Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite
nautil.us
nautil.us
Yes, it's true that we assume we can approximate the emotional experience of others, but I think a critical piece the author left is the verbal part of emotional intelligence - the words someone says that convey nuances that facial expressions/non verbal cues don't. And I'm not saying what a person says is what they really mean. You need to be cognizant of both to hear the "real message". That's at the heart of emotional intelligence. I feel like the beginning was just a contrived critique made to draw the reader into the meat of the article. Can't we just examine the existing literature and add our own thoughts without suggesting some grand "rewrite"?
Also internal and external emotional intelligence are very different, I feel like somewhere the author conflated the two without making a clear distinction although maybe I just didn't read it deeply enough.
That said, the discussion on emotional granularity is very interesting and I will definitely be reading more into it.
Also, part of emotional intelligence is not just identifying emotions in others, but also having good social skills for dealing with them.
The entire last half of the article is about expanding your emotional vocabulary, so I don't think so.
This part makes me very leery of the strength of any claims in the article. The general phenomenon of neuroplasticity is not evidence that any particular intervention will do what somebody claims or expects. Quietly jumping that gap is a favorite method of peddlers of neurobullshit. Dr. Barrett has certainly earned a bit more benefit of the doubt than, say, Lumosity, but that doesn't make this particular line of argument any less grating.
This is a very interesting article. However, I wonder if/how the concept (or skill) of emotional granularity can be obtained only from learning new words for emotions. It kind of reminds me of NLP (Neuro-Linguisting programming).
Anyone here has any knowledge on these subjects, or is aware of an accessible research paper where this is explained in a simple way? Also, how is this approach of emotional granularity seen by other researchers?
The approach I've found helpful in expanding emotional awarness (and which works for a lot of other things too) is to skip the words and directly relate the emotion to previous memories of people expressing that emotion (ideally where you have more knowledge of the context) and to previous memories of the person who is currently expressing the emotion (independent of the emotion currently being expressed). It is hard to explain but people do this naturally some of the time and the basic idea is to catch yourself doing it and try to do it more.
I think there are a number of aspects of difficulty interperating emotion (some mentioned in the article): emotions can depend on multiple kinds of unknown information (such as specific past experinces with the situation or subject of the situation or general mood or overall strength of emotions generally), the time and subjects contributing to the emotion may not be obvious even if shared (i.e. someone smiling at something you say might be reacting to how you pronounce a particular word rather than what you are saying), and your own emotional reaction to the other person's emotional reaction (which in depends on the same set of things for you) will take place before sufficient evaluation of the other person's emotion and affect how you perceive it (so, for example, your mood can affect the accuracy of your perception of other people's emotions as can how fast you expect a response is needed). OTOH, there tends to be a fair amount of human interaction aimed at clarifying the situation when stronger emotions are expressed.
IMO, there is a continuous spectrum from how we shift attention in the most boring situations to strong emotions. There can be preparation for expression or some movement signals sent even in cases where there is no perceptible movement to express emotion. We call it emotion about at the point when it becomes visible but there is not a clear line or a fundamental difference.
I think the article slightly overstates the learned aspect of emotions in that there are some emotions that are hard wired in various ways (that even babies express in similar ways) but if we predict when they would be triggered we can inhibit them (and potentially respond in a different way).
I don't think the aritcle is accurate that a prediction based perspective of the brain didn't exist when Emotional Intelligence was written. It doesn't take neurology research to figure that one out, although hopefully it is a more popular perspective now. IMO, it is really the key to getting a decent high level sense of how the brain works.
I would love to read an updated Emotional Intelligence. :)
Side note: Beyond the obviously false "triune brain" thing, many neurologist argue against less obviously incorrect word "neocortex". Pierre Gloor discusses this at some length early in The Temporal Lobe and Limbic System noting that the same basic division has long existed in olfactory areas and that the name "neocortex" is incorrect (he uses "isocortex"). I am not aware of a counterargument (other than "neocortex" already being widely used).
My understanding, as from Ekman, is that there are stereotypes expressions of a number of basic emotions, but that these get covered over and replaced for various reasons as children grow up.
Ekman's fairly recently published book "Nonverbal Messages" sounds interesting.
I agree. I should have said the primary expression often gets modified or covered up, and not implied it always does.
That said, I think it's slightly overrated, because most people don't even understand their own emotions, and some don't even allow themselves to talk about emotions/cry in presence of friends/other's.
So if one doesn't even understand, allow or acknowledge his/her own feelings, how could one possibly begin to understand, observe or manipulate that in other's with accuracy.
And actually that's not even fully true.. (this is why I think it can also be learned) Someone with anti-social disorder (sociopath), contrary to popular believe has the same emotions as everyone else. It's their empathy which is less/nonexistent. Yet they tend to be very good in picking up nuances in social settings and perform on them.
A lot of it also depends on personality/upbringing. Parents who lie a lot to their children, potentially makes these children more apt in lying/bluffing and giving false trust themselves when they grow up, which is still a form off emotional intelligence, morality is a different aspect.
Another example; One with social anxiety could very well have a high emotional intelligence. They naturally spend way more time focusing on nuances of themselves as well as other's, as the innate fear will push their thoughts constantly (with all due respect to people who experience this)
So almost ironically they might be socially less present, but probably spot true feelings far faster and more precise than people who are more "in the moment".
* a small anecdote*
I spend a few years giving music lessons, and I told a student I could teach him to just hear the music then be able to play it by ear. They almost all said "I am not born with good ears".
I began to pick a guitar and play a few notes off a famous song. They recognized it as anyone would.
Then I played a song but played wrong notes randomly. He didn't spot the first one, but then he noticed.
I asked him, how did u know the song and recognize the wrong notes if your ears are shit? he laughed.
Thing is, our senses are all very good, everyone can hear when singers are out off tune, anyone can recognize a person by a voice or most songs by melody.
You just need to learn which sound fits which spot on the guitar, like pictures to words.
The hearing, just like empathy, or sight and smell for that matter is there, or will naturally develop if actively used, and more efficient with added knowledge and guidance.
A good book on learning to understand your emotions is Focusing, by Eugene Gendlin.
Yeah. But how precisely people are able to do this varies a lot, and correlates strongly to musical training or (anecdotally) growing up in a "musical environment". This supports the emotional granularity idea from the article.
[Now all pop music is auto-tuned by computer, but a lot of older music (Madonna, etc.) is grating if you have moderately good musical hearing.]
Variable and yet really similar. There are general patterns and, as with all patterns, there are exceptions.
Years of experience with one person are not useless with another. Not as useful but helpful nonetheless.
(Sometimes)
It's one of those things where there's often nothing wrong until someone asks me "What's wrong?" and then suddenly { bam! } there are two things wrong:
1) apparently my expression is conveying there's something wrong and 2) now my chain of thought is broken (unless what I'm thinking about happens to lend itself to good conversation or it's just not important (admittedly I think about many unimportant things, which some might argue is problematic, but then again, what's really important?)).
Time to dig into the dictionary of obscure sorrows.
I'm also surprised to hear that there's scientific consensus that thought does not have an inhibiting effect on emotions. I wonder how that comments on Daniel Kahneman's observations of interacting system of cognition (System 1 & 2), where one may block the other? Is the author also saying that beliefs can't be changed to ultimately have a causal relationship with emotions?
> Let’s begin with the assumption that you can detect emotion in another person accurately. [...] People who are happy sometimes smile and sometimes don’t. Sometimes they even cry when they’re happy (say, at a wedding) and smile when they’re sad (when missing a beloved aunt who passed away).
Apparently the need for contextual cues and nuanced understanding renders the task of reading anothers' emotions futile for the author and her coleagues. I have found myself capable of overcoming it.
> A reasonable, science-backed way to define and practice emotional intelligence comes from a [process that] is completely unconscious.
Ah, yes. That very scientific and well-understood "consciousness" thing.
You shouldn't argue that people are approaching emotional intelligence wrong by appealing to neuroscience any more than you should tell people they've built their house wrong by appealing to particle physics.
The point of the first, is expanded upon later in the article:
>Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations.
The point is not that we, as people, should not partake in trying to find what someone is feeling, just that we can never be absolutely certain. Now, this would be an arbitrary philosophical point if we don't take into context that emotions are not bits. They're not on and off, but always different combinations of different signals:
>When we place electrodes on people’s faces to record their muscle movements, we see that they move in different ways, not one consistent way, when their owners feel the same emotion. Where the body is concerned, hundreds of studies show that instances of the same emotion involve different heart rates, breathing, blood pressure, sweat, and other factors, rather than a single, consistent response. Even in the brain, we see that instances of a single emotion, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times, both in the same individual and in different people.
There's no way we can be absolutely correct in emotional diagnosis, just the same as we cannot always be in the black when speculating on the stock market. There's too many factors at work and they'll never (rarely) align in the same pattern.
As for the "consciousness" point, I believe you're misconstruing unconscious to mean subconscious. Subconsciousness, in the practical sense, is part of the philosophical (and psychoanalytical) "consciousness" school. While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.
In the real world, nothing ever aligns in the same pattern. That only happens in mathematical models. That doesn't mean we can't use language to describe those phenomena.
In the real world, we also can never be never be "absolutely certain" of anything, beyond maybe something Cartesian. That doesn't mean we can't make judgments about our surroundings.
> While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.
Why are you assuming that the difference between what's "automatic" and "not automatic" in the brain is well-understood, and fundamentally distinct from the concept of consciousness?