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those that let the child know her emotions are met with empathy, accepted, and reciprocated, in a process Stern calls attunement . The twins’ mother was attuned with Mark, but out of emotional synch with Fred. Stern contends that the countlessly repeated moments of attunement or misattunement between parent and child ...
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message that Stern finds mothers send about once a minute when they interact with their babies. Attunement is very different from simple imitation. “If you just imitate a baby,” Stern told me, “that only shows you know what he
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did, not how he felt. To let him know you sense how he feels, you have to play back his inner feelings in another way. Then the baby knows he is understood.” Making love is perhaps the closest approximation in adult life to this intimate attunement between infant and mother. Lovemaking, Stern writes, “involves the expe...
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had mothers deliberately over- or underrespond to their infants, rather than matching them in an attuned way; the infants responded with immediate dismay and distress. Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and child takes a tremendous emotional toll on the child. When a parent consistently fails to show any em...
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One mother in Stern’s study consistently underreacted to her baby’s level of activity; eventually her baby learned to be passive. “An infant treated that way learns, when I get excited I can’t get my mother to be equally excited, so I may as well not try at all,” Stern contends. But there is hope in “reparative” relati...
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committed the cruelest and most violent crimes found that the one characteristic of their early lives that set them apart from other criminals was that they had been shuttled from foster home to foster home, or raised in orphanages—life histories that suggest emotional neglect and little opportunity for attunement. 10 ...
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As is so often the case in neurology, reports of quirky and bizarre cases were among the early clues to the brain basis of empathy. A 1975 report, for instance, reviewed several cases in which patients with certain lesions in the right area of the frontal lobes had a curious deficit: they were unable to understand the ...
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Technology, on the biology of empathy. 12 Reviewing both neurological findings and comparative studies with animals, Brothers points to the amygdala and its connections to the association area of the visual cortex as part of the key brain circuitry underlying empathy. Much of the relevant neurological research is from...
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prevented the shock—an act of empathy, if not of altruism. Having established that nonhuman primates do indeed read emotions from the faces of their peers, researchers gently inserted long, fine-tipped electrodes into the brains of monkeys. These electrodes allowed the recording of activity in a single neuron.
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Electrodes tapping neurons in the visual cortex and in the amygdala showed that when one monkey saw the face of another, that information led to a neuron firing first in the visual cortex, then in the amygdala. This pathway, of course, is a standard route for information that is emotionally arousing. But what is surpri...
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unfortunate monkeys had lost all sense of how to respond emotionally to other monkeys in their band. Even when one made a friendly approach, they would run away, and eventually lived as isolates, shunning contact with their own troop. The very regions of the cortex where the emotion-specific neurons concentrate are al...
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simple: the couple is videotaped and their physiological responses measured while talking over some troubling issue in their marriage— how to discipline the kids, spending habits, and the like. Each partner reviews the tape and narrates what he or she was feeling from moment to moment. Then the partner reviews the tape...
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now trying to read the other’s feelings. The most empathic accuracy occurred in those husbands and wives whose own physiology tracked that of the spouse they were watching. That is, when their partner had an elevated sweat response, so did they; when their partner had a drop in heart rate, their heart slowed. In sho...
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speaks to the heart of the link between empathy and caring: another’s pain is one’s own. To feel with another is to care. In this sense, the opposite of empathy is antipathy . The empathic attitude is engaged again and again in moral judgments, for moral dilemmas involve potential victims: Should you lie to keep fr...
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Hoffman sees a natural progression in empathy from infancy onward. As we have seen, at one year of age a child feels in distress
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herself when she sees another fall and start to cry; her rapport is so strong and immediate that she puts her thumb in her mouth and buries her head in her mother’s lap, as if she herself were hurt. After the first year, when infants become more aware that they are distinct from others, they actively try to soothe anot...
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understanding, in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions centered on wanting to alleviate misfortune and injustice. Empathy underlies many facets of moral judgment and action. One is “empathic anger,” which John Stuart Mill described as “the natural feeling of retaliation … rendered by intellect and sympathy appli...
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skater Tonya Harding, Eckardt had arranged to have thugs attack Nancy Kerrigan, Harding’s archrival for the 1994 women’s Olympic figure skating gold medal. In the attack, Kerrigan’s knee was battered,
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sidelining her during crucial training months. But when Eckardt saw the image of a sobbing Kerrigan on television, he had a sudden rush of remorse, and sought out a friend to bare his secret, beginning the sequence that led to the arrest of the attackers. Such is the power of empathy. But it is typically, and tragicall...
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The blotting out of empathy as these people inflict damage on victims is almost always part of an emotional cycle that precipitates their cruel acts. Witness the emotional sequence that typically leads to a sex crime such as child molestation. 17 The cycle begins with the molester feeling upset: angry, depressed, lone...
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in the situation. That emotional detachment characterizes everything that follows, from the ensuing plan to get a child alone, to the careful rehearsal of what will happen, and then the execution of the plan. All of it is pursued as though the child involved had no feelings of her own; instead the molester projects on ...
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register. If they did, it would “ruin” things for the molester. This utter lack of empathy for their victims is one of the main focuses of new treatments being devised for child molesters and other such offenders. In one of the most promising treatment programs, the offenders read heart-wrenching accounts of crimes lik...
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release compared to those who had no such treatment. Without this initial empathy-inspired motivation, none of the rest of treatment will work. While there may be some small hope for instilling a sense of empathy in offenders such as child molesters, there is much less for another criminal type, the psychopath (more re...
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cynicism. Consider the performance of Faro, a seventeen-year-old member of a Los Angeles gang who crippled a mother and her baby in a drive-by shooting, which he described with more pride than remorse. Driving in a car with Leon Bing, who was writing a book about the Los Angeles gangs the Crips and the Bloods, Faro wan...
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show off. Faro tells Bing he’s “gonna look crazy” at the “two dudes” in the next car. As Bing recounts the exchange: The driver, sensing that someone is looking at him, glances over at my car. His eyes connect with Faro’s, widen for an instant. Then he breaks the contact, looks down, looks away. And there is no mistaki...
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crime; in these cases too much empathy might be counterproductive. Indeed, an opportunistic lack of empathy may be a “virtue” in many roles in life, from “bad cop” police interrogator to corporate raider. Men who have been torturers for terrorist states, for example, describe how they learned to dissociate from the fee...
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appears to be a calculated act of terrorism, a method for controlling their wives by instilling fear. These coolly brutal husbands are a breed apart from most other men who batter their wives. For one, they are far more likely to be violent outside the marriage as well, getting into bar fights and
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battling with coworkers and other family members. And while most men who become violent with their wives do so impulsively, out of rage after feeling rejected or jealous, or out of fear of abandonment, these calculating batterers will strike out at their wives seemingly for no reason at all—and once they start, nothing...
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show a distinctive wave pattern in response to the emotional words, but not the neutral ones. But psychopaths have neither of these responses: their brains do not show the distinctive pattern in response to the emotional words, and they do not respond more quickly to them, suggesting a disruption in circuits between th...
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not feel fear, they have no empathy—or compassion—for the fear and pain of their victims. * A note of caution: If there are biological patterns at play in some kinds of criminality—such as a neural defect in empathy—that does not argue that all criminals are biologically flawed, or that there is some biological marker...
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the best consensus is that there is no such biological marker, and certainly no “criminal gene.” Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases, that does not mean all who have it will drift to crime; most will not. A lack of empathy should be factored in with all the other psychological, econo...
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8 The Social Arts As so often happens to five-year-olds with younger siblings, Len has lost all patience with Jay, his two-and-a-half-year-old brother, who is making a mess of the Lego blocks they’ve been playing with. Carried away by a wave of rage, Len bites Jay, who breaks into tears. Their mother, hearing Jay’s pai...
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show you. Len crying.” And then, turning to Len, Jay adopts a mothering mode, patting his weeping brother as he reassures him in soothing tones, “Look, Len. No go on crying.” Len’s sobs continue, despite the comforting. So Jay turns to another tactic, lending a helping hand in putting away the Lego blocks in their bag,...
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Through his sobs, Len manages a pathetic, gasping, “I’m trying to.” Which prompts Jay’s final stratagem: borrowing his mother’s firmness and voice of authority, he threatens, “Stop crying, Len. Smack your bottom!” This microdrama reveals the remarkable emotional sophistication that a toddler of just thirty months can b...
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The same skills can be used to tease or torment a sibling. But even that mean-spiritedness bespeaks the emergence of a crucial emotional aptitude: the ability to know another’s feelings and to act in a way that further shapes those feelings. Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core of the art of handli...
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someone else—the fine art of relationships—requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy. With this base, the “people skills” ripen. These are the social competences that make for effectiveness in dealings with others; deficits here lead to ineptness in the social world or repeated
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interpersonal disasters. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of these skills that can cause even the intellectually brightest to founder in their relationships, coming off as arrogant, obnoxious, or insensitive. These social abilities allow one to shape an encounter, to mobilize and inspire others, to thrive in intimate r...
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2 One is minimizing the show of emotion—this is the Japanese norm for feelings of distress in the presence of someone in authority, which the students were following when they masked their upset with a poker face. Another is exaggerating what one feels by magnifying the emotional expression; this is the ploy used b...
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educating the sentiments, emotions are both the medium and the
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message. If a child is told to “smile and say thank you” by a parent who is, at that moment, harsh, demanding, and cold—who hisses the message instead of warmly whispering it—the child is more likely to learn a very different lesson, and in fact respond to Grandpa with a frown and a curt, flat “Thank you.” The effect ...
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expressiveness is what evokes response in their audience. And, no doubt, some of us come into life as natural actors. But partly because the lessons we learn about display rules vary according to the models we’ve had, people differ greatly in their adeptness. EXPRESSIVENESS AND EMOTIONAL CONTAGION It was early in the V...
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in the heat of battle illustrates a basic principle of social life: Emotions are contagious. To be sure, this tale marks an extreme. Most emotional contagion is far more subtle, part of a tacit exchange that
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happens in every encounter. We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing. This emotional exchange is typically at a subtle, almost imperceptible level; the way a salesperson says thank you can leave us feeling ig...
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part of each other’s tool kit for emotional change, for better or for worse. Consider a remarkable demonstration of the subtlety with which emotions pass from one person to another. In a simple experiment two volunteers filled out a checklist about their moods at the moment, then simply sat facing each other quietly wh...
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to evoke those feelings once again. The day-to-day imitation of feeling is ordinarily quite subtle. Ulf
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Dimberg, a Swedish researcher at the University of Uppsala, found that when people view a smiling or angry face, their own faces show evidence of that same mood through slight changes in the facial muscles. The changes are evident through electronic sensors but are typically not visible to the naked eye. When two peopl...
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whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us all the time—there’s a dance, a synchrony, a transmission of emotions. This mood synchrony determines whether you feel an interaction went well or not.” The degree of emotional rapport people feel in an encounter is mirrored by how tightly o...
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the discussion—they had caught their girlfriends’ bad moods. 5 In short, whether people feel upbeat or down, the more physically
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attuned their encounter, the more similar their moods will become. The synchrony between teachers and students indicates how much rapport they feel; studies in classrooms show that the closer the movement coordination between teacher and student, the more they felt friendly, happy, enthused, interested, and easygoing w...
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emotional level. The mark of a powerful leader or performer is being able to move an audience of thousands in this way. By the same token, Cacioppo points out that people who are poor at receiving and sending emotions are prone to problems in their relationships, since people often feel uncomfortable with them, even if...
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6 That is what we mean by, “He had them in the palm of his hand.” Emotional entrainment is the heart of influence.
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THE RUDIMENTS OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE It’s recess at a preschool, and a band of boys is running across the grass. Reggie trips, hurts his knee, and starts crying, but the other boys keep right on running—save for Roger, who stops. As Reggie’s sobs subside Roger reaches down and rubs his own knee, calling out, “I hurt my...
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Roger’s talent represents one of four separate abilities that Hatch and Gardner identify as components of interpersonal intelligence: • Organizing groups —the essential skill of the leader, this involves initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people. This is the talent seen in theater directors or pro...
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dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business world they do well as salespeople or managers, or can be excellent teachers. Children like Roger get along well with virtually everyone
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else, easily enter into playing with them, and are happy doing so. These children tend to be best at reading emotions from facial expressions and are most liked by their classmates. • Social analysis —being able to detect and have insights about people’s feelings, motives, and concerns. This knowledge of how others fe...
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be around someone like that.” These interpersonal abilities build on other emotional intelligences. People who make an excellent social impression, for example, are adept at monitoring their own expression of emotion, are keenly attuned to the ways others are reacting, and so are able to continually fine-tune their soc...
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in order to be loved—or at least liked—the social chameleon will seem to be whatever those he is with seem to want. The sign that someone falls into this pattern, Snyder finds, is that they make an
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excellent impression, yet have few stable or satisfying intimate relationships. A more healthy pattern, of course, is to balance being true to oneself with social skills, using them with integrity. Social chameleons, though, don’t mind in the least saying one thing and doing another, if that will win them social approv...
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use their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate social situations demand, so that they may act like very different people depending on whom they are with, swinging from bubbly sociability, say, to reserved withdrawal. To be sure, to the extent that these traits lead to effective impression management, the...
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in foreign languages, superb at translating. But there were crucial
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ways in which he was completely inept. Cecil seemed to lack the simplest social skills. He would muff a casual conversation over coffee, and fumble when having to pass the time of day; in short, he seemed incapable of the most routine social exchange. Because his lack of social grace was most profound when he was aroun...
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ineptitude was overwhelming; he was socially paralyzed. The tale is told by Lakin Phillips, a psychologist at George Washington University, who proposes that Cecil’s plight stems from a failure to learn in childhood the most elementary lessons of social interaction: What could Cecil have been taught earlier? To speak d...
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those around us uncomfortable. The function of these rules, of course, is to keep everyone involved in a social exchange at ease; awkwardness spawns anxiety. People who lack these skills are inept not just at social niceties, but at handling the emotions of those they
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encounter; they inevitably leave disturbance in their wake. We all have known Cecils, people with an annoying lack of social graces—people who don’t seem to know when to end a conversation or phone call and who keep on talking, oblivious to all cues and hints to say good-bye; people whose conversation centers on themse...
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a poor sense of prosody, the emotional quality of speech, so that they talk too shrilly or flatly. Much research has focused on spotting children who show signs of social deficiency, children whose awkwardness makes them neglected or rejected by their playmates. Apart from children who are spurned because they are bul...
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understand what’s going on. This kind of communication is a constant subtext of everything you do; you can’t stop showing your facial expression or posture, or hide your tone of voice. If you make mistakes in what emotional messages you send, you constantly
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experience that people react to you in funny ways—you get rebuffed and don’t know why. If you’re thinking you’re acting happy but actually seem too hyper or angry, you find other kids getting angry at you in turn, and you don’t realize why. Such kids end up feeling no sense of control over how other people treat them, ...
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being on the edge of a group at play you want to join. It is a moment of peril, one when being liked or hated, belonging or not, is made all too public. For that reason that crucial moment has been the subject of intense scrutiny by students of child development, revealing a stark contrast in approach strategies used ...
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Barbara and starting to play with the animals. Barbara turns to her
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and says, “You can’t play!” “Yes, I can,” Linda counters. “I can have some animals, too.” “No, you can’t,” Barbara says bluntly. “We don’t like you today.” When Bill protests on Linda’s behalf, Nancy joins the attack: “We hate her today.” Because of the danger of being told, either explicitly or implicitly, “We hate yo...
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what kind of play is in flow, what out of place. The two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejection are trying to take the lead too soon and being out of synch with the frame of reference. But this is exactly what unpopular children tend to do: they push their way into a group, trying to change the subject too ...
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(actually pebbles) in their socks. Warren asks Roger if he wants to be in a helicopter or an airplane. Roger asks, before committing himself, “Are you in a helicopter?”
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This seemingly innocuous moment reveals sensitivity to others’ concerns, and the ability to act on that knowledge in a way that maintains the connection. Hatch comments about Roger, “He ‘checks in’ with his playmate so that they and their play remain connected. I have watched many other children who simply get in their...
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home on a suburban Tokyo train when a huge, bellicose, and very drunk and begrimed laborer got on. The man, staggering, began terrorizing the passengers: screaming curses, he took a swing at a woman holding a baby, sending her sprawling in the laps of an elderly couple, who then jumped up and joined a stampede to the o...
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in what was clearly a legitimate opportunity. So, as all the other passengers sat frozen in their seats, Terry stood up, slowly and with deliberation. Seeing him, the drunk roared, “Aha! A foreigner! You need a lesson in Japanese manners!” and began gathering himself to take on Terry. But just as the drunk was on the v...
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bellowed. “Oh, that’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” the old man replied in a warm tone. “You see, I love sake, too. Every night, me and my wife (she’s seventy-six, you know), we warm up a little bottle of sake and take it out into the garden, and we sit on an old wooden bench …” He continued on about the persimmon ...
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in the old man’s lap. That is emotional brilliance.
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PART THREE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED
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9 Intimate Enemies To love and to work, Sigmund Freud once remarked to his disciple Erik Erikson, are the twin capacities that mark full maturity. If that is the case, then maturity may be an endangered way station in life— and current trends in marriage and divorce make emotional intelligence more crucial than ever. C...
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likelihood that the marriage would end in divorce was projected to be close to a staggering 67 percent! 1 If the estimate holds, just three in ten of recent newlyweds can count on staying married to their new partner. It can be argued that much of this rise is due not so much to a decline in emotional intelligence as ...
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understanding what holds a marriage together or tears it apart has come from the use of sophisticated physiological measures that allow the moment-to-moment tracking of the emotional nuances of a couple’s encounter. Scientists are now able to detect a husband’s otherwise invisible adrenaline surges and jumps in blood p...
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contradictory plea aimed at a retreating back epitomizes the pattern most commonly seen in couples whose relationship is distressed: She seeks to engage, he withdraws. Marital therapists have long noted that by the time a couple finds their way to the therapy office they are in this pattern of engage-withdraw, with his...
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the opposite sex. 3 These separate social universes intersect little until teenagers start dating. Meanwhile, boys and girls are taught very different lessons about handling emotions. Parents, in general, discuss emotions—with the exception of anger—more with their daughters than their sons. 4 Girls are exposed to mo...
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“boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may become largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in themselves and in others.” 5 At age ten, roughly the same percent of girls as boys are overtly aggressive, given to open confrontation when angered. But by age thirteen, a telling difference ...
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the way and stop crying so the game can go on. If the same happens among a group of girls who are playing, the game stops while everyone
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gathers around to help the girl who is crying. This difference between boys and girls at play epitomizes what Harvard’s Carol Gilligan points to as a key disparity between the sexes: boys take pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness. Thus boy...
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empathic than men, at least as measured by the ability to read someone else’s unstated feelings from facial expression, tone of voice, and other nonverbal cues. Likewise, it is generally easier to read feelings from a woman’s face than a man’s; while there is no difference in facial expressiveness among very young boys...
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intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the relationship itself. The men, by and large, don’t understand what the wives want from them. They say, ‘I want to do things with her, and all she wants to do is talk.’ ” During courtship, Huston found, men were
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much more willing to spend time talking in ways that suited the wish for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once married, as time went on the men—especially in more traditional couples—spent less and less time talking in this way with their wives, finding a sense of closeness simply in doing things like gardening toget...
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about their relationship. (Of course this gender difference is a generalization, and is not true in every case; a psychiatrist friend complained that in his marriage his wife is reluctant to discuss emotional matters between them, and he is the one who is left to bring them up.) The slowness of men to bring up problems...
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reached an agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival; men and women have to overcome the innate gender differences in approaching rocky emotions. Failing this, couples are vulnerable to emotional rifts that eventually can tear their relationship apart. As we
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shall see, these rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both partners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence. MARITAL FAULT LINE Fred: Did you pick up my dry cleaning? Ingrid: (In a mocking tone) “Did you pick up my dry cleaning.” Pick up your own damn dry cleaning. What am I, your maid? Fred: Hardly. ...
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intelligence in the survival of a marriage. During the last two decades Gottman has tracked the ups and downs of more than two hundred couples, some just newlyweds, others married for decades. Gottman has charted the emotional ecology of marriage with such precision that, in one study, he was able to predict which coup...
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An early warning signal that a marriage is in danger, Gottman finds, is harsh criticism. In a healthy marriage husband and wife feel free to voice a complaint. But too often in the heat of anger complaints are expressed in a destructive fashion, as an attack on the spouse’s character. For example, Pamela and her daught...
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But for this lapse Pamela brands him as “thoughtless and self- centered.” Most couples have moments like this from time to time, where a complaint about something a partner has done is voiced as an attack against the person rather than the deed. But these harsh personal criticisms have a far more corrosive emotional im...
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criticism leaves the person on the receiving end feeling ashamed, disliked, blamed, and defective—all of which are more likely to lead to a defensive response than to steps to improve things. All the more so when the criticism comes laden with contempt, a particularly destructive emotion. Contempt comes easily with ang...
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voice and an angry expression. Its most obvious form, of course, is mockery or insult—“jerk,” “bitch,” “wimp.” But just as hurtful is the body language that conveys contempt, particularly the sneer or curled lip that are the universal facial signals for disgust, or a rolling of the eyes, as if to say, “Oh, brother!” Co...
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a marriage. Rather, such emotional volleys are akin to smoking and high cholesterol as risk factors for heart disease—the more intense and prolonged, the greater the danger. On the road to divorce, one of these factors predicts the next, in an escalating scale of misery. Habitual criticism and contempt or disgust are d...
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unnerving message, something like a combination of icy distance, superiority, and distaste. Stonewalling showed up mainly in marriages that were heading for trouble; in 85 percent of these cases it was the husband who stonewalled in response to a wife who attacked with
emotional_intelligence.pdf
d16ea231a5db-0
criticism and contempt. 14 As a habitual response stonewalling is devastating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all possibility of working out disagreements. TOXIC THOUGHTS The children are being rambunctious, and Martin, their father, is getting annoyed. He turns to his wife, Melanie, and says in a sharp t...
emotional_intelligence.pdf