example, a wife who feels in the heat of the moment that "he doesn't care about my needs—he's always so selfish" might challenge the thought by reminding herself of a number of things her husband has done that are, in fact, thoughtful. This allows her to reframe the thought as: "Well, he does show he cares about me sometimes, even though what he just did was thoughtless and upsetting to me." The latter formulation opens the possibility of change and a positive resolution; the former only foments anger and hurt.

NONDEFENSIVE LISTENING AND SPEAKING

The most powerful form of non-defensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said. As we saw in Chapter 7, for one partner in a couple to truly empathize with the other demands that his own emotional reactions calm down to the point where he is receptive enough for his own physiology to be able to mirror the feelings of his partner. Without this physiological attunement, a partner's sense of what the other is feeling is likely to be entirely off base. Empathy deteriorates when one's own feelings are so strong that they allow no physiological harmonizing, but simply override everything else.

One method for effective emotional listening, called "mirroring," is commonly used in marital therapy. When one partner makes a complaint, the other repeats it back in her own words, trying to capture not just the thought, but also the feelings that go with it. The partner mirroring checks with the other to be sure the restatement is on target, and if not, tries again until it is right—something that seems simple, but is surprisingly tricky in execution. The effect of being mirrored accurately is not just feeling understood, but having the added sense of being in emotional attunement. That in itself can sometimes disarm an imminent attack, and goes far toward keeping discussions of grievances from escalating into fights.

The art of non-defensive speaking for couples’ centers around keeping what is said to a specific complaint rather than escalating to a personal attack. Psychologist Haim Ginott, the grandfather of effective-communication programs, recommended that the best formula for a complaint is "XYZ": "When you did X, it made me feel Y, and I'd rather you did Z instead." For example: "When you didn't call to tell me you were going to be late for our dinner appointment, I felt unappreciated and angry. I wish you'd call to let me know you'll be late" instead of "You're a thoughtless, self-centered bastard," which is how the issue is all too often put in couples' fights. In short, open communication has no bullying, threats, or insults. Nor does it allow for any of the innumerable forms of defensiveness— excuses, denying responsibility, counterattacking with a criticism, and the like. Here again empathy is a potent tool.

CHAPTER 10: Managing with Heart

Harry Levinson, a psychoanalyst turned corporate consultant, gives the following advice on the art of the critique, which is intricately entwined with the art of praise:

• Be specific. Pick a significant incident, an event that illustrates a key problem that needs changing or a pattern of deficiency, such as the inability to do certain parts of a job well. It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing "something" wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change. Focus on the specifics, saying what the person did well, what was done poorly, and how it could be changed. Don't beat around the bush or be oblique or evasive; it will muddy the real message. This, of course, is akin to the advice to couples about the "XYZ" statement of a grievance: say exactly what the problem is, what's wrong with it or how it makes you feel, and what could be changed. "Specificity," Levinson points out, "is just as important for praise as for criticism. I won't say that vague praise has no effect at all, but it doesn't have much, and you can't learn from it."

• Offer a solution. The critique, like all useful feedback, should point to a way to fix the problem. Otherwise it leaves the recipient frustrated, demoralized, or demotivated. The critique may open the door to possibilities and alternatives that the person did not realize were there, or simply sensitize her to deficiencies that need attention—but should include suggestions about how to take care of these problems.

• Be present. Critiques, like praise, are most effective face to face and in private. People who are uncomfortable giving a criticism—or offering praise—are likely to ease the burden on themselves by doing it at a distance, such as in a memo. But this makes the communication too impersonal, and robs the person receiving it of an opportunity for a response or clarification.

• Be sensitive. This is a call for empathy, for being attuned to the impact of what you say and how you say it on the person at the receiving end. Managers who have little empathy, Levinson points out, are most prone to giving feedback in a hurtful fashion, such as the withering put-down. The net effect of such criticism is destructive: instead of opening the way for a corrective, it creates an emotional backlash of resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and distance.

CHAPTER 11: Mind and Medicine

Over the years since then, Ader's modest discovery has forced a new look at the links between the immune system and the central nervous system. The field that studies this, psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI, is now a leading-edge medical science. Its very name acknowledges the links: psycho, or "mind"; neuro, for the neuroendocrine system (which subsumes the nervous system and hormone systems); and immunology, for the immune system.

A network of researchers is finding that the chemical messengers that operate most extensively in both brain and immune system are those that are most-dense in neural areas that regulate emotion. Some of the strongest evidence for a direct physical pathway allowing emotions to impact the immune system has come from David Felten, a colleague of Ader's. Felten began by noting that emotions have a powerful effect on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure levels. Felten, working with his wife, Suzanne, and other colleagues, then detected a meeting point where the autonomic nervous system directly talks to lymphocytes and macrophages, cells of the immune system.

In electron-microscope studies, they found synapse like contacts where the nerve terminals of the autonomic system have endings that directly abut these immune cells. This physical contact point allows the nerve cells to release neurotransmitters to regulate the immune cells; indeed, they signal back and forth. The finding is revolutionary. No one had suspected that immune cells could be targets of messages from the nerves.

To test how important these nerve endings were in the workings of the immune system, Felten went a step further. In experiments with animals he removed some nerves from lymph nodes and spleen— where immune cells are stored or made—and then used viruses to challenge the immune system. The result: a huge drop in immune response to the virus. His conclusion is that without those nerve endings the immune system simply does not respond as it should to the challenge of an invading virus or bacterium. In short, the nervous system not only connects to the immune system, but is essential for proper immune function.

TOWARD A MEDICINE THAT CARES

For medicine to enlarge its vision to embrace the impact of emotions, two large implications of the scientific findings must be taken to heart:

1. Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings —anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness —is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. One way to do this that could have broad public-health effects would be to impart most basic emotional intelligence skills to children, so that they become lifelong habits. Another high-payoff preventive strategy would be to teach emotion management to people reaching retirement age, since emotional well-being is one factor that determines whether an older person declines rapidly or thrives. A third target group might be so-called at-risk populations—the very poor, single working mothers, residents of high-crime neighborhoods, and the like—who live under extraordinary pressure day in and day out, and so might do better medically with help in handling the emotional toll of these stresses.

2. Many patients can benefit measurably when their psychological needs are attended to along with their purely medical ones. While it is a step toward more humane care when a physician or nurse offers a distressed patient comfort and consolation, more can be done. But emotional care is an opportunity too often lost in the way medicine is practiced today; it is a blind spot for medicine. Despite mounting data on the medical usefulness of attending to emotional needs, as well as supporting evidence for connections between the brain's emotional center and the immune system, many physicians remain skeptical that their patients' emotions matter clinically, dismissing the evidence for this as trivial and anecdotal, as "fringe," or, worse, as the exaggerations of a self-promoting few.

PART FOUR

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY

CHAPTER 12: The Family Crucible

The three most common emotionally inept parenting styles proved to be:

• Ignoring feelings altogether. Such parents treat a child's emotional upset as trivial or a bother, something they should wait to blow over. They fail to use emotional moments as a chance to get closer to the child or to help the child learn lessons in emotional competence.

• Being too laissez-faire. These parents notice how a child feels, but hold that however a child handles the emotional storm is fine—even, say, hitting. Like those who ignore a child's feelings, these parents rarely step in to try to show their child an alternative emotional response. They try to soothe all upsets, and will, for instance, use bargaining and bribes to get their child to stop being sad or angry.

• Being contemptuous, showing no respect for how the child feels. Such parents are typically disapproving, harsh in both their criticisms and their punishments. They might, for instance, forbid any display of the child's anger at all, and become punitive at the least sign of irritability. These are the parents who angrily yell at a child who is trying to tell his side of the story, "Don't you talk back to me!"

***

A child's readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence:

1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful.

2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure.

3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective.

4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control.

5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others.

6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.

7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own needs with those of others in group activity.

CHAPTER 13: Trauma and Emotional Relearning

Read this chapter on how to treat PTSD.

Som Chit, a Cambodian refugee, balked when her three sons asked her to buy them toy AK-47 machine guns. Her sons—ages six, nine, and eleven—wanted the toy guns to play the game some of the kids at their school called Purdy. In the game, Purdy, the villain, uses a submachine gun to massacre a group of children, then turns it on himself. Sometimes, though, the children have it end differently: it is they who kill Purdy.

Purdy was the macabre reenactment by some of the survivors of the catastrophic events of February 17, 1989, at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. There, during the school's late morning recess for first, second, and third graders, Patrick Purdy—who had himself attended those grades at Cleveland Elementary some twenty years earlier—stood at the playground's edge and fired wave after wave of 7.22 mm bullets at the hundreds of children at play. For seven minutes Purdy sprayed bullets toward the playground, then put a pistol to his head and shot himself. When the police arrived they found five children dying, twenty-nine wounded.

In ensuing months, the Purdy game spontaneously appeared in the play of boys and girls at Cleveland Elementary, one of many signs that those seven minutes and their aftermath were seared into the children's memory. When I visited the school, just a short bike ride from the neighborhood near the University of the Pacific where I myself had grown up, it was five months after Purdy had turned that recess into a nightmare. His presence was still palpable, even though the most horrific of the grisly remnants of the shooting—swarms of bullet holes, pools of blood, bits of flesh, skin, and scalp—were gone by the morning after the shooting, washed away and painted over. By then the deepest scars at Cleveland Elementary were not to the building but to the psyches of the children and staff there, who were trying to carry on with life as usual. Perhaps most striking was how the memory of those few minutes was revived again and again by any small detail that was similar in the least. A teacher told me, for example, that a wave of fright swept through the school with the announcement that St. Patrick's Day was coming; a number of the children somehow got the idea that the day was to honor the killer, Patrick Purdy.

"Whenever we hear an ambulance on its way to the rest home down the street, everything halts," another teacher told me. "The kids all listen to see if it will stop here or go on." For several weeks many children were terrified of the mirrors in the restrooms; a rumor swept the school that "Bloody Virgin Mary," some kind of fantasied monster, lurked there. Weeks after the shooting a frantic girl came running up to the school's principal, Pat Busher, yelling, "I hear shots! I hear shots!" The sound was from the swinging chain on a tetherball pole.

Many children became hyper-vigilant, as though continually on guard against a repetition of the terror; some boys and girls would hover at recess next to the classroom doors, not daring to venture out to the playground where the killings had occurred. Others would only play in small groups, posting a designated child as lookout. Many continued for months to avoid the "evil" areas, where children had died.

The memories lived on, too, as disturbing dreams, intruding into the children's unguarded minds as they slept. Apart from nightmares repeating the shooting itself in some way, children were flooded with anxiety dreams that left them apprehensive that they too would die soon. Some children tried to sleep with their eyes open so they wouldn't dream.

All of these reactions are well known to psychiatrists as among the key symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. At the core of such trauma, says Dr. Spencer Eth, a child psychiatrist who specializes in PTSD in children, is "the intrusive memory of the central violent action: the final blow with a fist, the plunge of a knife, the blast of a shotgun. The memories are intense perceptual experiences—the sight, sound, and smell of gunfire; the screams or sudden silence of the victim; the splash of blood; the police sirens."

These vivid, terrifying moments, neuroscientists now say, become memories emblazoned in the emotional circuitry. The symptoms are, in effect, signs of an over-aroused amygdala impelling the vivid memories of a traumatic moment to continue to intrude on awareness. As such, the traumatic memories become mental hair triggers, ready to sound an alarm at the least hint that the dread moment is about to happen once again. This hair-trigger phenomenon is a hallmark of emotional trauma of all kinds, including suffering repeated physical abuse in childhood.

Any traumatizing event can implant such trigger memories in the amygdala: a fire or an auto accident, being in a natural catastrophe such as an earthquake or a hurricane, being raped or mugged. Hundreds of thousands of people each year endure such disasters, and many or most come away with the kind of emotional wounding that leaves its imprint on the brain.

Violent acts are more pernicious than natural catastrophes such as a hurricane because, unlike victims of a natural disaster, victims of violence feel themselves to have been intentionally selected as the target of malevolence. That fact shatters assumptions about the trustworthiness of people and the safety of the interpersonal world, an assumption natural catastrophes leave untouched. Within an instant, the social world becomes a dangerous place, one in which people are potential threats to your safety.

Human cruelties stamp their victims' memories with a template that regards with fear anything vaguely similar to the assault itself. A man who was struck on the back of his head, never seeing his attacker, was so frightened afterward that he would try to walk down the street directly in front of an old lady to feel safe from being hit on the head again. A woman who was mugged by a man who got on an elevator with her and forced her out at knife point to an unoccupied floor was fearful for weeks of going into not just elevators, but also the subway or any other enclosed space where she might feel trapped; she ran from her bank when she saw a man put his hand in his jacket as the mugger had done. The imprint of horror in memory—and the resulting hypervigilance—can last a lifetime, as a study of Holocaust survivors found. Close to fifty years after they had endured semi-starvation, the slaughter of their loved ones, and constant terror in Nazi death camps, the haunting memories were still alive. A third said they felt generally fearful. Nearly three quarters said they still became anxious at reminders of the Nazi persecution, such as the sight of a uniform, a knock at the door, dogs barking, or smoke rising from a chimney. About 60 percent said they thought about the Holocaust almost daily, even after a half century; of those with active symptoms, as many as eight in ten still suffered from repeated nightmares. As one survivor said, "If you've been through Auschwitz and you don't have nightmares, then you're not normal."

FROM THE CHAPTER 14: Temperament Is Not Destiny

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, 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 Prizewinners Thorsten Wiesel and David Hubel, both neuroscientists. 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 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. 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.

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.

PART FIVE

EMOTIONAL LITERACY

CHAPTER 15: The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy

[Read about how to treat depression.]

The plight of today's children can be seen at subtler 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 doing more poorly in these specific ways:

• 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.

CHAPTER 16: Schooling the Emotions

THE ABC'S OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

In use for close to twenty years, the Self Science curriculum stands as a model for the teaching of emotional intelligence. The lessons sometimes are surprisingly sophisticated; as Nueva's director, Karen Stone McCown, told me, "When we teach about anger, we help kids understand that it is almost always a secondary reaction and to look for what's underneath—are you hurt? jealous? Our kids learn that you always have choices about how you respond to emotion, and the more ways you know to respond to an emotion, the richer your life can be."

A list of the contents of Self Science is an almost point-for-point match with the ingredients of emotional intelligence—and with the core skills recommended as primary prevention for the range of pitfalls threatening children (see Appendix E for the full list). The topics taught include selfawareness, in the sense of recognizing feelings and building a vocabulary for them, and seeing the links between thoughts, feelings, and reactions; knowing if thoughts or feelings are ruling a decision; seeing the consequences of alternative choices; and applying these insights to decisions about such issues as drugs, smoking, and sex. Self-awareness also takes the form of recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and seeing yourself in a positive but realistic light (and so avoiding a common pitfall of the self-esteem movement).

Another emphasis is managing emotions: realizing what is behind a feeling (for example, the hurt that triggers anger), and learning ways to handle anxieties, anger, and sadness. Still another emphasis is on taking responsibility for decisions and actions, and following through on commitments.

A key social ability is empathy, understanding others' feelings and taking their perspective, and respecting differences in how people feel about things. Relationships are a major focus, including learning to be a good listener and question-asker; distinguishing between what someone says or does and your own reactions and judgments; being assertive rather than angry or passive; and learning the arts of cooperation, conflict resolution, and negotiating compromise.

There are no grades given in Self Science; life itself is the final exam. But at the end of the eighth grade, as students are about to leave Nueva for high school, each is given a Socratic examination, an oral test in Self Science. One question from a recent final: "Describe an appropriate response to help a friend solve a conflict over someone pressuring them to try drugs, or over a friend who likes to tease." Or, "What are some healthy ways to deal with stress, anger, and fear?"

Were he alive today, Aristotle, so concerned with emotional skillfulness, might well approve.

***

Here is a method is to track changes in the same students before and after the courses based

on objective measures of their behavior, such as the number of schoolyard fights or suspensions.

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS

• Improvement in recognizing and naming own emotions

• Better able to understand the causes of feelings

• Recognizing the difference between feelings and actions

MANAGING EMOTIONS

• Better frustration tolerance and anger management

• Fewer verbal put-downs, fights, and classroom disruptions

• Better able to express anger appropriately, without fighting

• Fewer suspensions and expulsions

• Less aggressive or self-destructive behavior

• More positive feelings about self, school, and family

• Better at handling stress

• Less loneliness and social anxiety

HARNESSING EMOTIONS PRODUCTIVELY

• More responsible

• Better able to focus on the task at hand and pay attention

• Less impulsive; more self-control

• Improved scores on achievement tests

EMPATHY: READING EMOTIONS

• Better able to take another person's perspective

• Improved empathy and sensitivity to others' feelings

• Better at listening to others

HANDLING RELATIONSHIPS

• Increased ability to analyze and understand relationships

• Better at resolving conflicts and negotiating disagreements

• Better at solving problems in relationships

• More assertive and skilled at communicating

• More popular and outgoing; friendly and involved with peers

• More sought out by peers

• More concerned and considerate

• More "pro-social" and harmonious in groups

• More sharing, cooperation, and helpfulness

• More democratic in dealing with others