Learn how wiring and temperament affects your story

Chapter 7: LEARN HOW WIRING AND TEMPERAMENT AFFECTS YOUR STORY
Book: Thanks for the Feedback. The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Douglas Stone)

Krista doesn’t lack self-confidence. She laughs as she recounts this story: My husband and I spent the first six months of our marriage traveling the States by car, with “Honk if you support our marriage!” scribbled in shoe polish on the rear window. People honked and waved like crazy, and it was exhilarating to be supported by friendly strangers. When we returned to regular life, my husband cleaned off the window, but I didn’t notice. So, I’d be doing some dumb move in traffic, pulling a U-turn. Someone would be honking furiously, and I’d be waving back with this big grin, saying, “Hey, thanks so much. Thank you! I love you, too!”

“That’s typical for me,” Krista adds. “I can be oblivious to negative feedback.
When I hear that someone doesn’t like something I did, I immediately think, Really? But do you know how amazing I am? Honestly, I’ve got so much selfconfidence it’s practically inappropriate.”
Of course Krista’s life has seen its share of rain, and she wasn’t smiling through it all. But even at her lowest, her upbeat disposition helped to pull her through: “My first husband and I divorced, and a divorce is a giant oozing spitball of negative feedback. I questioned everything about myself—whether anyone could love me, whether I was capable of real love at all. I went to some dark places, like everyone does.
“But,” she adds, “I didn’t stay very long. I can get from ‘no one will ever love me’ to ‘that’s ridiculous, lots of people love me’ pretty quickly. Within a year I was in an awesome relationship with my current husband, driving around the country getting honks of loving support.”
Alita finds herself at the opposite end of the spectrum. A popular obstetrician, Alita received feedback from last year’s patient survey. Her reviews were glowing, and many patients made special mention of her attentive approach to their pregnancy questions. But several patients commented that Alita’s schedule often ran late, and that they resented having to wait. The comments came down like a sledgehammer. “I was so disheartened,” Alita says. “I give each patient so much time and care, and then they turn around and complain. Until I read my feedback I loved my job. I haven’t felt the same about my practice since.” The envelope with the most recent patient survey results has been sitting on Alita’s desk for the past two months—unopened.
For Krista, feedback is like water off a duck’s back, while for Alita, it penetrates deep into her soul. We each metabolize feedback in our own way.

THE LIBERATION OF HARD WIRING

One reason why Krista and Alita respond so differently to feedback is their wiring—their built-in neural structures and connections. Our wiring affects who we are, tilting us toward being anxious or upbeat, shy or outgoing, sensitive or resilient, and it contributes to how intensely feedback—both positive and negative—affects us. It influences how high we go, how low we descend, and how quickly we recover from dread or despair.
This chapter takes a look at our different emotional reactions to feedback and at the role our wiring plays in that. We’ll also look at how those emotions influence our thinking, and how our thinking influences our emotions.
Understanding your own wiring and tendencies helps you to improve your ability to weather the storm of negative feedback—and to dig yourself out in the morning.
Learning that how you are in the world is due in part to your wiring might feel discouraging—just one more thing that’s wrong with you, and one that seems impossible to fix. But it can be freeing, as well. Like your naturally curly hair, high cheekbones, or flat feet, your wiring is no more judgment-worthy than whether your second toe is shorter or longer than the first. If you’ve spent a lifetime being told that you’re either “hypersensitive” or “totally oblivious,” this is a moment to step back and say, “Okay, so that’s how I’m built. That’s how I showed up in this world.” Your reactions are not due to a lack of courage or surplus of self-pity.
This doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for how you are and how you act. It is simply a true and usefully complicating observation: wiring matters.

A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT YOURSELF ON FEEDBACK

Our understanding of the brain is under construction. By “our” we mean the general state of human understanding (not to mention the authors’ understanding). Discoveries in neuroscience pour forth, debates proliferate, interpretations shift. Writing about neuroscience is a little like leaping from a moving train: No matter how carefully you time your jump, you’re likely to get roughed up. Even so, we think it’s useful; dipping into the recent social science and neuroscience research can help us understand why we each react to feedback the way we do, and why others react differently.
One of the brain’s primary survival functions is to manage approach and withdrawal: We tend to move toward things that are pleasurable and away from things that are painful. Pleasure is a rough proxy for the healthy and safe; pain is a rough proxy for the unhealthy and dangerous.
But our approach-withdrawal function is too crudely calibrated to navigate the nuanced worlds of modern work and love. The brain gets tangled when it encounters short-term pain that is necessary for long-term gain—that exercising you put off, for instance. And the opposite is also true: Short-term pleasures that produce long-term pain—as with, say, recreational drugs or an extramarital affair—also produce confused approach-withdraw signals (“wine, women, and song” in older days; “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” to baby boomers). These brain-life mismatches are the source of great fascination and endless torment.
What does this have to do with feedback? Like sex, drugs, food, and exercise, feedback is one of these areas that boggle the brain and muck up the approachwithdrawal system. Doing what feels good now (finding a way to make negative feedback stop) may be costly in the long run (you are left, fired, or simply stagnate). And what is healthy in the long run (understanding and acting on useful feedback) may feel painful now.
A lot goes on in both your brain and body when you experience mood-altering feedback, more than anyone yet understands, and certainly more than we can describe in a short chapter. But for simplicity’s sake, we can say that your “reaction” to feedback can be thought of as containing three key variables: Baseline, Swing, and Sustain or Recovery.

“Baseline” refers to the default state of well-being or contentment toward which you gravitate in the wake of good or bad events in your life. “Swing” refers to how far up or down you move from your baseline when you receive feedback. Some of us have extreme reactions to feedback; we swing wide.
Others remain on an even keel even in the face of disquieting news. “Sustain and Recovery” refers to duration, how long your ups and downs last. Ideally, we want to sustain a boost from positive feedback and recover quickly from a negative emotional dip.

1. Baseline: The Beginning and End of the Arc

Whether we feel happy or sad, content or discontent, is not determined merely by each individual successive moment of life experience—a good thing happens and I’m happy, a bad thing happens and I’m sad. It doesn’t work that way. While our experiences affect our mood, we are not blown in a completely new direction by each gust of wind. We feel emotions in the moment, of course, but they occur against a broader backdrop.
As humans, we adapt—to new information and events both good and bad— and gravitate back to our personal default level of well-being.2 There will be highs and lows, but over time, like water seeking its own level, we are pulled toward our baseline—back up after bad news and back down after good. The euphoria of first love fades, and so does the despair of divorce. This tendency is best seen with little kids and their toy joy: When they get what they’ve longed for, they believe they will be happy for the rest of their lives. And for the first few minutes of the rest of their lives, they are. But then the kids—like adults— adapt.
There is enormous variance among individuals when it comes to baseline.
This is why our uncle Murray seems perpetually dissatisfied with life, while our aunt Eileen seems delighted with everything for no apparent reason. Happiness is believed to be one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies have led to estimates that about 50 percent of the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.3 Famously, studies of lottery winners have shown that a year after claiming their prize, winners are approximately as happy (or unhappy) as they were prior to the windfall.4
Why does your baseline matter when it comes to receiving feedback? First, people who have higher happiness baselines are more likely to respond positively to positive feedback than people with lower self-reported well-being.
And people with lower general satisfaction respond more strongly to negative information.5 Krista has a pretty high baseline, so it’s not surprising that she’d find honks of marital support exhilarating, and criticism less emotionally “sticky.” Alita likely has a lower general baseline, so she may get less of a boost from the positive patient ratings, and be hit harder by the criticism.
This may seem particularly unfair to Alita. After all, she’s the one who needs to hear the positive feedback and get the emotional boost it offers. But don’t worry—there are things Alita can do to turn up the volume on the positives and temper the negatives when receiving tough feedback. For now, it’s useful simply to be aware that for her, positive feedback may be muffled and negatives amplified.

2. Swing: How Far Up or Down You Go

Wherever our natural baseline, some of us swing far in either direction, even when the input is minor, while others live in a narrower emotional band. These tendencies appear to be present from birth. Some infants are more sensitive than others and can experience a strong physiological jolt even from comparatively small inputs—loud noises, novel situations, or scary drawings, for example.
Of course, newborns aren’t subjected to performance reviews, and feedback for adults is rarely accompanied by scary drawings. But it turns out that infants who are what research psychologist Jerome Kagan calls “high reactive” are more likely than others to grow into adults who are high reactives. High reactivity in infants can translate into a big swing for adults. And we can reasonably assume such adults would be likely to be more sensitive to negative feedback.6 Brain imaging studies suggest that differences in sensitivity may correlate with anatomical differences as well. The adults who had low-reactive infant temperaments had greater thickness in the left orbitofrontal cortex than the highreactive group while the adults categorized as high-reactive infants displayed greater thickness in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex.7
Whatever is going on inside our cortexes, differences in swing are easy to observe within our conference rooms. When a client sends the same critical comments to both Eliza and Jeron, Eliza is frantic with anxiety while Jeron has no reaction beyond “Well, this means a bit more work.” Because Eliza and Jeron are teammates, their disparate reactions create tension. Jeron thinks Eliza is melodramatic and attention-seeking; Eliza thinks Jeron is in denial about the depth of the problem. Now they have feedback for each other about how they are each (mis-)handling the feedback.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good

Whether we are easily swamped or nearly waterproof, there’s one wiring challenge we all face: Bad is stronger than good. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt elaborates: “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” This observation sheds light on an eternal riddle about feedback: Why do we dwell on the one criticism buried amid four hundred compliments? Built into our wiring is a kind of security team that scans for threat. When it detects danger—real or perceived—the team responds instantaneously, bypassing our slower, more reflective systems. The amygdala is a key player.
This small, almond-shaped bundle of neurons sits at the heart of the limbic system—a part of the brain central to processing emotion. As Haidt explains: The amygdala has a direct connection to the brainstem that activates the fight-or-flight response, and if that amygdala finds a pattern that was part of a previous fear episode . . . it orders the body to red alert.
. . . the brain has no equivalent “green alert” . . . threats get a shortcut to your panic button, but there is no equivalent alarm system for positive information. Bad news is emotionally louder than good, and thus will have bigger impact.
So why are you still obsessing over that oblique comment your mother-in-law made during an otherwise lovely holiday visit? Because she unwittingly activated your red alert system—the one that evolved more than 100 million years ago9 that was later used to detect snakes, saber-toothed tigers, and other life-threatening creatures that lurk. Long after your mother-in-law has left, your emotional brain remains ready for her to pounce.

3. Sustain and Recovery: How Long Does the Swing Last?

Whether you swing wide emotionally or barely budge, the last variable is duration—how long it takes you to return to your baseline. Do you recover quickly from even the most distressing feedback, or are you brought low for weeks or months? And how long do you sustain the high of good news? When a grateful customer e-mails to extol your expertise, do you have a bounce in your fingertips for the rest of the day? Or just until you read your next e-mail? Researcher Richard Davidson has found that the amount of time that we sustain positive emotion, or need to recover from negative emotion, can differ by as much as 3,000 percent across individuals.

Surprisingly, negative feedback and positive feedback are mediated by different parts of the brain; in fact, they appear to be mediated by different halves of the brain. And those different halves of the brain can be differently good at their job. This subject gets complicated quickly, but there are some simple insights that emerge from the research on this front.
Negative Recovery: Righty or Lefty? It’s crucial to have a red alert system for threats, but due to the high number of false alarms encountered in everyday life, it’s just as crucial to have a way to turn the alarm off.
The amygdala is a key player in the alert system, but it’s no lone cowboy. The frontal cortex runs the show, working to integrate the emotional response with the actual content of the feedback. The frontal cortex can contain or intensify the stampedes that the amygdala starts.
Sitting just behind your forehead, your prefrontal cortex is the seat of higherorder reasoning, judgment, and decision making. Like other parts of your brain, it is divided in two, with a right and left side. When you experience negative feelings like fear, anxiety, and disgust, your brain shows increased activity on the right side. When you experience positive feelings like amusement, hope, and love, your brain shows increased activity on the left side. Researchers have termed this the “valence hypothesis,” suggesting that people who have more activity on the right side (“cortical righties”) tend to be more depressed and more anxious; cortical lefties tend to be happier.11 (We shouldn’t overstate current scientific consensus; this “locational” theory of emotion is not without controversy.)

With the help of imaging devices like functional MRIs, which reveal how the brain responds to particular stimuli, neuroscientists are beginning to understand how recovery from negative emotion may work. Surprisingly, it’s the left side— the positive side—that seems to be responsible here. While the amygdala is fanning the flames of fear and anxiety, activity in the left side of the brain exerts a calming influence. Strong activity on the left is associated with quicker recovery from upset.

People who are faster to recover not only have more activity in the left side; they also tend to have more connections (“white matter” pathways that connect brain regions to one another) running between the left side of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.13 This appears to create more bandwidth along which the positive messages can travel to the amygdala. People with numerous connections effectively have a superhighway to deliver reassuring signals, while those who are slower to recover have narrow country roads.

The bottom line is that people whose brain wiring and organization are more right-sided, or righties, are slower than lefties to recover from negative feedback.
Recovery is slower whether the feedback is small (you forgot to take out the garbage . . .) or large (. . . and therefore I’m leaving you).14
If we hooked up Alita to an fMRI while she read the criticism about keeping patients waiting, we’d likely see activity in her amygdala and right prefrontal cortex increase. “There’s danger!” yells the amygdala. “It’s a disaster!” confirms the right prefrontal cortex. In contrast, activity in Alita’s left prefrontal cortex— the more positive side—would show comparatively less activity. “Let’s all just calm down. Lots of patients appreciate the time you spend with them,” says the left, but too faintly to be heard above the bluster of disaster and doom.
Alita is likely a cortical righty. Compared with a less sensitive colleague, she’ll feel more physiologically aroused, more anxious, more depressed. It will be harder for her to find hope or humor (which are mediated more by the left side) and more difficult for her to calm herself down.

Krista’s fMRI in the same situation would likely show a different pattern.
Initially, she might feel anxious, angry, or hurt (Krista’s amygdala will light up, too), but her strong left prefrontal cortex will soon kick in, quieting down the quick emotional response: “Relax, don’t overreact. Most of your patients love you, and anyway, motherhood is all about learning patience, so you’re giving them a head start. C’mon, let’s go have some Mexican food.”

While a fast recovery time has real advantages—those who are resilient are more likely to respond to setbacks with energy and determination and less likely to suffer from depression—being at the extreme end of this scale presents its own challenges as far as feedback is concerned. Because negative feedback has less emotional resonance for Krista, it may not adequately catch her attention or even stick in memory. She may be dismissive of suggestions or lack motivation to work on improving. Those around her may see her as callous to the concerns of others, not because she doesn’t care, but because she doesn’t always realize how serious their concerns are. And anyway, she’s moved on.

Sustaining Positive Feelings

Recovery measures how quickly you emerge from the abyss of upsetting feedback. Sustain measures how long positive feedback has you walking on air.
What’s going on in the brain that helps us sustain positive feelings? We need to zoom in on a cluster of neurons inside the ventral striatum called the nucleus accumbens. This region sits just in front of your temple and is part of the mesolimbic pathway—sometimes called the “reward pathway” or “pleasure center”—which is responsible for releasing dopamine, which in turn prompts feelings of pleasure, desire, and motivation. Connected to that upbeat left side of the prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens creates a circuit in which positive experiences trigger a dopamine response, which triggers more positive feelings, which triggers more dopamine.

Both Krista and Alita feel an uptick in joy when given a positive boost, whether it’s a honk of marital support or the cry of a newly delivered baby boy.
But Krista’s nucleus accumbens stays active, continuing to release dopamine and maintaining the emotional high long after the honk fades. For Alita, the positive feelings evaporate in minutes.

Just as we can retrigger negative feelings by recalling negative feedback, we can extend our positive sustain by recalling positive feedback—replaying that appreciative comment from a customer or reminding ourselves that no matter what happens at work, we’ve got nine kids who love us at home. Or perhaps remembering that no matter what happens at home, our kids aren’t allowed to follow us to work.
Our sustain and recovery tendencies can create virtuous and vicious cycles. If you find it easier to sustain positive emotion, you can ride the boosts you get from happy moments large (We landed the account!) and small (That was a great cup of coffee!). You might reread positive feedback from your child’s teacher or from a grateful constituent when you need a reminder that you’re doing something right. Positive feedback sticks, and helps you turn the corner to recovering your equilibrium. This sense of control over your emotional state means you feel more confident about your ability to cope with whatever life throws your way. You will tend to be optimistic that the future will be bright and confident that regardless, you’ll manage things well. That’s a pretty good definition of peace of mind.
But when positive sustain is weak, it’s harder to remember what you’re doing right, and pessimism seems the more realistic outlook. If you’ve been low and had trouble recovering, you may doubt your ability to pull yourself up the next time you stumble into a particularly troubling time. This can produce a challenging combination of pessimism and self-doubt. This is where baseline, swing, and sustain come full circle and together constitute what is sometimes referred to as temperament.16

Four Sustain/Recovery Combinations

Krista has both quick recovery and long sustain. Her nature enables her to bounce back quickly from adversity and to luxuriate in life’s joys. Alita is the opposite on both fronts; she takes longer to recover from negatives and has more trouble sustaining positives.
But these aren’t the only two sustain/recovery combinations, because how long you sustain negative feelings operates independently from how long you sustain positive ones. From a purely physiological point of view, there are four combinations of sustain/recover tendencies. The chart below doesn’t address whether you receive feedback skillfully, or whether you find it helpful and important to learning. It merely suggests different variations on how you might experience feedback, given your wiring. It’s an oversimplification, but the categories are illuminating.



WIRING IS ONLY PART OF THE STORY

The danger when talking about brain wiring and temperament is that we take our wiring as fixed and assume it is destiny. It’s neither.
There are genetic bases to our temperament; understanding them helps us understand ourselves, and just as important, offers insight into why others are different from us. But while aspects of our temperament are inherited, there is ample evidence that they are not fixed. Practices such as meditation, serving others, and exercise can raise your baseline over time, and life events that involve trauma or depression can have a profound impact as well. This growing understanding of neuroplasticity is a thrilling reminder that even wiring changes over time in response to our environment and experiences.

THE MAGIC 40

Perhaps more important, our wiring—whether fixed or not—tells only part of the story. Research suggests a 50-40-10 formula for happiness: About 50 percent of our happiness is wired in. Another 40 percent can be attributed to how we interpret and respond to what happens to us, and 10 percent is driven by our circumstances—where we live and with whom, where we work and with whom, the state of our health, and so forth. Whether these are exactly the right proportions is obviously debatable, but what’s certain is that there is a lot of room to move in that magic middle of around 40 percent. That’s the piece we have control over—the way we interpret what happens, the meaning we make, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Indeed, University of Pennsylvania researcher Marty Seligman suggests that for some people, these interpretations and responses can help turn post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth.18 Our interpretations and responses to what happens to us—and to the feedback we get—can help turn upsetting feedback and even failure into learning.
But there’s a catch.
Our emotions have so profound an influence on how we interpret what happens and the stories we tell about it that, in the wake of upsetting feedback, our upset itself distorts what we think the feedback means. Our boss offers us some gentle advice that is as harmless as a kitten. But in the flush of anxiety, the advice appears to us as threatening as a tiger, poised to rip us apart.

EMOTIONS DISTORT OUR SENSE OF THE FEEDBACK ITSELF

If we’re going to get better at handling tough feedback, we have to understand how emotions interact with, and distort, the stories we tell about what the feedback means. Is it really just a kitten, or is it a tiger? Or is it something else altogether?

OUR STORIES HAVE AN EMOTIONAL SOUNDTRACK

We don’t live our life in data, but in stories—big stories, like who we are and what we care about and why we’re here, and smaller stories, like whether we embarrassed ourselves at the company picnic last weekend.
And these stories are made not only of thoughts but of feelings. We don’t experience them as separate. We don’t think: Here’s a thought and here’s a feeling. At any given moment we have a seamless awareness of our life. It’s similar to the way a music soundtrack works in a movie. When we’re absorbed in a good movie, we don’t notice the swell and fade of the soundtrack. The music adds to the suspense, the excitement, the poignancy of the plot, yet we are as unaware of the music as we are of the projector.
Most of the time that’s a good thing. A movie is better when we get lost in it and the same is true in life. When we are at our most engaged, most creative, and most energized, we achieve that delicious state of unselfconsciousness called “flow.”19 But when things go wrong, it’s worth slowing things down to observe the effect our emotions are having on how we tell the story.

THOUGHTS + FEELINGS = STORY

When someone behind you honks when the light changes, you don’t think: That person behind me honked. You instantly embellish that thought into a story: Dude! Obnoxious people like you are what’s wrong with this town these days.
How you feel in that moment has a big impact on the story you tell yourself. If you are already in a dark mood, you’ll tell a darker story. If you’re frustrated, you’ll tell a frustrated story. If you’re sitting at the light feeling like a loser, and the guy behind you honks, it’s just another example of you being a loser. You can’t even drive right. That guy sees right into your sad, incompetent soul.
Thanks, pal, but I already know. If you’re newly in love, you’ll feel patient and generous: Oops, sorry about that, I was doing a little daydreaming there at the light. But ain’t life grand? In these examples, the feeling comes first. The feeling colors the story and influences how we perceive the characters in it. But there’s a second pattern between thoughts and feelings, and confusingly, it’s just the opposite: Sometimes the thought is first, and the feelings follow.
For instance, I may have started my journey feeling just fine, but then I looked at the clock and saw that I might miss my flight. A story unfolds in my mind about how the rest of the day will play out—I’ll miss my flight by seconds,
I won’t make the meeting this afternoon, my client is going to be annoyed, my boss will be apoplectic. And now—because of these thoughts—I’m on edge. In this case, the feelings follow the thoughts.
Jonathan Haidt gives us a glimpse of the biology behind this intertwining of thoughts and feeling: Not only does [the amygdala] reach down to the brainstem to trigger a response to danger but it reaches up to the frontal cortex to change your thinking. It shifts the entire brain over to a withdrawal orientation. There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts. . . .
There’s a key insight that follows from this observation that is relevant for feedback: If our stories are a result of our feelings plus our thoughts, then we can change our stories by working to change either our feelings or our thoughts. So there are two ways in.

HOW FEELINGS EXAGGERATE FEEDBACK

Let’s start by looking at the predictable ways that feelings distort our stories.
Knowing those patterns is crucial to being able to tell a less distorted story.
In general, strong feelings push us toward extreme interpretations. One thing becomes everything, now becomes always, partly becomes entirely, and slightly becomes extremely. Feelings skew our sense of the past, present, and future.
They distort our stories about who we are, how others see us, and what the consequences of feedback will be. Below are three common patterns of distortion.

OUR PAST: THE GOOGLE BIAS

Today’s upsetting feedback can influence the story we tell about yesterday: Suddenly what comes to mind is all the damning evidence of past failures, earlier poor choices, and bygone bad behavior.
It’s a little like using Google. If you Google “dictators,” you’re going to pull up 8.4 million sites that mention dictators. It seems that dictators are everywhere; you can’t swing a cat without hitting one. But that doesn’t mean most people are dictators or that most countries are run by dictators. Filling your head with dictator stories doesn’t mean there are more dictators, and ignoring dictator stories doesn’t mean there are fewer.
When you feel lousy about yourself, you are effectively Googling “Things that are wrong with me.” You will pull up 8.4 million sites, and suddenly you are pathetic. You see “sponsored ads” from your exes, father, and boss. You can’t recall a single thing you’ve ever done right.
We all have our own ways of experiencing these distortions. Marc describes how the “Google bias” manifests for him: The feedback could be small, but if I’m feeling vulnerable, it’s as if I fall through the floor, plunged into the basement where all the things I’ve ever regretted are collected. It’s as if they are happening all at once, right now.
I feel guilty about the people I’ve hurt and ashamed of the selfish things I’ve done. When I’m not in the basement I literally don’t think about it. But when I’m there, it’s the only reality, my failures surround me, and I can’t believe I was ever happy.
Of course, when you feel good, the Google bias tilts in the other direction, offering up the successes and the wise and generous choices that have led inexorably to your bountiful life. You rock and always have. Either way, when it comes to your stories about yourself, you get what you Google.

Google search parody designed by Sarah Seminski 



OUR PRESENT: NOT ONE THING, EVERYTHING

When we feel happy and healthy, we are able to contain negative feedback to the topic or trait under scrutiny and to the person doing the “scruting.” We are hearing the feedback as it was meant. If you are told you sing off key, you think,
Okay, this person thinks I sing off key. The feedback is about your singing. And it’s from one person.
But if you’re in the grip of strong emotion, negative feedback floods across boundaries into other areas of your self-image: I sing off key? I can’t do anything right. We rush from “I have trouble closing certain kinds of deals” to “I’m no good at my job,” and from “My colleague has a concern” to “Everybody on the team hates me.”
Flooding can drown out any positive attributes that might lend balance to the picture. Whether you sing off key has no bearing on your long-standing commitment to improving your community’s social services, your tenacious dedication to your daughter, or the astonishing quality of your slow-roast short ribs. But when we get flooded, that’s all washed away.

OUR FUTURE: THE FOREVER BIAS AND SNOWBALLING

Feelings affect not only how we recall the past, but how we imagine the future.
When we feel bad, we assume we will always feel bad. You feel humiliated by the shoddy presentation you gave at the joint venture launch and assume that you will feel precisely this humiliated up to the moment of your death.
And perhaps worse, we engage in catastrophic thinking, and our stories can eventually snowball out of control.21 A specific and contained piece of feedback steadily turns into an ever more ominous future disaster: “I had mayonnaise on my cheek during the date” becomes “I will die alone.”
What’s so amazing about these distortions is how real they appear to us in the moment. Common sense suggests that the bigger the gap between our thoughts and reality, the more likely we would be to notice that the two are misaligned.
But unless we are consciously looking for it, we can’t see the gap when we’re in it, so the size is irrelevant.
The strong feelings triggered by feedback can cause us to distort our thinking about the past, the present, and the future. Learning to regain our balance so that we can accurately assess the feedback is first a matter of rewinding our thoughts and straightening them out. Once we’ve gotten the feedback in realistic perspective, we have a real shot at learning from it.
In the next chapter, “Dismantle Distortions,” we’ll look at strategies for straightening out distorted thinking, so that we can more accurately assess the feedback we get.

Summary: SOME KEY IDEAS

Wiring matters.

# Baseline, Swing, and Sustain/Recovery vary by as much as 3,000 percent among individuals.
# If we have a lower baseline, the volume will be turned down on the positives, and up on the negatives.

Emotions distort our stories about the feedback itself.
# The Google bias collapses the past and the present.
# One thing becomes everything and everyone.
# The forever bias makes the future look bleak.

Tags: Book Summary,Negotiation,Communication Skills,

The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy (And a lesson about Depression)

The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy (And a lesson about Depression)
Chapter 15, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
    
It began as a small dispute, but had escalated. Ian Moore, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and Tyrone Sinkler, a junior, had had a falling-out with a buddy, fifteen-year-old Khalil Sumpter. Then they had started picking on him and making threats. Now it exploded.

Khalil, scared that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat him up, brought a .38 caliber pistol to school one morning, and, fifteen feet from a school guard, shot both boys to death at point-blank range in the school's hallway.

The incident, chilling as it is, can be read as yet another sign of a desperate need for lessons in handling emotions, settling disagreements peaceably, and just plain getting along. Educators, long disturbed by school children's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional illiteracy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well school children can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

Signs of the deficiency can be seen in violent incidents such as the shooting of Ian and Tyrone, growing ever more common in American schools. But these are more than isolated events; the heightening of the turmoil of adolescence and troubles of childhood can be read for the United States—a bellwether of world trends—in statistics such as these:

In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates quadrupled, mostly due to an increase in shootings. During those same two decades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did the number of children under fourteen who are murder victims.
More, and younger, teenage girls are getting pregnant. As of 1993 the birthrate among girls ten to fourteen has risen steadily for five years in a row—some call it "babies having babies"—as has the proportion of unwanted teen pregnancies and peer pressure to have sex. Rates of venereal disease among teenagers have tripled over the last three decades.

While these figures are discouraging, if the focus is on African-American youth, especially in the inner city, they are utterly bleak—all the rates are higher by far, sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled or higher. For example, heroin and cocaine use among white youth climbed about 300 percent over the two decades before the 1990s; for African-American youth it jumped to a staggering 13 times the rate of twenty years before.

The most common cause of disability among teenagers is mental illness.
Symptoms of depression, whether major or minor, affect up to one third of teenagers; for girls, the incidence of depression doubles at puberty. The frequency of eating disorders in teenage girls has skyrocketed.

Finally, unless things change, the long-term prospects for today's children marrying and having a fruitful, stable life together are growing more dismal with each generation. As we saw in Chapter 9, while during the 1970s and 1980s the divorce rate was around 50 percent, as we entered the 1990s the rate among newlyweds predicted that two out of three marriages of young people would end in divorce.

AN EMOTIONAL MALAISE

These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal miner's tunnel whose death warns of too little oxygen. Beyond such sobering numbers, the plight of today's children can be seen at more subtle levels, in day-to-day problems that have not yet blossomed into outright crises. Perhaps the most telling data of all —a direct barometer of dropping levels of emotional competence—are from a national sample of American children, ages seven to sixteen, comparing their emotional condition in the mid-1970s and at the end of the 1980s. 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 

While any of these problems in isolation raises no eyebrows, taken as a group they are barometers of a sea change, a new kind of toxicity seeping into and poisoning the very experience of childhood, signifying sweeping deficits in emotional competences. This emotional malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for children. While Americans often decry their problems as particularly bad compared to other cultures', studies around the world have found rates on a par with or worse than in the United States. For example, in the 1980s teachers and parents in the Netherlands, China, and Germany rated children at about the same level of problems as were found for American children in 1976.

And some countries had children in worse shape than current U.S. levels, including Australia, France, and Thailand. But this may not remain true for long.
The larger forces that propel the downward spiral in emotional competence seem to be picking up speed in the United States relative to many other developed nations.

No children, rich or poor, are exempt from risk; these problems are universal, occurring in all ethnic, racial, and income groups. Thus while children in poverty have the worst record on indices of emotional skills, their rate of deterioration over the decades was no worse than for middle-class children or for wealthy children: all show the same steady slide. There has also been a corresponding threefold rise in the number of children who have gotten psychological help (perhaps a good sign, signaling that help is more available), as well as a near doubling of the number of children who have enough emotional problems that they should get such help but have not (a bad sign)—from about 9 percent in 1976 to 18 percent in 1989.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, the eminent Cornell University developmental psychologist who did an international comparison of children's well-being, says: "In the absence of good support systems, external stresses have become so great that even strong families are falling apart. The hecticness, instability, and inconsistency of daily family life are rampant in all segments of our society, including the well-educated and well-to-do. What is at stake is nothing less than the next generation, particularly males, who in growing up are especially vulnerable to such disruptive forces as the devastating effects of divorce, poverty, and unemployment. The status of American children and families is as desperate as ever.... We are depriving millions of children of their competence and moral character."

This is not just an American phenomenon but a global one, with worldwide competition to drive down labor costs creating economic forces that press on the family. These are times of financially besieged families in which both parents work long hours, so that children are left to their own devices or the TV baby-sits; when more children than ever grow up in poverty; when the one-parent family is becoming ever more commonplace; when more infants and toddlers are left in day care so poorly run that it amounts to neglect. All this means, even for well-intentioned parents, the erosion of the countless small, nourishing exchanges between parent and child that build emotional competences.

If families no longer function effectively to put all our children on a firm footing for life, what are we to do? A more careful look at the mechanics of specific problems suggests how given deficits in emotional or social competences lay the foundation for grave problems—and how well-aimed correctives or preventives could keep more children on track.

TAMING AGGRESSION

In my elementary school the tough kid was Jimmy, a fourth grader when I was in first grade. He was the kid who would steal your lunch money, take your bike, slug you as soon as talk to you. Jimmy was the classic bully, starting fights with the least provocation, or none at all. We all stood in awe of Jimmy—and we all stood at a distance. Everyone hated and feared Jimmy; no one would play with him. It was as though everywhere he went on the playground an invisible bodyguard cleared kids out of his way.

Kids like Jimmy are clearly troubled. But what may be less obvious is that being so flagrantly aggressive in childhood is a mark of emotional and other troubles to come. Jimmy was in jail for assault by the time he reached sixteen.

The lifelong legacy of childhood aggressiveness in kids like Jimmy has emerged from many studies. As we have seen, the family life of such aggressive children typically includes parents who alternate neglect with harsh and capricious punishments, a pattern that, perhaps understandably, makes the children a bit paranoid or combative.
Not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn social outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what they perceive as slights or unfairness. But the one perceptual flaw that unites such children is that they perceive slights where none were intended, imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as threatening ones—an innocent bump is seen as a vendetta—and to attack in return. That, of course, leads other children to shun them, isolating them further. Such angry, isolated children are highly sensitive to injustices and being treated unfairly.

They typically see themselves as victims and can recite a list of instances when, say, teachers blamed them for doing something when in fact they were innocent.
Another trait of such children is that once they are in the heat of anger they can think of only one way to react: by lashing out.

These perceptual biases can be seen at work in an experiment in which bullies are paired with a more peaceable child to watch videos. In one video, a boy drops his books when another knocks into him, and children standing nearby laugh; the boy who dropped the books gets angry and tries to hit one of those who laughed. When the boys who watched the video talk about it afterward, the bully always sees the boy who struck out as justified. Even more telling, when they have to rate how aggressive the boys were during their discussion of the video, the bullies see the boy who knocked into the other as more combative, and the anger of the boy who struck out as justified.

This jump to judgment testifies to a deep perceptual bias in people who are unusually aggressive: they act on the basis of the assumption of hostility or threat, paying too little attention to what is actually going on. Once they assume threat, they leapfrog to action. For instance, if an aggressive boy is playing checkers with another who moves a piece out of turn, he'll interpret the move as "cheating" without pausing to find out if it had been an innocent mistake. His presumption is of malevolence rather than innocence; his reaction is automatic hostility. Along with the knee-jerk perception of a hostile act is entwined an equally automatic aggression; instead of, say, pointing out to the other boy that equally automatic aggression; instead of, say, pointing out to the other boy that he made a mistake, he will jump to accusation, yelling, hitting. And the more such children do this, the more automatic aggression becomes for them, and the more the repertoire of alternatives — politeness, joking — shrinks.

Such children are emotionally vulnerable in the sense that they have a low threshold for upset, getting peeved more often by more things; once upset, their thinking is muddled, so that they see benign acts as hostile and fall back on their overlearned habit of striking out.

These perceptual biases toward hostility are already in place by the early grades. While most children, and especially boys, are rambunctious in kindergarten and first grade, the more aggressive children fail to learn a modicum of self-control by second grade. Where other children have started to learn negotiation and compromise for playground disagreements, the bullies rely more and more on force and bluster. They pay a social price: within two or three hours of a first playground contact with a bully, other children already say they dislike him.

But studies that have followed children from the preschool years into the teenage ones find that up to half of first graders who are disruptive, unable to get along with other kids, disobedient with their parents, and resistant with teachers will become delinquents in their teen years. Of course, not all such aggressive children are on the trajectory that leads to violence and criminality in later life.

But of all children, these are the ones most at risk for eventually committing violent crimes.
The drift toward crime shows up surprisingly early in these children's lives.
When children in a Montreal kindergarten were rated for hostility and trouble making, those highest at age five already had far greater evidence of delinquency just five to eight years later, in their early teens. They were about three times as likely as other children to admit they had beaten up someone who had not done anything to them, to have shoplifted, to have used a weapon in a fight, to have broken into or stolen parts from a car, and to have been drunk—and all this before they reached fourteen years of age.

The prototypical pathway to violence and criminality starts with children who are aggressive and hard to handle in first and second grade. Typically, from the earliest school years their poor impulse control also contributes to their being poor students, seen as, and seeing themselves as, "dumb"—a judgment confirmed by their being shunted to special-education classes (and though such children may have a higher rate of "hyperactivity" or learning disorders, by nomeans all do). Children who on entering school already have learned in their homes a "coercive" style—that is, bullying—are also written off by their teachers, who have to spend too much time keeping the children in line. The defiance of classroom rules that comes naturally to these children means that they waste time that would otherwise be used in learning; their destined academic failure is usually obvious by about third grade. While boys on a trajectory toward delinquency tend to have lower IQ scores than their peers, their impulsivity is more directly at cause: impulsivity in ten-year-old boys is almost three times as powerful a predictor of their later delinquency as is their IQ.

By fourth or fifth grade these kids—by now seen as bullies or just "difficult"—are rejected by their peers and are unable to make friends easily, if at all, and have become academic failures. Feeling themselves friendless, they gravitate to other social outcasts. Between grade four and grade nine they commit themselves to their outcast group and a life of defying the law: they show a five fold increase in their truancy, drinking, and drug taking, with the biggest boost between seventh and eighth grade. By the middle-school years, they are joined by another type of "late starters," who are attracted to their defiant style; these late starters are often youngsters who are completely unsupervised at home and have started roaming the streets on their own in grade school. In the high-school years this outcast group typically drops out of school in a drift toward delinquency, engaging in petty crimes such as shoplifting, theft, and drug dealing.

(A telling difference emerges in this trajectory between boys and girls. A study of fourth-grade girls who were "bad"—getting in trouble with teachers and breaking rules, but not unpopular with their peers—found that 40 percent had a child by the time they finished the high-school years. That was three times the average pregnancy rate for girls in their schools. In other words, antisocial teenage girls don't get violent—they get pregnant.) There is, of course, no single pathway to violence and criminality, and many other factors can put a child at risk: being born in a high-crime neighborhood where they are exposed to more temptations to crime and violence, coming from a family under high levels of stress, or living in poverty. But none of these factors makes a life of violent crime inevitable. All things being equal, the psychological forces at work in aggressive children greatly intensify the likelihood of their ending up as violent criminals. As Gerald Patterson, a psychologist who has closely followed the careers of hundreds of boys into young adulthood, puts it, "the antisocial acts of a five-year-old may be prototypic of the acts of the delinquent adolescent."

SCHOOL FOR BULLIES

The bent of mind that aggressive children take with them through life is one that almost ensures they will end up in trouble. A study of juvenile offenders convicted of violent crimes and of aggressive high-school students found a common mind-set: When they have difficulties with someone, they immediately see the other person in an antagonistic way, jumping to conclusions about the other person's hostility toward them without seeking any further information or trying to think of a peaceful way to settle their differences. At the same time, the negative consequence of a violent solution—a fight, typically—never crosses their mind. Their aggressive bent is justified in their mind by beliefs like:
"It's okay to hit someone if you just go crazy from anger"; 
"If you back down from a fight everyone will think you're a coward"; and 
"People who get beaten up badly don't really suffer that much."

But timely help can change these attitudes and stop a child's trajectory toward delinquency; several experimental programs have had some success in helping such aggressive kids learn to control their antisocial bent before it leads to more serious trouble. One, at Duke University, worked with anger-ridden grade-school troublemakers in training sessions for forty minutes twice a week for six to twelve weeks. The boys were taught, for example, to see how some of the social cues they interpreted as hostile were in fact neutral or friendly. They learned to take the perspective of other children, to get a sense of how they were being seen and of what other children might be thinking and feeling in the encounters that had gotten them so angry. They also got direct training in anger control through enacting scenes, such as being teased, that might lead them to lose their temper.
One of the key skills for anger control was monitoring their feelings—becoming aware of their body's sensations, such as flushing or muscle tensing, as they were getting angry, and to take those feelings as a cue to stop and consider what to do next rather than strike out impulsively.

John Lochman, a Duke University psychologist who was one of the designers of the program, told me, "They'll discuss situations they've been in recently, like being bumped in the hallway when they think it was on purpose. The kids will talk about how they might have handled it. One kid said, for example, that he just stared at the boy who bumped him and told him not to do it again, and walked away. That put him in the position of exerting some control and keeping walked away. That put him in the position of exerting some control and keeping his self-esteem, without starting a fight."

This appeals; many such aggressive boys are unhappy that they lose their temper so easily, and so are receptive to learning to control it. In the heat of the moment, of course, such cool-headed responses as walking away or counting to ten so the impulse to hit will pass before reacting are not automatic; the boys practice such alternatives in role-playing scenes such as getting on a bus where other kids are taunting them. That way they can try out friendly responses that preserve their dignity while giving them an alternative to hitting, crying, or running away in shame.
Three years after the boys had been through the training, Lochman compared these boys with others who had been just as aggressive, but did not have the benefit of the anger-control sessions. He found that, in adolescence, the boys who graduated from the program were much less disruptive in class, had more positive feelings about themselves, and were less likely to drink or take drugs.
And the longer they had been in the program, the less aggressive they were as teenagers.

PREVENTING DEPRESSION

Dana, sixteen, had always seemed to get along. But now, suddenly, she just could not relate with other girls, and, more troubling for her, she could not find a way to hold on to boyfriends, even though she slept with them. Morose and constantly fatigued, Dana lost interest in eating, in having fun of any kind; she said she felt hopeless and helpless to do anything to escape her mood, and was thinking of suicide.
The drop into depression had been triggered by her most recent breakup. She said she didn't know how to go out with a boy without getting sexually involved right away—even if she was uncomfortable about it—and that she did not know how to end a relationship even if it was unsatisfying. She went to bed with boys, she said, when all she really wanted to do was get to know them better.

She had just moved to a new school, and felt shy and anxious about making friends with girls there. For instance, she held back from starting conversations, only talking once someone spoke to her. She felt unable to let them know what she was like, and didn't even feel she knew what to say after "Hello, how are you?"

Dana went for therapy to an experimental program for depressed adolescents at Columbia University. Her treatment focused on helping her learn how to handle her relationships better: how to develop a friendship, how to feel more confident with other teens, how to assert limits on sexual closeness, how to be intimate, how to express her feelings. In essence, it was a remedial tutorial in some of the most basic emotional skills. And it worked; her depression lifted.

Particularly in young people, problems in relationships are a trigger for depression. The difficulty is as often in children's relationships with their parents as it is with their peers. Depressed children and teenagers are frequently unable or unwilling to talk about their sadness. They seem unable to label their feelings accurately, showing instead a sullen irritability, impatience, crankiness, and anger—especially toward their parents. This, in turn, makes it harder for their parents to offer the emotional support and guidance the depressed child actually needs, setting in motion a downward spiral that typically ends in constant arguments and alienation.

A new look at the causes of depression in the young pinpoints deficits in two areas of emotional competence: 
# relationship skills, on the one hand, and 
# a depression-promoting way of interpreting setbacks, on the other. 

While some of the tendency to depression almost certainly is due to genetic destiny, some of that tendency seems due to reversible, pessimistic habits of thought that predispose children to react to life's small defeats—a bad grade, arguments with parents, a social rejection—by becoming depressed. And there is evidence to suggest that the predisposition to depression, whatever its basis, is becoming ever more widespread among the young.

A COST OF MODERNITY: RISING RATES OF DEPRESSION

These millennial years are ushering in an Age of Melancholy, just as the twentieth century became an Age of Anxiety. International data show what seems to be a modern epidemic of depression, one that is spreading side by side with the adoption throughout the world of modern ways. Each successive generation worldwide since the opening of the century has lived with a higher risk than their parents of suffering a major depression—not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection, and self-pity, and an overwhelminghopelessness—over the course of life. And those episodes are beginning at earlier and earlier ages. Childhood depression, once virtually unknown (or, at least, unrecognized) is emerging as a fixture of the modern scene.
Although the likelihood of becoming depressed rises with age, the greatest increases are among young people. For those born after 1955 the likelihood they will suffer a major depression at some point in life is, in many countries, three times or more greater than for their grandparents. Among Americans born before 1905, the rate of those having a major depression over a lifetime was just 1 percent; for those born since 1955, by age twenty-four about 6 percent had become depressed. For those born between 1945 and 1954, the chances of having had a major depression before age thirty-four are ten times greater than for those born between 1905 and 1914. And for each generation the onset of a person's first episode of depression has tended to occur at an ever-earlier age.

A worldwide study of more than thirty-nine thousand people found the same trend in Puerto Rico, Canada, Italy, Germany, France, Taiwan, Lebanon, and New Zealand. In Beirut, the rise of depression tracked political events closely, the upward trends rocketing during periods of civil war. In Germany, for those born before 1914 the rate of depression by age thirty-five is 4 percent; for those born in the decade before 1944 it is 14 percent at age thirty-five. Worldwide, generations that came of age during politically troubled times had higher rates of depression, though the overall upward trend holds apart from any political events.

The lowering into childhood of the age when people first experience depression also seems to hold worldwide. When I asked experts to hazard a guess as to why, there were several theories.
Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, speculated, "There's been a tremendous erosion of the nuclear family—a doubling of the divorce rate, a drop in parents' time available to children, and an increase in mobility. You don't grow up knowing your extended family much anymore. The losses of these stable sources of self-identification mean a greater susceptibility to depression."

Dr. David Kupfer, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh medical school, pointed to another trend: "With the spread of industrialization after World War II, in a sense nobody was home anymore. In more and more families there has been growing parental indifference to children's needs as they grow up. This is not a direct cause of depression, but it sets up a vulnerability.

Early emotional stressors may affect neuron development, which can lead to a depression when you are under great stress even decades later."

Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist, proposed: "For the last thirty or forty years we've seen the ascendance of individualism and a waning of larger beliefs in religion, and in supports from the community and extended family. That means a loss of resources that can buffer you against setbacks and failures. To the extent you see a failure as something that is lasting and which you magnify to taint everything in your life, you are prone to let a momentary defeat become a lasting source of hopelessness. But if you have a larger perspective, like a belief in God and an afterlife, and you lose your job, it's just a temporary defeat."

Whatever the cause, depression in the young is a pressing problem. In the United States, estimates vary widely for how many children and teens are depressed in any given year, as opposed to vulnerability over their lifetime.

Some epidemiological studies using strict criteria—the official diagnostic symptoms for depression—have found that for boys and girls between ten and thirteen the rate of major depression over the course of a year is as high as 8 or 9 percent, though other studies place it at about half that rate (and some as low as about 2 percent). At puberty, some data suggest, the rate nearly doubles for girls; up to 16 percent of girls between fourteen and sixteen suffer a bout of depression, while the rate is unchanged for boys.25

THE COURSE OF DEPRESSION IN THE YOUNG

That depression should not just be treated, but prevented, in children is clear from an alarming discovery: Even mild episodes of depression in a child can augur more severe episodes later in life. This challenges the old assumption that depression in childhood does not matter in the long run, since children supposedly "grow out of it." Of course, every child gets sad from time to time; childhood and adolescence are, like adulthood, times of occasional disappointments and losses large and small with the attendant grief. The need for prevention is not for these times, but for those children for whom sadness spirals downward into a gloom that leaves them despairing, irritable, and withdrawn—a far more severe melancholy.

Among children whose depression was severe enough that they were referred for treatment, three quarters had a subsequent episode of severe depression, according to data collected by Maria Kovacs, a psychologist at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh. Kovacs studied children diagnosed with depression when they were as young as eight years old, assessing them every few years until some were as old as twenty-four.

The children with major depression had episodes lasting about eleven months on average, though in one in six of them it persisted for as long as eighteen months. Mild depression, which began as early as age five in some children, was less incapacitating but lasted far longer—an average of about four years. And, Kovacs found, children who have a minor depression are more likely to have it intensify into major depression—a so-called double depression. Those who develop double depression are much more prone to suffer recurring episodes as the years go on. As children who had an episode of depression grew into adolescence and early adulthood, they suffered from depression or manic-depressive disorder, on average, one year in three.

The cost to children goes beyond the suffering caused by depression itself.

Kovacs told me, "Kids learn social skills in their peer relations—for example, what to do if you want something and aren't getting it, seeing how other children handle the situation and then trying it yourself. But depressed kids are likely to be among the neglected children in a school, the ones other kids don't play with much."

The sullenness or sadness such children feel leads them to avoid initiating social contacts, or to look away when another child is trying to engage them—a social signal the other child only takes as a rebuff; the end result is that depressed children end up rejected or neglected on the playground. This lacuna in their interpersonal experience means they miss out on what they would normally learn in the rough-and-tumble of play, and so can leave them social and emotional laggards, with much catching up to do after the depression lifts.

Indeed, when depressed children have been compared to those without depression, they have been found to be more socially inept, to have fewer friends, to be less preferred than others as playmates, to be less liked, and to have more troubled relationships with other children.
Another cost to these children is doing poorly in school; depression interferes with their memory and concentration, making it harder to pay attention in class and retain what is taught. A child who feels no joy in anything will find it hard to marshal the energy to master challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in learning. Understandably, the longer children in Kovacs's study were depressed, the more their grades dropped and the poorer they did on achievement tests, so that they were more likely to be held back in school. In fact, there was a direct correlation between the length of time a child had been depressed and his grade- point average, with a steady plummet over the course of the episode. All of thispoint average, with a steady plummet over the course of the episode. All of this academic rough going, of course, compounds the depression. As Kovacs observes, "Imagine you're already feeling depressed, and you start flunking out of school, and you sit home by yourself instead of playing with other kids."

DEPRESSIONOGENIC WAYS OF THOUGHT

Just as with adults, pessimistic ways of interpreting life's defeats seem to feed the sense of helplessness and hopelessness at the heart of children's depression.
That people who are already depressed think in these ways has long been known. What has only recently emerged, though, is that children who are most prone to melancholy tend toward this pessimistic outlook before they become depressed. This insight suggests a window of opportunity for inoculating them against depression before it strikes.

One line of evidence comes from studies of children's beliefs about their own ability to control what happens in their lives—for example, being able to change things for the better. This is assessed by children's ratings of themselves in such terms as "When I have problems at home I'm better than most kids at helping to solve the problems" and "When I work hard I get good grades." Children who say none of these positive descriptions fits them have little sense that they can do anything to change things; this sense of helplessness is highest in those children who are most depressed.

A telling study looked at fifth and sixth graders in the few days after they received report cards. As we all remember, report cards are one of the greatest sources of elation and despair in childhood. But researchers find a marked consequence in how children assess their role when they get a worse grade than they expected. Those who see a bad grade as due to some personal flaw ("I'm stupid") feel more depressed than those who explain it away in terms of something they could change ("If I work harder on my math homework I'll get a better grade").

Researchers identified a group of third, fourth, and fifth graders whom classmates had rejected, and tracked which ones continued to be social outcasts in their new classes the following year. How the children explained the rejection to themselves seemed crucial to whether they became depressed. Those who saw their rejection as due to some flaw in themselves grew more depressed. But the optimists, who felt that they could do something to change things for the better, were not especially depressed despite the continuing rejection. And in a study of children making the notoriously stressful transition to seventh grade, those who had the pessimistic attitude responded to high levels of hassles at school and to any additional stress at home by becoming depressed.

The most direct evidence that a pessimistic outlook makes children highly susceptible to depression comes from a five-year study of children beginning when they were in third grade.

Among the younger children, the strongest predictor that they would become depressed was a pessimistic outlook coupled with a major blow such as parents divorcing or a death in the family, which left the child upset, unsettled, and, presumably, with parents less able to offer a nurturing buffer. As the children grew through the elementary-school years, there was a telling shift in their thinking about the good and bad events of their lives, with the children increasingly ascribing them to their own traits: "I'm getting good grades because I'm smart"; "I don't have many friends because I'm no fun." This shift seems to set in gradually over the third to fifth grades. As this happens those children who develop a pessimistic outlook—attributing the setbacks in their lives to some dire flaw in themselves—begin to fall prey to depressed moods in reaction to setbacks. What's more, the experience of depression itself seems to reinforce these pessimistic ways of thinking, so that even after the depression lifts, the child is left with what amounts to an emotional scar, a set of convictions fed by the depression and solidified in the mind: that he can't do well in school, is unlikable, and can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods. These fixed ideas can make the child all the more vulnerable to another depression down the road.

SHORT-CIRCUITING DEPRESSION

The good news: there is every sign that teaching children more productive ways of looking at their difficulties lowers their risk of depression. In a study of one Oregon high school, about one in four students had what psychologists call a "low-level depression," not severe enough to say it was beyond ordinary unhappiness as yet. Some may have been in the early weeks or months of what was to become a depression.

In a special after-school class seventy-five of the mildly depressed students learned to challenge the thinking patterns associated with depression, to becomemore adept at making friends, to get along better with their parents, and to engage in more social activities they found pleasant. By the end of the eight- week program, 55 percent of the students had recovered from their mild depression, while only about a quarter of equally depressed students who were not in the program had begun to pull out of their depression. A year later a quarter of those in the comparison group had gone on to fall into a major depression, as opposed to only 14 percent of students in the depression- prevention program. Though they lasted just eight sessions, the classes seemed to have cut the risk of depression in half.

Similarly promising findings came from a special once-a-week class given to ten-to thirteen-year-old youngsters at odds with their parents and showing some signs of depression. In after-school sessions they learned some basic emotional skills, including handling disagreements, thinking before acting, and, perhaps most important, challenging the pessimistic beliefs associated with depression— for example, resolving to study harder after doing poorly on an exam instead of thinking, "I'm just not smart enough."
"What a child learns in these classes is that moods like anxiety, sadness, and anger don't just descend on you without your having any control over them, but that you can change the way you feel by what you think," points out psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the developers of the twelve-week program. Because disputing the depressing thoughts vanquishes the gathering mood of gloom, Seligman added, "it's an instant reinforcer that becomes a habit."
Again the special sessions lowered depression rates by one half—and did so as long as two years later. A year after the classes ended, just 8 percent of those who participated scored at a moderate-to-severe level on a test of depression, versus 29 percent of children in a comparison group. And after two years, about 20 percent of those in the course were showing some signs of at least mild depression, compared to 44 percent of those in the comparison group.

Learning these emotional skills at the cusp of adolescence may be especially helpful. Seligman observes, "These kids seem to be better at handling the routine teenage agonies of rejection. They seem to have learned this at a crucial window for risk of depression, just as they enter the teen years. And the lesson seems to persist and grow a bit stronger over the course of the years after they learn it, suggesting the kids are actually using it in their day-to-day lives."
Other experts on childhood depression applaud the new programs. "If you want to make a real difference for psychiatric illness like depression, you have to do something before the kids get sick in the first place," Kovacs commented.do something before the kids get sick in the first place," Kovacs commented.
"The real solution is a psychological inoculation."

EATING DISORDERS

During my days as a graduate student in clinical psychology in the late 1960s, I knew two women who suffered from eating disorders, though I realized this only after many years had passed. One was a brilliant graduate student in mathematics at Harvard, a friend from my undergraduate days; the other was on the staff at M.I.T. The mathematician, though skeletally thin, simply could not bring herself to eat; food, she said, repulsed her. The librarian had an ample figure and was given to bingeing on ice cream, Sara Lee carrot cake, and other desserts; then—as she once confided with some embarrassment—she would secretly go off to the bathroom and make herself vomit. Today the mathematician would be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, the librarian with bulimia.
In those years there were no such labels. Clinicians were just beginning to comment on the problem; Hilda Bruch, the pioneer in this movement, published her seminal article on eating disorders in 1969.37 Bruch, puzzled by women who were starving themselves to death, proposed that one of the several underlying causes lay in an inability to label and respond appropriately to bodily urges— notably, of course, hunger. Since then the clinical literature on eating disorders has mushroomed, with a multitude of hypotheses about the causes, ranging from ever-younger girls feeling compelled to compete with unattainably high standards of female beauty, to intrusive mothers who enmesh their daughters in a controlling web of guilt and blame.
Most of these hypotheses suffered from one great drawback: they were extrapolations from observations made during therapy. Far more desirable, from a scientific viewpoint, are studies of large groups of people over a period of several years, to see who among them eventually comes down with the problem.
That kind of study allows a clean comparison that can tell, for example, if having controlling parents predisposes a girl to eating disorders. Beyond that, it can identify the cluster of conditions that leads to the problem, and distinguish them from conditions that might seem to be a cause, but which actually are found as often in people without the problem as in those who come for treatment.
When just such a study was done with more than nine hundred girls in theseventh through tenth grades, emotional deficits—particularly a failure to tell distressing feelings from one another and to control them—were found to be key among the factors leading to eating disorders.38 Even by tenth grade, there were sixty-one girls in this affluent, suburban Minneapolis high school who already had serious symptoms of anorexia or bulimia. The greater the problem, the more the girls reacted to setbacks, difficulties, and minor annoyances with intense negative feelings that they could not soothe, and the less their awareness of what, exactly, they were feeling. When these two emotional tendencies were coupled with being highly dissatisfied with their body, then the outcome was anorexia or bulimia. Overly controlling parents were found not to play a prime role in causing eating disorders. (As Bruch herself had warned, theories based on hindsight were unlikely to be accurate; for example, parents can easily become intensely controlling in response to their daughter's eating disorder, out of desperation to help her.) Also judged irrelevant were such popular explanations as fear of sexuality, early onset of puberty, and low self-esteem.
Instead, the causal chain this prospective study revealed began with the effects on young girls of growing up in a society preoccupied with unnatural thinness as a sign of female beauty. Well in advance of adolescence, girls are already self- conscious about their weight. One six-year-old, for example, broke into tears when her mother asked her to go for a swim, saying she'd look fat in a swimsuit.

In fact, says her pediatrician, who tells the story, her weight was normal for her height. In one study of 271 young teenagers, half the girls thought they were too fat, even though the vast majority of them were normal in weight. But the Minneapolis study showed that an obsession with being overweight is not in and of itself sufficient to explain why some girls go on to develop eating disorders.

Some obese people are unable to tell the difference between being scared, angry, and hungry, and so lump all those feelings together as signifying hunger, which leads them to overeat whenever they feel upset. Something similar seems to be happening in these girls. Gloria Leon, the University of Minnesota psychologist who did the study of young girls and eating disorders, observed that these girls "have poor awareness of their feelings and body signals; that was the strongest single predictor that they would go on to develop an eating disorder within the next two years. Most children learn to distinguish among their sensations, to tell if they're feeling bored, angry, depressed, or hungry—it's a basic part of emotional learning. But these girls have trouble distinguishing among their most basic feelings. They may have a problem with their boyfriend, and not be sure whether they're angry, or anxious, or depressed—they justexperience a diffuse emotional storm that they do not know how to deal with effectively. Instead they learn to make themselves feel better by eating; that can become a strongly entrenched emotional habit."

But when this habit for soothing themselves interacts with the pressures girls feel to stay thin, the way is paved for eating disorders to develop. "At first she might start with binge eating," Leon observes. "But to stay thin she may turn to vomiting or laxatives, or intense physical exertion to undo the weight gain from overeating. Another avenue this struggle to handle emotional confusion can take is for the girl not to eat at all—it can be a way to feel you have at least some control over these overwhelming feelings."
The combination of poor inner awareness and weak social skills means that these girls, when upset by friends or parents, fail to act effectively to soothe either the relationship or their own distress. Instead their upset triggers the eating disorder, whether it be that of bulimia or anorexia, or simply binge eating.
Effective treatments for such girls, Leon believes, need to include some remedial instruction in the emotional skills they lack. "Clinicians find," she told me, "that if you address the deficits therapy works better. These girls need to learn to identify their feelings and learn ways to soothe themselves or handle their relationships better, without turning to their maladaptive eating habits to do the job."

ONLY THE LONELY: DROPOUTS

It's a grade-school drama: Ben, a fourth grader with few friends, has just heard from his one buddy, Jason, that they aren't going to play together this lunch period—Jason wants to play with another boy, Chad, instead. Ben, crushed, hangs his head and cries. After his sobs subside, Ben goes over to the lunch table where Jason and Chad are eating.
"I hate your guts!" Ben yells at Jason.
"Why?" Jason asks.
"Because you lied," Ben says, his tone accusatory. "You said this whole week that you were gonna play with me and you lied."
Ben then stalks off to his empty table, crying quietly. Jason and Chad go over to him and try to talk to him, but Ben puts his fingers in his ears, determinedly ignoring them, and runs out of the lunchroom to hide behind the school Dumpster. A group of girls who have witnessed the exchange try to play a peacemaker role, finding Ben and telling him that Jason is willing to play with him too. But Ben will have none of it, and tells them to leave him alone. Henurses his wounds, sulking and sobbing, defiantly alone.41
A poignant moment, to be sure; the feeling of being rejected and friendless is one most everyone goes through at some point in childhood or adolescence. But what is most telling about Ben's reaction is his failure to respond to Jason's efforts to repair their friendship, a stance that extends his plight when it might have ended. Such an inability to seize key cues is typical of children who are unpopular; as we saw in Chapter 8, socially rejected children typically are poor at reading emotional and social signals; even when they do read such signals, they may have limited repertoires for response.
Dropping out of school is a particular risk for children who are social rejects.
The dropout rate for children who are rejected by their peers is between two and eight times greater than for children who have friends. One study found, for example, that about 25 percent of children who were unpopular in elementary school had dropped out before completing high school, compared to a general rate of 8 percent.42 Small wonder: imagine spending thirty hours a week in a place where no one likes you.
Two kinds of emotional proclivities lead children to end up as social outcasts.
As we have seen, one is the propensity to angry outbursts and to perceive hostility even where none is intended. The second is being timid, anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these temperamental factors, it is children who are "off—whose awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfortable—who tend to be shunted aside.
One way these children are "off is in the emotional signals they send. When grade schoolers with few friends were asked to match an emotion such as disgust or anger with faces that displayed a range of emotions, they made far more mismatches than did children who were popular. When kindergarteners were asked to explain ways they might make friends with someone or keep from having a fight, it was the unpopular children—the ones others shied away from playing with—who came up with self-defeating answers ("Punch him" for what to do when both children wanted the same toy, for example), or vague appeals for help from a grown-up. And when teenagers were asked to role-play being sad, angry, or mischievous, the more unpopular among them gave the least convincing performances. It is perhaps no surprise that such children come to feel that they are helpless to do any better at making friends; their social incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of learning new approaches to making friends, they simply keep doing the same things that have not worked for them in the past, or come up with even more inept responses.

In the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key emotional criteria: theyIn the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key emotional criteria: they are not seen as fun to be with, and they don't know how to make another child feel good. Observations of unpopular children at play show, for example, that they are much more likely than others to cheat, sulk, quit when losing, or show off and brag about winning. Of course, most children want to win at a game— but win or lose, most children are able to contain their emotional reaction so that it does not undermine the relationship with the friend they play games with.
While children who are socially tone-deaf—who continually have trouble reading and responding to emotions—end up as social isolates, this does not apply, of course, to children who go through a temporary period of feeling left out. But for those who are continually excluded and rejected, their painful outcast status clings to them as they continue their school years. The consequences of ending up at the social margins are potentially great as a child continues on into adulthood. For one, it is in the cauldron of close friendships and the tumult of play that children refine the social and emotional skills that they will bring to relationships later in life. Children who are excluded from this realm of learning are, inevitably, disadvantaged.
Understandably, those who are rejected report great anxiety and many worries, as well as being depressed and lonely. In fact, how popular a child was in third grade has been shown to be a better predictor of mental-health problems at age eighteen than anything else—teachers' and nurses' ratings, school performance and IQ, even scores on psychological tests.44 And, as we have seen, in later stages of life people who have few friends and are chronically lonely are at greater risk for medical diseases and an early death.
As psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out, we learn how to negotiate intimate relations—to work out differences and share our deepest feelings—in our first close friendships with same-sex chums. But children who are socially rejected are only half as likely as their peers to have a best friend during the crucial years of elementary school, and so miss out on one of the essential chances for emotional growth.45 One friend can make the difference—even when all others turn their backs (and even when that friendship is not all that solid).
COACHING FOR FRIENDSHIP
There is hope for rejected children, despite their ineptness. Steven Asher, aUniversity of Illinois psychologist, has designed a series of "friendship coaching" sessions for unpopular children that has shown some success.46
Identifying third and fourth graders who were the least liked in their classes,
Asher gave them six sessions in how to "make playing games more fun" through being "friendly, fun, and nice." To avoid stigma, the children were told that they were acting as "consultants" to the coach, who was trying to learn what kinds of things make it more enjoyable to play games.
The children were coached to act in ways Asher had found typical of more popular children. For example, they were encouraged to think of alternative suggestions and compromises (rather than fighting) if they disagree about the rules; to remember to talk with and ask questions about the other child while they play; to listen and look at the other child to see how he's doing; to say something nice when the other person does well; to smile and offer help or suggestions and encouragement. The children also tried out these basic social amenities while playing games such as Pick-up Sticks with a classmate, and were coached afterward on how well they did. This minicourse in getting along had a remarkable effect: a year later the children who were coached—all of whom were selected because they were the least-liked in their class—were now solidly in the middle of classroom popularity. None were social stars, but none were rejects.
Similar results have been found by Stephen Nowicki, an Emory University psychologist.47 His program trains social outcasts to hone their ability to read and respond appropriately to other children's feelings. The children, for example, are videotaped while practicing expression of feelings such as happiness and sadness, and are coached to improve their emotional expressiveness. They then try out their newly honed skills with a child they want to make friends with.
Such programs have reported a 50 to 60 percent success rate in raising the popularity of rejected children. These programs (at least as presently designed) seem to work best for third and fourth graders rather than children in higher grades, and to be more helpful for socially inept children than for highly aggressive ones. But that is all a matter for fine-tuning; the hopeful sign is that many or most rejected children can be brought into the circle of friendship with some basic emotional coaching.

DRINKING AND DRUGS: ADDICTION AS SELF-MEDICATION

Students at the local campus call it drinking to black —bingeing on beer to the point of passing out. One of the techniques: attach a funnel to a garden hose, so that a can of beer can be downed in about ten seconds. The method is not an isolated oddity. One survey found that two fifths of male college students down seven or more drinks at a time, while 11 percent call themselves "heavy drinkers." Another term, of course, might be "alcoholics." About half of college men and almost 40 percent of women have at least two binge-drinking episodes in a month.

While in the United States use of most drugs among young people generally tapered off in the 1980s, there is a steady trend toward more alcohol use at ever- younger ages. A 1993 survey found that 35 percent of college women said they drank to get drunk, while just 10 percent did so in 1977; overall, one in three students drinks to get drunk. That poses other risks: 90 percent of all rapes reported on college campuses happened when either the assailant or the victim— or both—had been drinking. Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death among young people between fifteen and twenty-four.

Experimentation with drugs and alcohol might seem a rite of passage for adolescents, but this first taste can have long-lasting results for some. For most alcoholics and drug abusers, the beginnings of addiction can be traced to their teen years, though few of those who so experiment end up as alcoholics or drug abusers. By the time students leave high school, over 90 percent have tried alcohol, yet only about 14 percent eventually become alcoholics; of the millions of Americans who experimented with cocaine, fewer than 5 percent became addicted. What makes the difference? To be sure, those living in high-crime neighborhoods, where crack is sold on the corner and the drug dealer is the most prominent local model of economic success, are most at risk for substance abuse. Some may end up addicted through becoming small-time dealers themselves, others simply because of the easy access or a peer culture that glamorizes drugs—a factor that heightens the risk of drug use in any neighborhood, even (and perhaps especially) the most well-off.

But still the question remains, of the pool of those exposed to these lures and pressures, and who go on to experiment, which ones are most likely to end up with a lasting habit? One current scientific theory is that those who stay with the habit, becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol or drugs, are using these substances as a medication of sorts, a way to soothe feelings of anxiety, anger, or depression. Through their early experimentation they hit upon a chemical fix, a way to calm the feelings of anxiety or melancholy that have tormented them. Thus of several hundred seventh-and eighth-grade students tracked for two years, it was those who reported higher levels of emotional distress who subsequently went on to have the highest rates of substance abuse. This may explain why so many young people are able to experiment with drugs and drinking without becoming addicted, while others become dependent almost from the start: those most vulnerable to addiction seem to find in the drug or alcohol an instant way to soothe emotions that have distressed them for years.

As Ralph Tarter, a psychologist at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, put it, "For people who are biologically predisposed, the first drink or dose of a drug is immensely reinforcing, in a way others just don't experience. Many recovering drug abusers tell me, 'The moment I took my first drug, I felt normal for the first time.' It stabilizes them physiologically, at least in the short term." 
That, of course, is the devil's bargain of addiction: a short-term good feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of one's life.

Certain emotional patterns seem to make people more likely to find emotional relief in one substance rather than another. For example, there are two emotional pathways to alcoholism. One starts with someone who was highly-strung and anxious in childhood, who typically discovers as a teenager that alcohol will calm the anxiety. Very often they are children—usually sons—of alcoholics who themselves have turned to alcohol to soothe their nerves. 

One biological marker for this pattern is undersecretion of GABA, a neurotransmitter that regulates anxiety—too little GABA is experienced as a high level of tension. One study found that sons of alcoholic fathers had low levels of GABA and were highly anxious, but when they drank alcohol, their GABA levels rose as their anxiety fell. These sons of alcoholics drink to ease their tension, finding in alcohol a relaxation that they could not seem to get otherwise. Such people may be vulnerable to abusing sedatives as well as alcohol for the same anxiety-reduction effect.

A neuropsychological study of sons of alcoholics who at age twelve showed signs of anxiety such as a heightened heart rate in response to stress, as well as impulsivity, found the boys also had poor frontal lobe functioning. Thus the brain areas that might have helped ease their anxiety or control their impulsiveness brought them less help than in other boys. And since the pre- frontal lobes also handle working memory—which holds in mind the consequences of various routes of action while making a decision—their deficit could support a slide into alcoholism by helping them ignore the long-term drawbacks of drinking, even as they found an immediate sedation from anxiety through alcohol.

This craving for calm seems to be an emotional marker of a genetic susceptibility to alcoholism. A study of thirteen hundred relatives of alcoholics found that the children of alcoholics who were most at risk for becoming alcoholics themselves were those who reported having chronically high levels of anxiety. Indeed, the researchers concluded that alcoholism develops in such people as "self-medication of anxiety symptoms."

A second emotional pathway to alcoholism comes from a high level of agitation, impulsivity, and boredom. This pattern shows up in infancy as being restless, cranky, and hard to handle, in grade school as having the "fidgets," hyperactivity, and getting into trouble, a propensity that, as we have seen, can push such children to seek out friends on the fringe—sometimes leading to a criminal career or the diagnosis of "antisocial personality disorder." Such people (and they are mainly men) have as their main emotional complaint agitation; their main weakness is unrestrained impulsivity; their usual reaction to boredom —which they often feel—is an impulsive search for risk and excitement. As adults, people with this pattern (which may be tied to deficiencies in two other neurotransmitters, serotonin and MAO) find that alcohol can soothe their agitation. And the fact that they can't stand monotony makes them ready to try anything; coupled with their general impulsivity, it makes them prone to abusing an almost random list of drugs besides alcohol.

While depression can drive some to drink, the metabolic effects of alcohol often simply worsen the depression after a short lift. People who turn to alcohol as an emotional palliative do so much more often to calm anxiety than for depression; an entirely different class of drugs soothes the feelings of people who are depressed—at least temporarily. Feeling chronically unhappy puts people at greater risk for addiction to stimulants such as cocaine, which provide a direct antidote to feeling depressed. One study found that more than half the patients being treated at a clinic for cocaine addiction would have been diagnosed with severe depression before they started their habit, and the deeper the preceding depression, the stronger the habit.

Chronic anger may lead to still another kind of susceptibility. In a study of four hundred patients being treated for addiction to heroin and other opioids, the most striking emotional pattern was a lifelong difficulty handling anger and a quickness to rage. Some of the patients themselves said that with opiates theyfinally felt normal and relaxed.60
Though the predisposition to substance abuse may, in many cases, be brain- based, the feelings that drive people to "self-medicate" themselves through drink or drugs can be handled without recourse to medication, as Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs have demonstrated for decades.
Acquiring the ability to handle those feelings—soothing anxiety, lifting depression, calming rage—removes the impetus to use drugs or alcohol in the first place. These basic emotional skills are taught remedially in treatment programs for drug and alcohol abuse. It would be far better, of course, if they were learned early in life, well before the habit became established.

NO MORE WARS: A FINAL COMMON PREVENTIVE PATHWAY

Over the last decade or so "wars" have been proclaimed, in turn, on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently violence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they come too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic proportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young.
They are crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an inoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place. Instead of more such "wars," what we need is to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children the skills for facing life that will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of these fates.

My focus on the place of emotional and social deficits is not to deny the role of other risk factors, such as growing up in a fragmented, abusive, or chaotic family, or in an impoverished, crime-and drug-ridden neighborhood. Poverty itself delivers emotional blows to children: poorer children at age five are already more fearful, anxious, and sad than their better-off peers, and have more behavior problems such as frequent tantrums and destroying things, a trend that continues through the teen years. The press of poverty corrodes family life too: there tend to be fewer expressions of parental warmth, more depression in mothers (who are often single and jobless), and a greater reliance on harsh punishments such as yelling, hitting, and physical threats.

But there is a role that emotional competence plays over and above family and economic forces—it may be decisive in determining the extent to which anygiven child or teenager is undone by these hardships or finds a core of resilience to survive them. Long-term studies of hundreds of children brought up in poverty, in abusive families, or by a parent with severe mental illness show that those who are resilient even in the face of the most grinding hardships tend to share key emotional skills.63 These include a winning sociability that draws people to them, self-confidence, an optimistic persistence in the face of failure and frustration, the ability to recover quickly from upsets, and an easygoing nature.
But the vast majority of children face such difficulties without these advantages. Of course, many of these skills are innate, the luck of genes—but even qualities of temperament can change for the better, as we saw in Chapter 14. One line of intervention, of course, is political and economic, alleviating the poverty and other social conditions that breed these problems. But apart from these tactics (which seem to move ever lower on the social agenda) there is much that can be offered to children to help them grapple better with such debilitating hardships.

Take the case of emotional disorders, afflictions that about one in two Americans experiences over the course of life. A study of a representative sample of 8,098 Americans found that 48 percent suffered from at least one psychiatric problem during their lifetime.64 Most severely affected were the 14 percent of people who developed three or more psychiatric problems at once.

This group was the most troubled, accounting for 60 percent of all psychiatric disorders occurring at any one time, and 90 percent of the most severe and disabling ones. While they need intensive care now, the optimal approach would be, wherever possible, to prevent these problems in the first place. To be sure, not every mental disorder can be prevented—but there are some, and perhaps many, that can. Ronald Kessler, the University of Michigan sociologist who did the study, told me, "We need to intervene early in life. Take a young girl who has a social phobia in the sixth grade, and starts drinking in junior high school to handle her social anxieties. By her late twenties, when she shows up in our study, she's still fearful, has become both an alcohol and drug abuser, and is depressed because her life is so messed up. The big question is, what could we have done early in her life to have headed off the whole downward spiral?"

The same holds, of course, for dropping out or violence, or most of the litany of perils faced by young people today. Educational programs to prevent one or another specific problem such as drug use and violence have proliferated wildly in the last decade or so, creating a mini-industry within the education marketplace. But many of them—including many of the most slickly marketedmarketplace. But many of them—including many of the most slickly marketed and most widely used—have proven to be ineffective. A few, to the chagrin of educators, even seemed to increase the likelihood of the problems they were meant to head off, particularly drug abuse and teen sex.
Information Is Not Enough An instructive case in point is sexual abuse of children. As of 1993, about two hundred thousand substantiated cases were reported annually in the United States, with that number growing by about 10 percent per year. And while estimates vary widely, most experts agree that between 20 and 30 percent of girls and about half that number of boys are victims of some form of sexual abuse by age seventeen (the figures rise or fall depending on how sexual abuse is defined, among other factors).65 There is no single profile of a child who is particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse, but most feel unprotected, unable to resist on their own, and isolated by what has happened to them.
With these risks in mind, many schools have begun to offer programs to prevent sexual abuse. Most such programs are tightly focused on basic information about sexual abuse, teaching kids, for example, to know the difference between "good" and "bad" touching, alerting them to the dangers, and encouraging them to tell an adult if anything untoward happens to them. But a national survey of two thousand children found that this basic training was little better than nothing—or actually worse than nothing—in helping children do something to prevent being victimized, whether by a school bully or a potential child molester. 66 Worse, the children who had only such basic programs and who had subsequendy become victims of sexual assault were actually half as likely to report it afterward than were children who had had no programs at all.
By contrast, children given more comprehensive training—including related emotional and social competences—were better able to protect themselves against the threat of being victimized: they were far more likely to demand to be left alone, to yell or fight back, to threaten to tell, and to actually tell if something bad did happen to them. This last benefit—reporting the abuse—is preventive in a telling sense: many child molesters victimize hundreds of children. A study of child molesters in their forties found that, on average, they had one victim a month since their teenage years. A report on a bus driver and a high-school computer teacher reveals they molested about three hundred children each year between them—yet not one of the children reported the sexual abuse; the abuse came to light only after one of the boys who had beenabused by the teacher started to sexually abuse his sister.67
Those children who got the more comprehensive programs were three times more likely than those in minimal programs to report abuse. What worked so well? These programs were not one-shot topics, but were given at different levels several times over the course of a child's school career, as part of health or sex education. They enlisted parents to deliver the message to the child along with what was taught in school (children whose parents did this were the very best at resisting threats of sexual abuse).
Beyond that, social and emotional competences made the difference. It is not enough for a child simply to know about "good" and "bad" touching; children need the self-awareness to know when a situation feels wrong or distressing long before the touching begins. This entails not just self-awareness, but also enough self-confidence and assertiveness to trust and act on those feelings of distress, even in the face of an adult who may be trying to reassure her that "it's okay."
And then a child needs a repertoire of ways to disrupt what is about to happen— everything from running away to threatening to tell. For these reasons, the better programs teach children to stand up for what they want, to assert their rights rather than be passive, to know what their boundaries are and defend them.
The most effective programs, then, supplemented the basic sexual-abuse information with essential emotional and social skills. These programs taught children to find ways to solve interpersonal conflicts more positively, to have more self-confidence, not to blame themselves if something happened, and to feel they had a network of support in teachers and parents whom they could turn to. And if something bad did happen to them, they were far more likely to tell.
The Active Ingredients Such findings have led to a reenvisioning of what the ingredients of an optimal prevention program should be, based on those that impartial evaluations showed to be truly effective. In a five-year project sponsored by the W. T. Grant Foundation, a consortium of researchers studied this landscape and distilled the active ingredients that seemed crucial to the success of those programs that worked.68 The list of key skills the consortium concluded should be covered, no matter what specific problem it is designed to prevent, reads like the ingredients of emotional intelligence (see Appendix D for the full list).69
The emotional skills include self-awareness; identifying, expressing, and managing feelings; impulse control and delaying gratification; and handling stress and anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is knowing the differencestress and anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is knowing the difference between feelings and actions, and learning to make better emotional decisions by first controlling the impulse to act, then identifying alternative actions and their consequences before acting. Many competences are interpersonal: reading social and emotional cues, listening, being able to resist negative influences, taking others' perspectives, and understanding what behavior is acceptable in a situation.
These are among the core emotional and social skills for life, and include at least partial remedies for most, if not all, of the difficulties I have discussed in this chapter. The choice of specific problems these skills might inoculate against is nearly arbitrary—similar cases for the role of emotional and social competences could have been made for, say, unwanted teen pregnancy or teen suicide.
To be sure, the causes of all such problems are complex, interweaving differing ratios of biological destiny, family dynamics, the politics of poverty, and the culture of the streets. No single kind of intervention, including one targeting emotions, can claim to do the whole job. But to the degree emotional deficits add to a child's risk—and we have seen that they add a great deal— attention must be paid to emotional remedies, not to the exclusion of other answers, but along with them. The next question is, what would an education in the emotions look like? * In children, unlike adults, medication is not a clear alternative to therapy or preventive education for treating depression; children metabolize medications differently than do adults. Tricyclic antidepressants, often successful with adults, have failed in controlled studies with children to prove better than an inactive placebo drug. Newer depression medications, including Prozac, are as yet untested for use in children. And desipramine, one of the most common (and safest) tricyclics used with adults, has, at this writing, become the focus of FDA scrutiny as a possible cause of death in children.

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Emotional Intelligence Books (Oct 2019)

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1: Emotional Intelligence - Why it matter more than IQ (Daniel Goleman)
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