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down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s arousal, leaving people feeling more angry, not less. Tice found that when people told of times they had taken their rage out on the person who provoked it, the net effect was to prolong the mood rather than end it. Far more effective was when people firs...
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The above specimen is offered by Lizabeth Roemer and Thomas Borkovec, Pennsylvania State University psychologists, whose
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research on worrying—the heart of all anxiety—has raised the topic from neurotic’s art to science. 10 There is, of course, no hitch when worry works; by mulling over a problem—that is, employing constructive reflection, which can look like worrying—a solution can appear. Indeed, the reaction that underlies worry is th...
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impervious to reason, and lock the worrier into a single, inflexible view of the worrisome topic. When this same cycle of worry intensifies and persists, it shades over the line into full-blown neural hijackings, the anxiety disorders: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, panic attacks. In each of these disorders worr...
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germs; she worried constantly that without her washing and sterilizing she would catch a disease and die. 11 A woman being treated for “generalized anxiety disorder”—the psychiatric nomenclature for being a constant worrier—responded to the request to worry aloud for one minute this way:
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I might not do this right. This may be so artificial that it won’t be an indication of the real thing and we need to get at the real thing.… Because if we don’t get at the real thing, I won’t get well. And if I don’t get well I’ll never be happy. 12 In this virtuoso display of worrying about worrying, the very request ...
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trouble with insomniacs, Borkovec found, was not the somatic arousal. What kept them up were intrusive thoughts. They were chronic worriers, and could not stop worrying, no matter how sleepy they were. The one thing that worked in helping them get to sleep was getting their minds off their worries, focusing instead on...
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potential problems, worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger itself, immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread associated with it while staying in the same rut of thought. Chronic worriers worry about a wide range of things, most of which have almost no chance of happening; they read dangers into life’...
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that their worries are self-perpetuating, an endless loop of angst- ridden thought. Why should worry become what seems to amount to a mental addiction? Oddly, as Borkovec points out, the worry habit is reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people worry about many things that have a very low probab...
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signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive. Borkovec discovered another unexpected benefit to worrying. While people are immersed in the...
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thoughts, so immersion in thoughts, to the exclusion of catastrophic images, partially alleviates the experience of being anxious. And, to that extent, the worry is also reinforced, as a halfway antidote to the
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very anxiety it evoked. But chronic worries are self-defeating too in that they take the form of stereotyped, rigid ideas, not creative breakthroughs that actually move toward solving the problem. This rigidity shows up not just in the manifest content of worried thought, which simply repeats more or less the same idea...
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The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as near their beginning as possible—ideally, as soon as or just after the fleeting catastrophic image triggers the worry-anxiety cycle. Borkovec trains people in this approach by first teaching them to monitor cues for anxiety, especially learning to ide...
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to be taken? Does it really help to run through these same anxious thoughts over and over? This combination of mindfulness and healthy skepticism would, presumably, act as a brake on the neural activation that underlies low-grade anxiety. Actively generating such thoughts may prime the
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circuitry that can inhibit the limbic driving of worry; at the same time, actively inducing a relaxed state counters the signals for anxiety the emotional brain is sending throughout the body. Indeed, Borkovec points out, these strategies establish a train of mental activity that is incompatible with worry. When a worr...
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comes to trying to escape the blues. Of course, not all sadness should be escaped; melancholy, like every other mood, has its benefits. The sadness that a loss brings has certain invariable effects: it closes down our interest in diversions and pleasures, fixes attention on what has been lost, and saps our energy for s...
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distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” alo...
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compounds offering some help, especially for major depression. My focus here is the far more common sadness that at its upper limits becomes, technically speaking, a “subclinical depression”—that is, ordinary melancholy. This is a range of despondency that people can handle on their own, if they have the internal resou...
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more intense and prolonged. In depression, worry takes several forms, all focusing on some aspect of the depression itself—how tired we feel, how little energy or motivation we have, for instance, or how little work we’re getting done. Typically none of this reflection is
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accompanied by any concrete course of action that might alleviate the problem. Other common worries include “isolating yourself and thinking about how terrible you feel, worrying that your spouse might reject you because you are depressed, and wondering whether you are going to have another sleepless night,” says Stanf...
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feeds her depression. But if she reacted to depression by trying to distract herself, she might well plunge into the sales calls as a way to get her mind off the sadness. Sales would be less likely to decline, and the very experience of making a sale might bolster her self-confidence, lessening the depression somewhat....
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16 One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of rumination—to question their validity and think of more positive alternatives. The other is to purposely schedule pleasant, distracting events.
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One reason distraction works is that depressing thoughts are automatic, intruding on one’s state of mind unbidden. Even when depressed people try to suppress their depressing thoughts, they often cannot come up with better alternatives; once the depressive tide of thought has started, it has a powerful magnetic effect ...
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Mood-lifters Imagine that you’re driving on an unfamiliar, steep, and winding road through fog. Suddenly a car pulls out of a driveway only a few feet in front of you, too close for you to stop in time. Your foot slams the brake to the floor and you go into a skid, your car sliding into the side of the other one. You s...
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actually showed a pronounced increase in intruding thoughts of the
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scene as time passed, and even made oblique references to it in the thoughts that were supposed to be distractions from it. What’s more, the depression-prone volunteers used other distressing thoughts to distract themselves. As Wenzlaff told me, “Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. Peo...
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the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for the most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory—patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were so sad. At any rate, to shake garden-variety sadness, Diane Tice found, many people reported turning to distract...
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for habitual exercisers there is a reverse effect on mood: they start to feel bad on those days when they skip their workout. Exercise seems to work well because it changes the physiological state the mood evokes: depression is a low-arousal state, and aerobics pitches the
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body into high arousal. By the same token, relaxation techniques, which put the body into a low-arousal state, work well for anxiety, a high-arousal state, but not so well for depression. Each of these approaches seems to work to break the cycle of depression or anxiety because it pitches the brain into a level of acti...
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eating to excess brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression itself. A more constructive approach to mood-lifting, Tice reports, is engineering a small triumph or easy success: tackling some long- delayed chore around the house or getting to some other du...
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bring to mind another patient who was in even worse shape (“I’m not so bad off—at least I can walk”); those who compared themselves to healthy people were the most depressed. 18 Such downward comparisons are surprisingly cheering: suddenly what had seemed quite dispiriting doesn’t look all that bad.
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Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in need. Since depression feeds on ruminations and preoccupations with the self, helping others lifts us out of those preoccupations as we empathize with people in pain of their own. Throwing oneself into volunteer work—coaching Little League, being a Big Brother, ...
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as part of a sentence-completion test. Other tests showed that this small act of mental avoidance was part of a larger pattern in his life, a pattern of tuning out most emotional upset. 19 While at first researchers saw repressors as a prime example of the inability to feel emotion—cousins of alexithymics, perhaps—cur...
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with the sentence about the violent roommate and others like it, they gave all the signs of anxiety, such as a racing heart, sweating, and climbing blood pressure. Yet when asked, they said they felt perfectly calm. This continual tuning-out of emotions such as anger and anxiety is not uncommon: about one person in si...
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distressing emotions, or are they simply feigning calm? The answer to that has come from clever research by Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist and an early collaborator with Weinberger. Davidson had people with the unflappable pattern free-associate to a list of words, most neutral, but several wi...
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the neural wiring of the visual system, if the display was to the left half of the visual field, it was recognized first by the right half of the brain, with its sensitivity to distress. If the display was to the right half of the visual field, the signal went to the left side of the brain
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without being assessed for upset. When the words were presented to the right hemisphere, there was a lag in the time it took the unflappables to utter a response—but only if the word they were responding to was one of the upsetting ones. They had no time lag in the speed of their associations to neutral words. The l...
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and show a pattern of left frontal activation while just sitting at rest that is associated with positive feelings. This brain activity may be the key to their positive claims, despite the underlying physiological arousal that looks like distress.” Davidson’s theory is that, in terms of brain activity, it is energy-dem...
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6 The Master Aptitude Just once in my life have I been paralyzed by fear. The occasion was a calculus exam during my freshman year in college for which I somehow had managed not to study. I still remember the room I marched to that spring morning with feelings of doom and foreboding heavy in my heart. I had been in tha...
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attempt to patch together some semblance of answers to the test. I did not daydream. I simply sat fixated on my terror, waiting for the ordeal to finish. 1 That narrative of an ordeal by terror is my own; it is to this day for me the most convincing evidence of the devastating impact of emotional distress on mental cla...
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on the comparatively trivial routines of the work or school day; for the clinically depressed, thoughts of self-pity and despair, hopelessness and helplessness, override all others. When emotions overwhelm concentration, what is being swamped is the mental capacity cognitive scientists call “working memory,” the abilit...
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achievement. Studies of Olympic athletes, world-class musicians, and chess grand masters find their unifying trait is the ability to motivate themselves to pursue relentless training routines. 4 And, with a steady rise in the degree of excellence required to be a world-class performer, these rigorous training routines...
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beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years. And that doggedness depends on emotional traits
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—enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks—above all else. The added payoff for life success from motivation, apart from other innate abilities, can be seen in the remarkable performance of Asian students in American schools and professions. One thorough review of the evidence suggests that Asian-American chil...
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believe that anyone can do well in school with the right effort.” In short, a strong cultural work ethic translates into higher motivation, zeal, and persistence—an emotional edge. To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or enhance our ability to think and plan, to pursue training for a distant goal, to solve...
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between impulse and restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control,
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gratification and delay. Which of these choices a child makes is a telling test; it offers a quick reading not just of character, but of the trajectory that child will probably take through life. There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-contro...
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seemed an endless fifteen to twenty minutes for the experimenter to return. To sustain themselves in their struggle they covered their eyes so they wouldn’t have to stare at temptation, or rested their heads in their arms, talked to themselves, sang, played games with their hands and feet, even tried to go to sleep. Th...
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pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of giving up even in the face of difficulties; they were self-reliant and confident, trustworthy and dependable; and they took initiative and plunged into projects. And, more than a decade later, they were still
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able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals. The third or so who grabbed for the marshmallow, however, tended to have fewer of these qualities, and shared instead a relatively more troubled psychological portrait. In adolescence they were more likely to be seen as shying away from social contacts; to be stubb...
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attention from focusing on the temptation at hand, and to distract themselves while maintaining the necessary perseverance toward their goal—the two marshmallows. Even more surprising, when the tested children were evaluated again as they were finishing high school, those who had waited patiently at four were far super...
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children learn to read. 9 This suggests that the ability to delay gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood is also a powerful predictor of later delinquency, again more so than IQ. 10 ) As we shall see in Part Five, while some argue t...
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and so represents an unbendable limitation on a child’s life potential, there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as impulse control and accurately reading a social situation can be learned. What Walter Mischel, who did the study, describes with the rather infelicitous phrase “goal-directed self-imposed dela...
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11 But when it comes time to make a simple decision, such as whether to watch her son play football, her mind floods with thoughts of disaster. She is not free to choose; her worries overwhelm her reason. As we have seen, worry is the nub of anxiety’s damaging effect on mental performance of all kind. Worry, of course...
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their academic performance, no matter how measured—grades on tests, grade-point average, or achievement tests. 13 When people who are prone to worry are asked to perform a cognitive task such as sorting ambiguous objects into one of two categories, and narrate what is going through their mind as they do so, it is the ...
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whose anxiety undoes their academic performance, and those who are able to do well despite the stress—or, perhaps, because of it. 16 The irony of test anxiety is that the very apprehension about doing well on the test that, ideally, can motivate students like Haber to study hard in preparation and so do well can sabot...
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hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an upcoming speech or test, say—to motivate themselves to prepare well for it, thereby doing well. The classical literature in psychology describes the relationship
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between anxiety and performance, including mental performance, in terms of an upside-down U. At the peak of the inverted U is the optimal relationship between anxiety and performance, with a modicum of nerves propelling outstanding achievement. But too little anxiety—the first side of the U—brings about apathy or too ...
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problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal. This suggests that one way to help someone think through a problem is to tell them a joke. Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely, noticing relationships that might have eluded them otherwise—a mental skill important not...
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for the box holding the tacks, and so come up with the creative solution: tack the box to the wall and use it as a candleholder. Even mild mood changes can sway thinking. In making plans or decisions people in good moods have a perceptual bias that leads them to be more expansive and positive in their thinking. This is
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partly because memory is state-specific, so that while in a good mood we remember more positive events; as we think over the pros and cons of a course of action while feeling pleasant, memory biases our weighing of evidence in a positive direction, making us more likely to do something slightly adventurous or risky, fo...
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learned about the D grade. What do you do? 19 Hope made all the difference. The response by students with high levels of hope was to work harder and think of a range of things they might try that could bolster their final grade. Students with moderate levels of hope thought of several ways they might up their grade, bu...
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compare students of equivalent intellectual aptitude on their academic achievements, what sets them apart is hope.” 20 As the familiar legend has it, Pandora, a princess of ancient Greece, was given a gift, a mysterious box, by gods jealous of her beauty. She was told she must never open the gift. But one day, overcome...
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in this sense. Some typically think of themselves as able to get out of a jam or find ways to solve problems, while others simply do not see themselves as having the energy, ability, or means to accomplish their goals. People with high levels of hope, Snyder finds, share certain traits, among them being able to motivat...
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touting Biondi as likely to match Mark Spitz’s 1972 feat of taking
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seven gold medals. But Biondi finished a heartbreaking third in his first event, the 200-meter freestyle. In his next event, the 100-meter butterfly, Biondi was inched out for the gold by another swimmer who made a greater effort in the last meter. Sportscasters speculated that the defeats would dispirit Biondi in his ...
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general, things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations. From the standpoint of emotional intelligence, optimism is an attitude that buffers people against falling into apathy, hopelessness, or depression in the face of tough going. And, as with hope, its near cousin, optimism pays dividends ...
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assuming there is nothing they can do to make things go better the next time, and so do nothing about the problem; they see the setback as due to some personal deficit that will always plague them. As with hope, optimism predicts academic success. In a study of five
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hundred members of the incoming freshman class of 1984 at the University of Pennsylvania, the students’ scores on a test of optimism were a better predictor of their actual grades freshman year than were their SAT scores or their high-school grades. Said Seligman, who studied them, “College entrance exams measure talen...
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first three years. Seligman found that new salesmen who were by nature optimists sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two years on the job than did pessimists. And during the first year the pessimists quit at twice the rate of the optimists. What’s more, Seligman persuaded MetLife to hire a special group of ap...
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interpretation that is sure to trigger apathy and defeatism, if not depression. Optimists, on the other hand, tell themselves, “I’m using the wrong approach,” or “That last person was just in a bad mood.” By seeing not themselves but something in the situation as the reason
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for their failure, they can change their approach in the next call. While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s spawns hope. One source of a positive or negative outlook may well be inborn temperament; some people by nature tend one way or the other. But as we shall also see in Chapter 14 , tempe...
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property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.” 24 FLOW: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EXCELLENCE A composer describes those moments when his work is at ...
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peak performance during two decades of research. 26 Athletes know this state of grace as “the zone,” where excellence becomes effortless, crowd and competitors disappearing into a blissful, steady absorption in the moment. Diane Roffe-Steinrotter, who captured a gold medal in skiing at the 1994 Winter Olympics, said a...
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of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because flow feels so good, it is intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become utterly absorbed in what they are doing, paying undivided attention to the task, their awareness merged with their actions. Indeed, it interrupts flow to reflect too much on what is happenin...
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consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless. Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task. And although people perform at...
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success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them. There are several ways to enter flow. One is to intentionally focus a sharp attention on the task at hand; a highly concentrated state is the essence of flow. There seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone: it can require con...
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flow are incompatible with emotional hijackings, in which limbic surges capture the rest of the brain. The quality of attention in flow is relaxed yet highly focused. It is a concentration very different from straining to pay attention when we are tired or bored, or when our focus is under siege from intrusive feelings...
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capture and hold their attention, their brain “quiets down” in the sense that there is a lessening of cortical arousal. 29 That discovery is remarkable, given that flow allows people to tackle the most challenging tasks in a given domain, whether playing against a chess master or solving a complex mathematical problem...
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would be that such challenging tasks would require more cortical activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs only within reach of the summit of ability, where skills are well-rehearsed and neural circuits are most efficient. A strained concentration—a focus fueled by worry—produces increased cortical acti...
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30 The same happens in boredom. But when the brain is operating at peak efficiency, as in flow, there is a precise relation between the active areas and the demands of the task. In this state even hard work can seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining. LEARNING AND FLOW: A NEW MODEL FOR EDUCATION Because f...
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fame and wealth for the most part drifted away from art after graduating.
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Csikszentmihalyi concludes: “Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won’t be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single- minded immersion.” 31 Just as flow is a ...
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spent most of the hours during which they were not studying in socializing, hanging out with friends and family. When their moods were analyzed, a telling finding emerged. Both the high and low achievers spent a great deal of time during the week being bored by activities, such as TV watching, that posed no challenge ...
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will be enjoyable to them in the future. 32 Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who developed the theory of multiple intelligences, sees flow, and the positive states that typify it, as part of the healthiest way to teach children, motivating them from inside rather than by threat or promise of reward. “We should ...
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domains where they can develop competencies,” Gardner proposed to me. “Flow is an internal state that signifies a kid is engaged in a task that’s right. You have to find something you like and stick to it. It’s when kids get bored in school that they fight and act up, and when they’re overwhelmed by a challenge that th...
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be emboldened to take on challenges in new areas,” says Gardner, adding that experience suggests this is the case. More generally, the flow model suggests that achieving mastery of any skill or body of knowledge should ideally happen naturally, as the child is drawn to the areas that spontaneously engage her—that, in e...
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in controlling impulse and putting off gratification, regulating our moods so they facilitate rather than impede thinking, motivating ourselves to persist and try, try again in the face of setbacks, or finding ways to enter flow and so perform more effectively—all
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bespeak the power of emotion to guide effective effort.
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7 The Roots of Empathy Back to Gary, the brilliant but alexithymic surgeon who so distressed his fiancée, Ellen, by being oblivious not only to his own feelings but to hers as well. Like most alexithymics, he lacked empathy as well as insight. If Ellen spoke of feeling down, Gary failed to sympathize; if she spoke of l...
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bewildered when other people express their feelings to them. This failure to register another’s feelings is a major deficit in emotional intelligence, and a tragic failing in what it means to be human. For all rapport, the root of caring, stems from emotional attunement, from the capacity for empathy. That capacity—the...
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devised a test of empathy, the PONS (Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity), a series of videotapes of a young woman expressing feelings ranging from loathing to motherly love. 2 The scenes span the spectrum from a jealous rage to asking forgiveness, from a show of gratitude to a seduction. The video has been edited so tha...
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Empathy, it should be no surprise to learn, helps with romantic life. In keeping with findings about other elements of emotional intelligence, there was only an incidental relationship between scores on this measure of empathic acuity and SAT or IQ scores or school achievement tests. Empathy’s independence from academi...
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he says. One rule of thumb used in communications research is that 90 percent or more of an emotional message is nonverbal. And such messages—anxiety in someone’s tone of voice, irritation in the
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quickness of a gesture—are almost always taken in unconsciously, without paying specific attention to the nature of the message, but simply tacitly receiving it and responding. The skills that allow us to do this well or poorly are also, for the most part, learned tacitly. HOW EMPATHY UNFOLDS The moment Hope, just nin...
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apart from other people. Even a few months after birth, infants react to a disturbance in those around them as though it were their own, crying when they see another child’s tears. By one year or so, they start to realize the misery is not their own but someone else’s, though they still seem confused over what to do ab...
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an American psychologist. This sense is slightly different from its original introduction into English from the Greek empatheia , “feeling into,” a term used initially by theoreticians of aesthetics for the ability to perceive the subjective experience of another person. Titchener’s
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theory was that empathy stemmed from a sort of physical imitation of the distress of another, which then evokes the same feelings in oneself. He sought a word that would be distinct from sympathy , which can be felt for the general plight of another with no sharing whatever of what that other person is feeling. Motor ...
emotional_intelligence.pdf
686423caa45b-1
the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: “Look how s...
emotional_intelligence.pdf
a68fb0c99f47-0
away, Fred would look back at her, and the cycle of pursuit and aversion would begin again—often leaving Fred in tears. But with Mark, Sarah virtually never tried to impose eye contact as she did with Fred. Instead Mark could break off eye contact whenever he wanted, and she would not pursue. A small act, but telling. ...
emotional_intelligence.pdf