Category: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

I can think of no better way to start talking about emotional intelligence than by discussing the book that popularized the topic. Written by author and science journalist Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence analyzes the importance of EI in every aspect of life. Goleman posits that EI is as important, if not more so, than IQ in determining success in academic, professional, social and interpersonal aspects of life. Goleman argues that EI is a skill that can be taught and cultivated, and he proceeds to outline methods for incorporating emotional skills training in school curriculum.

The first part of the book discusses the biological underpinnings of emotions, where they originate in the brain, and why we have them. Ultimately, emotions are our internal messaging system, whose evolution over the last 50,000 “human generations” have been finely tuned to keep us alive in the environment in which we evolved; small tribes. The quick departure from the state in which we evolved due to the rise of civilization has caused an increasing mismatch in the suitability of these emotions in our daily lives. Emotional Intelligence, and the corresponding Emotional Competence, serves as an ever more necessary skill set to help us deal with these mismatches, communicate and relate to others, and succeed in nearly every aspect of daily life.

Quotes and Excerpts

Introduction

“…But IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession, will become the strongest leader… EI abilities rather than IQ or technical skills emerge as the ‘discriminating’ competency that best predicts who among a group of very smart people will lead most ably.”

“At the very highest levels, competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from 80 to 100 percent IE based abilities. As the head of research at a global executive search firm put it. “CEOs are hired for their intelligence and business expertise – and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.”

“While our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the fundamentals of self-mastery an the like, our emotional competence shows how much of that potential we have mastered in ways that translate to on the job capabilities.”

Aristotle’s Challenge

“What factors are at play, for example, when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well? I would argue that the difference quite often lies in the abilities called here emotional intelligence, which includes self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself. And these skills, as we shall see, can be taught to children, giving them a better chance tot use whatever intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given them.”

“There is growing evidence that fundamental ethical stances in life stem from underlying emotional capacities. For one, impulse is the medium of emotion; the seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action. Those who are at the mercy of impulse – who lack self control – suffer a moral deficiency: The ability to control impulses is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these. self-restraint and compassion.”

Note: I will address this in a future post, but according to models within dialectical behavior therapy there is MUCH more to just “impulse control”, as Goleman somewhat naively and succinctly puts it.

“Part two of this book is in seeing how neurological givens play out in the basic flair for living called emotional intelligence: being able, for example, to rein in emotional impulse; to read another’s innermost feelings; to handle relationships smoothly – as Aristotle put it, the rare skill ‘to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way… As Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but within the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.'”

1 – What Are Emotions For?

“…That power is extraordinary: Only a potent love – the urgency of saving a cherished child – could lead a parent to override the impulse for personal survival. Seen from the intellect, their self-sacrifice was arguably irrational; seen from the heart, it was the only choice to make. Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over head at such crucial moments when they conjecture about why evolution has given emotion such a central role in the human psyche. Our emotions, they say, guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave to intellect alone – danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a family.”

“But while our emotions have been wise guides in the evolutionary long run, the new realities civilization presents have arisen with such rapidity that the slow march of evolution cannot keep up… In terms of biological design for the basic neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what worked best for the last 50,000 human generations, not the last 500 generations – and certainly not the last five. The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years – despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization ad the explosion of the human population from five million to five billion – have left little imprint on our biological template for emotional life.”

“All emotions are. in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us… That emotions lead to actions is most obvious in watching animals or children; it is only in ‘civilized’ adults we so often find the great anomaly in the animal kingdom, emotions – root impulses to act – divorced from obvious reaction.”

“In our emotional repertoire each emotion plays a unique role…
Anger – blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous action.
Fear – blood goes to the large skeletal muscles making it easier to flee – and making the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it. Circuits in the brain’s emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand.
Happiness – increased activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy, and a quieting of those that generate worrisome thought.
Love –
Surprise –
Disgust –
Sadness – A main function of sadness is to help adjust to a significant loss. It brings a drop in energy and enthusiasm for life’s activities, particularly diversions and pleasures… This lose of energy may well have kept saddened – and vulnerable – early humans close to home, where they were safer.”

“Those same pressures had made our emotional responses so valuable for survival; as they waned, so did the goodness of fit of parts of our emotional repertoire. While in the ancient past a hair-trigger anger may have offered a crucial edge for survival, the availability of technology that can harm others has made it too often a disastrous reaction.”

“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”

“From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or neocortex, the great bulb of convoluted tissues that make up the top layers. The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.”

“With the arrival of the first mammals came new, key layers of the emotional brain. These, surrounding the brainstem, look roughly like a bagel with a bite taken out at the bottom here the brainstem nestles into them. Because this part of the brain rings and borders the brainstem, it was called the ‘limbic’ system, from limbus, the latin word for ring. This new neural territory added emotions proper to the brain’s repertoire. When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head over heels in love or recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grasp… As it evolved, the limbic system refined two powerful tools: learning and memory.”

“The homo sapien neocortex, so much larger than in any other species, has added all that is distinctly human… Our survival edge is due to the neocortex’s talent for strategizing, long-term planning, and other mental wiles. Beyond that, the triumphs of art, of civilization and culture, are all fruits of the neocortex… As we proceed up the phylogenetic scale from reptile to rhesus to human, the sheer mass of the neocortex increases. With that increase comes a geometric rise in the interconnections in brain circuitry. The larger the number of such connections, the greater the range of possible responses. The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about feelings. There is more neocortex to limbic system in primates than in other species – and vastly more in humans – suggesting why we are able to display a far greater range of reactions to our emotions, and more nuance.”

2 – Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking

Chapter two starts out with a story about a serial burglar who in a fit of panic clubbed two women over the head until they were unconscious, then completely engulfed by rage and fear murdered them with a kitchen knife. The burglar stated that “I just went bananas. My head just exploded.”

“Such emotional explosions are neural hijackings. At those moments, evidence suggests, a center of the limbic brain proclaims an emergency, recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda. The hijacking occurs in an instant, triggering this reaction crucial moments before the neocortex, the thinking brain, has had a chance to glimpse fully what is happening, let alone decide if it’s a good idea. The hallmark of such a hijack is that once the moment passes, those so possessed have the sense of not knowing what came over them… Neural takeovers, as we shall see, originate in the amygdala, a center in the limbic brain.”

“The hippocampus and the amygdala were the two key parts of the primitive “nose brain” that, in evolution, gave rise to the cortex and then the neocortex. To this day these limbic structures do much or most of the brain’s learning and remembering: the amygdala is the specialist for emotional matters. If the amygdala is severed from the reset of the brain, the result is a striking inability to gauge the emotional significance of event; this condition is sometimes called ‘affective blindness’… The amygdala acts as a storehouse of emotional memory, and thus of significance itself; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of persona meanings… The workings of the amygdala and its interplay with the neocortex are at the heart of emotional intelligence.”

“…When impulsive feelings overrides the rational, the newly discovered role for the amygdala is pivotal. Incoming signals from the sense let the amygdala scan every experience for trouble. This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the most primitive: ‘is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I fear?’ If so – if the moment at hand somehow draws a ‘Yes’ – the amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts of the brain… The amygdala’s extensive web of neural connections allows it, during an emotional emergency, to capture and drive much of the rest of the brain – including the rational mind.”

“The conventional view in neuroscience (prior to LeDoux’s research) had been that the eye, ear and other sensory organs transmit signals to the thalamus, and from there to the sensory processing areas of the neocortex. , where the signals are put together into objects as we perceive them. The signals are sorted for meanings so that the brain recognizes what each object is and what its presence means. From the neocortex, the old theory held, that the signals are then sent to the limbic brain, and from there the appropriate response radiates out through the brain and the rest of the body. That is the way it works much, or most of the time – but LeDoux discovered a smaller bundle of neurons that leads directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, in addition to those going through the larger path of neurons to the cortex. This smaller and shorter pathway – something like a neural back alley – allows the amygdala to receive some direct inputs from the sense and start a response before they are fully registered by the neocortex… The amygdala can have us spring to action with the slightly slower – but more fully informed – neocortex unfolds its more refined plan for reaction.“

“While the hippocampus remembers the dry facts, the amygdala retains the emotional flavor that goes with those facts… The more intense the amygdala arousal, the stronger the imprint… This means that, in effect, the brain has two memory systems, one for ordinary facts and one for emotionally charged ones. A special system for emotional memories makes excellent sense in evolution, of course, ensuring that animals would have particularly vivid memories of what threatens or pleases them. But emotional memories can be faulty guides to the present. One drawback of such neural alarms is that the urgent message the amygdala sens is sometimes, if not often, out of date – especially in the fluid social world we humans inhabit. As the repository for emotional memory, the amygdala scans experience, comparing what is happening now with what happened in the past. Its method of comparison is associative: when one key element of a present situation is similar to the past, it can call it a ‘match’ – which is why this circuit is sloppy: it acts before there is full confirmation.”

“One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional outbursts, then, is that they often date from a time early in our lives when things were bewildering and we did not yet have words for comprehending events. We may have the chaotic feelings, but not the words for the memories that formed them.”

“While the amygdala is at work in priming an anxious, impulsive reaction, another part of the emotional brain allows for a more fitting, corrective response. The brain’s damper switch for the amygdala’s surges appears to lie at the other end of a major circuit to the neocortex, in the prefrontal lobes just behind the forehead.”

“When an emotions trigger, within moments the prefrontal lobes perform what amounts to a risk/benefit ratio of myriad possible reactions, and bet that one of them is best. For animals, when to attack, when to run. And for us humans… when to attack, when to run – and also when to placate, persuade, seek sympathy, stonewall, provoke guilt, whine, put on a facade of bravado, be contemptuous – and so on, through the whole repertoire of emotional wiles.”

“The neocortical response is slower in brain time than the hijack mechanism because it involves more circuitry. It can also be more judicious and considered, since more thought precedes feeling. When we register a loss and become sad, or feel happy after a triumph, or mull over something someone has said or done and then get hurt or angry, the neocortex is at work.”

“Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynamics: triggering of the amygdala and a failure to activate the neocortical processes that usually keep the emotional response in balance – or a recruitment of the neocortical zones to the emotional urgency. At this moment the rational mind is swamped by the emotional.”

“Take the power of emotions to disrupt thinking itself. Neuroscientists use the term ‘working memory’ for the capacity of attention that holds in mind the facts essential for completing a given task or problem, whether it be the ideal features one seeks in a house while touring several prospects, or the elements of a reasoning problem on a test. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region responsible for working memory. But circuits from the limbic brain to the prefrontal lobes mean that the signals of strong emotion – anxiety, anger and the like – can create neural static, sabotaging the ability of the prefrontal lobe to maintain working memory. That is why when we are emotionally upset we say we ‘just can’t think straight’ – and why continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child’s intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn.”

Note: And to cripple one’s ability to do their job well if they are in a state of constant fear or anxiety or stress at work.

“In one study, primary school boys who had above-average IQ scores but nevertheless were doing poorly in school were found via neuropsychological tests to have impaired frontal cortex functioning. They also were impulsive and anxious, often disruptive and in trouble – suggesting faulty prefrontal control over their limbic urges. Despite their intellectual potential, these are the children at highest risk for problems like academic failure, alcoholism, and criminality – not because their intellect is deficient, but because their control over their emotional life is impaired. “

“In a sense we have two brains, two minds – and two different kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional. How we do in life is determined by both – it is not just IQ, but emotional intelligence that matters.