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
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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
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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
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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
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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/
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.
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/
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.
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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
