MARSHMALLOW

noun:   

spongy confection made of gelatin and sugar and corn syrup and dusted with powdered sugar 

Chapter 1 – What are emotions for?

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2^nd paragraph – 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. Each emotion offers a distinctive readiness to act; each points us in a direction that has worked well to handle the recurring challenges of human life. As these eternal situations were repeated and repeated over our evolutionary history, the survival value of our emotional repertoire was attested to by its becoming imprinted in our nerves as innate automatic tendencies of the human heart.

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1^st paragraph – Automatic reactions of this sort have become etched in our nervous system, evolutionary biologists presume, because for a long and crucial period in human prehistory they made the difference between survival and death.

2^nd paragraph --- the code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka --- can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate emotional life. As Freud described in Civilization and Its Discontents, society has had to enforce from without rules meant to subdue tides of emotional excess that surge too freely within.

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4^th paragraph --- All emotions are in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion  is motere, the Latin verb “to move”, plus the prefix “e-“ to connote “move away”, suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion.

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2^nd paragraph --- parasympathetic arousal --- the physiological opposite of the “flight-or-fight” mobilization shared by anger and fear. The parasympathetic pattern, dubbed the “relaxation response”, is a body wide set of reactions that generates a general state of calm and contentment, facilitating cooperation.

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4^th paragraph --- That moment of teary eyes could easily pass unnoted. But the empathic understanding that someone’s watering eyes mean she is sad despite her words to the contrary is an act of comprehending just as surely as is distilling meaning from words on a printed page. One is an act of the emotional mind, the other of the rational mind. In a very real sense we have town minds, one that thinks and one that feels.

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4^th paragraph --- Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason --- you could calculate the ratio as 24 to one. He set up two raging tyrants in opposition to Reason’s solitary power: anger and lust. How far Reason can prevail against the combined forces of these two the common life of man makes quite clear. Reason does the only thing she can and shouts herself hoarse, repeating formulas of virtue, while the other two bid her go hand herself, and are increasingly noisy and offensive, until at last their Ruler is exhausted, gives up, and surrenders.

Erasmus of Rotterdam

5^th paragraph --- Over millions of years of evolution, the brain has grown from the bottom up, with its higher centers developing as elaborations of lower, more ancient parts. (The growth of the brain in the human embryo roughly traces this evolutionary course.)

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2^nd paragraph --- 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.

5^th paragraph --- 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 grip.

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5^th paragraph --- (neocortex) This new addition to the brain allowed the addition of nuance to emotional life. Take love. Limbic structures generate feelings of pleasure and sexual desire --- the emotions that feed sexual passion. But the addition of the neocortex and its connections to the limbic system allowed for the mother-child bond that is the basis of the family unit and the long-term commitment to childrearing that makes human development possible.

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1^st paragraph --- 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 our 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.

Chapter 2 --- Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking

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3^rd paragraph --- 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 is a good idea. The hallmark of such a hijack is that once the moment passes, those so possessed have a sense of not knowing what came over them.

4^th paragraph --- (“lost it”) In all probability, that, too, was such a hijacking, a neural takeover which, as we shall see, originates in the amygdala, a center in the limbic brain.

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3^rd paragraph --- (blowup about art print) It is in moments such as these --- when impulsive feeling overrides the rational --- that the newly discovered role for the amygdala is pivotal. Incoming signals from the senses 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.

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5^th paragraph --- research has shown that sensory signals from eye or ear travel first in the brain to the thalamus, and then --- across a single synapse --- to the amygdala; a second signal from the thalamus is routed to the neocortex --- the thinking brain. This branching allows the amygdala to respond before the neocortex, which mulls information through several levels of brain circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely tailored response. (LaDoux)

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2^nd paragraph --- Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the “cognitive unconscious” presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it. Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.

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2^nd paragraph --- 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.

4^th paragraph --- A few spare elements of the situation is all that need seem similar to some past danger for the amygdala to trigger its emergency proclamation. The trouble is that along with the emotionally charged memories that have the power to trigger this crisis response can come equally outdated ways of responding to it.

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2^nd paragraph --- (emotions learned in childhood) –These emotional lessons are so potent and yet so difficult to understand from the vantage point of adult life because, believes LaDoux, they are stored in the amygdala as rough, wordless blueprints for emotional life. Since these earliest emotional memories are established at a time before infants have words for their experience, when these emotional memories are triggered in later life there is no matching set of articulated thoughts about the response that takes us over. One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional outbursts, then, is that they often date from a time in our lives when thing were bewildering and we did not yet have words for comprehending events. We may have chaotic feeling, but not words for the memories that formed them.

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2^nd paragraph --- “precognitive emotion”, a reaction based on neural bits and pieces of sensory information that have not been fully sorted out and integrated into a recognizable object. It’s a very raw form of sensory information, something like a neural Name That Tune, where, instead of snap judgments of a melody being made on the basis of just a few notes, a whole perception is grasped on the basis of the first few tentative parts. If the amygdala senses a sensory pattern of import emerging, it jumps to a conclusion, triggering its reactions before there is full confirming evidence --- or any confirmation at all.

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5^th paragraph --- (lobotomy) This role of the prefrontal lobes in emotions has been suspected by neurologists since the advent in the 1940s of that rather desperate --- and sadly misguided --- surgical “cure” for mental illness: the prefrontal lobotomy, which (often sloppily) removed part of the prefrontal lobes or otherwise cut connections between prefrontal cortex and the lower brain. In the days before any effective medications for mental illness, the lobotomy was hailed as the answer to grave emotional distress ---

Page 26

2^nd paragraph --- At these moments the rational mind is swamped by the emotional. One way the prefrontal cortex acts as an efficient manager of emotion --- weighing reactions before acting --- is by dampening the signals for activation sent out by the amygdala and other limbic centers --- something like a parent who stops an impulsive child from grabbing and tells the child to ask properly (or wait) for what it wants instead.

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2^nd paragraph --- 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.

3^rd paragraph --- The emotional brain, quite separate from those cortical areas tapped by IQ tests, controls rage and compassion alike. These emotional circuits are sculpted by experience throughout childhood --- and we leave those experiences utterly to chance at our peril.

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4^th paragraph --- The emotions, then, matter for rationality. In the dance of feeling and thought the emotional faculty guides our moment-to-moment decisions, working hand-in-hand with the rational mind, enabling --- or disabling --- thought itself. Likewise, the thinking brain plays an executive role in our emotions --- except in those moments when emotions surge out of control and the emotional brain runs rampant.

5^th paragraph --- 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. Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence. Ordinarily the complementarity (sic) of limbic system and neocortex, amygdala, and prefrontal lobes, means each is a full partner in mental life. When these partners interact well, emotional intelligence rises --- as does intellectual ability.

Chapter 3 --- When Smart is Dumb

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1^st paragraph --- Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passion and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.

3^rd paragraph --- As one observer notes, “The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.”

5^th paragraph --- And while  there are those who argue that IQ cannot be changed much by experience or education, I will show in Part Five that the crucial emotional competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children --- if we bother to teach them.

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5^th paragraph --- “I think we’ve discovered the ‘dutiful’ --- people who know how to achieve in the system. But valedictorians struggle as surely as we all do. To know that a person is a valedictorian is to know only that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as measured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.

Page 36

2^nd paragraph --- Emotional life is a domain that, as surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires its own unique set of competencies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends: emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

3^rd paragraph --- People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.

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3^rd paragraph --- By encouraging children to develop a full range of the abilities that they will actually draw on to succeed, or use simply to be fulfilled in what they do, school becomes and education in life skills.

4^th paragraph --- We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

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2^nd paragraph --- Garner’s influential 1983 book Frames of Mind was a manifesto refuting the IQ view; it proposed that there was not just one, monolithic kind of intelligence that was crucial for life success, but rather a wide spectrum of intelligences, with seven key variables.

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4^th paragraph --- In another rendering, Garner noted that the core of interpersonal intelligence includes the “capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of other people.” In intrapersonal intelligence, the key to self-knowledge, he included “access to one’s own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide good behavior.”

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2^nd paragraph --- And it leaves yet to be plumbed both the sense in which there is intelligence in the emotions and the sense in which intelligence can be brought to the emotions.

4^th paragraph --- (1960s) Conventional wisdom among cognitive scientists held that intelligence entails a cold, hard-nosed processing of fact. It is hyper rational, rather like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, the archetype of dry information bytes unmuddied by feeling, embodying the idea that emotions have no place in intelligence and only muddy our picture of mental life.

5^th paragraph --- The cognitive scientists who embraced this view have been seduced by the computer as the operative model of mind, forgetting that, in reality, the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of neurochemicals, nothing like the sanitized, orderly silicone that has spawned the guiding metaphor for mind. 

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5^th paragraph --- the social cost of being emotionally tone-deaf, and the reason empathy kindles altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to the subtle social signals that indicate what others need or want. This is what makes them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales, and management.

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5^th paragraph --- The high IQ pure type (that is, setting aside emotional intelligence) is almost a caricature of the intellectual, adept in the realm of the mind but inept in the personal world. The profiles differ slightly for men and women. The high-IQ male is typified --- no surprise --- by a wide range of intellectual interests and abilities. He is ambitious and productive, predictable and dogged, and untroubled by concerns about himself. He also tends to be critical and condescending, fastidious and inhibited, uneasy with sexuality and sensual experience, unexpressive and detached, and emotionally bland and cold.

By contrast, men who are high in emotional intelligence are socially poised, outgoing and cheerful, not prone to fearfulness or worried rumination. They have a notable capacity for commitment to people or causes, for taking responsibility, and for having and ethical outlook; they are sympathetic and caring in their relationships. Their emotional life is rich, but appropriate; they are comfortable with themselves, others, and the social universe they live in.

Purely high-IQ women have the expected intellectual confidence, are fluent in expressing their thoughts, value intellectual matters, and have a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic interests. They also tend to be introspective, prone to anxiety, rumination, and guilt, and hesitate to express their anger openly (though they do so indirectly).

Emotionally intelligent women, by contrast, tend to be assertive and express their feelings directly, and tend to feel positive about themselves; life holds meaning for them. Like the emotionally intelligent men, they are outgoing and gregarious, and express their feeling appropriately (rather than, say, in outbursts they later regret); they adapt well to stress. Their social poise lets them easily reach out to new people; they are comfortable enough with themselves to be playful, spontaneous, and open to sensual experiences. Unlike the women purely high in IQ, they rarely feel anxious or guilty, or sink into rumination.

These portraits, of course, are extremes --- all of us mix IQ and emotional intelligence in varying degrees. But they offer an instructive look at what each of these dimensions adds separately to a person’s qualities. To the degree a person has both cognitive and emotional intelligence, these pictures merge. Still, of the two, emotional intelligence adds far more of the qualities that make us more fully human.

Chapter 4 --- Know Thyself

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5^th paragraph --- Psychologist use the rather ponderous term metacognition to refer to an awareness of thought processes, and metamood to mean awareness of one’s own emotions. I prefer the term self-awareness, in the sense of an ongoing attention to one’s internal states. In this self-reflexive awareness mind observes and investigates experience itself, including the emotions.

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2^nd paragraph --- Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.

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3^rd paragraph --- Self-aware: Aware of their moods as they are having them, these people understandably have some sophistication about their emotional lives. Their clarity about emotions may undergird other personality traits: they are autonomous and sure of their own boundaries, are in good psychological health, and tend to have a positive outlook on life. When they get into a bad mood, they don’t ruminate and obsess about it, and are able to get out of it sooner. In short, their mindfulness helps them mind their emotions.

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3^rd paragraph --- (stress response and attentional stance) Which of the (stress response) choices comes to us more naturally is a sign of our favored attentional stance under duress. (edit by Doyle)

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1^st paragraph --- enhanced emotional sensitivity means that for such people the least provocation unleashes emotional storms, whether heavenly or hellish, while those at the other extreme barely experience any feeling even under the most dire circumstances.

4^th paragraph --- alexithymia, from the Greek a- for “lack”, lexis for “word”, and thymos for “emotion”. Such people lack words for their feelings. Indeed, they seem to lack feelings altogether, although this may actually be because of their inability to express emotion rather than from and absence of emotion altogether.

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1^st paragraph --- “If you could put words to what you felt, it was yours.” The corollary, of course, is the alexithymic’s dilemma: having no words for feelings means not making the feelings your own.  

Page 53

3^rd paragraph --- While strong feelings can create havoc in reasoning, the lack of awareness of feeling can also be ruinous, especially in weighing the decisions on which our destiny largely depends: what career to pursue, whether to stay with a secure job or switch to one that is riskier but more interesting, whom to date or marry, where to live, which apartment to rent or house to buy --- and on and on through life. Such decisions cannot be made well through sheer rationality; they require gut feeling, and the emotional wisdom garnered through past experiences. Formal logic alone can never work as the basis for deciding whom to marry or trust or even what job to take; these are the realms where reason without feeling is blind.

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3^rd paragraph --- Some of us are naturally more attuned to the emotional mind’s special symbolic modes: metaphor and simile, along with poetry, song, and fable, are all cast in the language of the heart. So too are dreams and myths, in which loose associations determine the flow of narrative, abiding by the logic of the emotional mind. Those who have natural attunement to their own heart’s voice --- the language of emotion --- are sure to more adept at articulating its messages, whether as a novelist, songwriter, or psychotherapist.

Chapter 5 --- Passion’s Slaves

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1^st paragraph --- A sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the emotional storms that the buffeting of Fortune brings rather than being “passions slave”, has been praised as a virtue since the time of Plato. The ancient Greek word for it was sophrosyne, “care and intelligence in conducting one’s life; a tempered balance and wisdom”, as Page DuBois, a Greek scholar, translates it. The Romans and early Christian church called it temperantia, temperance, the restraining of emotional excess.

Page 57

1^st paragraph --- being happy all the time somehow suggests the blandness of those smiley-face badges that had a faddish moment in the 1970s. There is much to be said for the constructive contribution of suffering to creative and spiritual life; suffering can temper the soul.

2^nd paragraph --- People who have strong episodes of anger or depression can still feel a sense of well-being if they have a countervailing set of equally joyous or happy times. These studies also affirm the independence of emotional from academic intelligence, finding little or no relationship between grades or IQ and people’s emotional well-being.

Page 59

2^nd paragraph --- The problem, as Aristotle’s challenge to have only appropriate anger reminds us, is that more often than not our anger surges out of control. Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”

4^th paragraph --- anger is the most seductive of the negative emotions; the self-righteous inner monologue that propels it along fills the mind with the most convincing arguments for venting rage. Unlike sadness, anger is energizing, even exhilarating.

Page 60

2^nd paragraph --- Zillman that a universal trigger for anger is the sense of being endangered. Endangerment can be signaled not just by an outright physical threat but also, as is more often the case, by a symbolic threat to self-esteem or dignity: being treated unjustly or rudely, being insulted or demeaned, being frustrated in pursuing an important goal.

3^rd paragraph --- Meanwhile, another amygdala-driven ripple through the adrenocortical branch of the nervous system creates a general tonic background of action readiness, which lasts for much longer that the catecholamine energy surg. This generalized adrenal and cortical excitation can last for hours and even days, keeping the emotional brain in a special readiness for arousal, and becoming a foundation on which subsequent reactions can build with particular quickness. In general, the hair-trigger condition created by adrenocortical arousal explains why people are so much more prone to anger if they have already been provoked or slightly irritated by something else. Stress of all sorts creates adrenocortical arousal, lowering the threshold for what provokes anger.

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3^rd paragraph --- The power of understanding to deflate anger is clear from another of Zillman’s experiments, in which a rude assistant (a confederate) insulted and provoked volunteers who were riding an exercise bike. When the volunteers were given the chance to retaliate against the rude experimenter (again, by giving a bad evaluation they thought would be used in weighing his candidacy for a job) they did so with angry glee.

4^th paragraph --- But there is a specific window of opportunity for this de-escalation. Zillman finds it works well at moderate levels of anger; at high levels of rage it makes no difference because of what he calls “cognitive incapacitation” --- in other words, people can no longer think straight. When people were already highly enraged, they dismissed the mitigating information with “That’s just too bad!” or “the strongest vulgarities in the English language has to offer”, as Zillman put it with delicacy.

Page 64

2^nd paragraph --- (Redford Williams) to help hostile people, who are at higher risk for heart disease, to control their irritability. One of his recommendations is to use self-awareness to catch cynical or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and reappraised, though, as Zillmann found, this approach works better before anger has escalated to rage.

5^th paragraph --- “You can’t take any shit from anyone. You gotta yell back --- at least it makes you better!” Catharsis --- giving vent to rage --- is sometimes extolled as a way of handling anger. The popular theory holds that “it makes you feel better”. But, as Zillmann’s findings suggest, there is an argument against catharsis. ---psychologists started to test the effects of catharsis experimentally and , time after time, found that giving vent to anger did little or nothing to dispel it (though, because of the seductive nature of anger, it may feel satisfying).

Page 65

3^rd paragraph --- (Roemer and Borkovec) whose research on worrying --- the heart of all anxiety --- has raised the topic from neurotic’s art to science.

4^th paragraph --- The difficulty is with chronic, repetitive worries, the kind that recycle on and on and never get any nearer a positive solution. A close analysis of chronic worry suggests that it has all the attributes of a low-grade emotional hijacking: the worries seem to come from nowhere, are uncontrollable, generate a steady hum of anxiety, are impervious to reason, and lock the worrier into a single, inflexible view of the worrisome topic.

Page 66

3^rd paragraph – A woman treated for “generalized anxiety disorder” --- the psychiatric nomenclature for being a constant worrier --- responded to the requests to worry aloud for one minute this way: 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.

Page 68

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 ideas over and over. But at a neurological level there seems to be a cortical rigidity, a deficit in the emotional brain’s ability to respond flexibly to changing circumstances. In short, chronic worry works in some ways, but not in other, more consequential ones: it eases some anxiety, but never solves the problem.

Page 69

3^rd paragraph --- (mindfulness) 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 circuitry that can inhibit the limbic driving or worry; at the same time, actively inducing a relaxed state counters the signals for anxiety the emotional brain is sending throughout the body.

6^th paragraph --- 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 starting new endeavors --- at least for the time being. In short, it enforces a kind of reflective retreat from life’s busy pursuits, and leaves us in a suspended state to mourn the loss, mull over its meaning, and, finally, make the psychological adjustments and new plans that will allow our lives to continue.

Page 70

2^nd paragraph --- Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not.

3^rd paragraph --- In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold.

Page 71

2^nd paragraph --- 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 accompanied by any concrete course of action that might alleviate the problem.

5^th paragraph --- Women, Nolen-Hoeksma finds, are far more prone to ruminate when they are depressed than men. This, she proposes, may at least partly explain the fact that women are diagnosed with depression twice as often as are men. Of course, other factors may come into play, such as women being more open to disclosing their distress or having more in their lives to be depressed about. And men may drown their depression in alcoholism, for which their rate is about twice that of women.

Page 73

2^nd paragraph --- As Wenzlaff told me, “Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. People have what amounts to a set of bad-mood thoughts that come to mind more readily when they are feeling down. People who get depressed easily tend to create very strong networks of association between these thoughts, so that it is harder to suppress them once some kind of bad mood is evoked. Ironically, depressed people seem to use on depressing topic to get their minds off another, which only stirs more negative emotions.”

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3^rd paragraph --- 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 duty they’ve been wanting to clear up. By the same token, lifts to self-image also were cheering, even if only in the form of getting dressed up or putting on makeup.

5^th paragraph --- 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 se empathize with people in pain of their own. Throwing oneself into volunteer work --- coaching Little League, being a Big Brother, feeding the homeless --- was one of the most powerful mood-changers in Tice’s study. But it was also one of the rarest. Finally, at least some people are able to find relief from their melancholy in turning to a transcendent power. Tice told me, “Praying if you’re very religious, works for all moods, especial depression”.

Page 76

1^st paragraph --- In theory, children might learn to become unflappable in any of several ways. One might be as a strategy for surviving a troubling situation such as having an alcoholic parent in a family where the problem itself is denied. Another might be having a parent or parents who are themselves repressors and so pass on the example of perennial cheerfulness or a stiff upper lip in the face of disturbing feelings.

3^rd paragraph --- Once the right hemisphere recognizes that a word is upsetting, it transmits that information across the corpus callosum, the great divide between the brain's halves, to the speech center, and a word is spoken in response.

Page 77

2^nd paragraph --- Davidson's theory is that, in terms of brain activity, it is energy demanding work to experience distressing realities in a positive light. The increased physiological arousal may be due to the sustained attempt by the neural circuitry to maintain positive feelings or to suppress or inhibit any negative ones.  

3^rd paragraph --- In short, unflappableness is a kind of upbeat denial, a positive dissociation --- and, possibly, a clue to neural mechanisms at play in the more severe dissociative states that can occur in, say, post-traumatic stress disorder. When it is simply involved in equanimity, says Davidson, "it seems to be a successful strategy for emotional self-regulation" though with an unknown cost to self-awareness.

Chapter 6 --- The Master Aptitude

Page 78

3^rd paragraph --- convincing evidence of the devastating impact of emotional distress on mental clarity. I now see that my ordeal was most likely a testament to the power of the emotional brain to overpower, even paralyze, the thinking brain.

Page 79

2^nd paragraph --- Working memory is an executive function par excellence in mental life, making possible all other intellectual efforts, from speaking a sentence to tackling a knotty logical proposition. The prefrontal cortex executes working memory --- and, remember, is where feelings and emotions meet.

Page 80

2^nd paragraph --- (Stanford Dorenbusch) "While most American parents are willing to accept a child's weak areas and emphasize the strengths, for Asians, the attitude is that if you're not doing well, the answer is to study later at night, and if you still don't do well, to get up and study earlier in the morning. They 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.

Page 81 ---

1^st paragraph --- (Marshmallow Test) It is a challenge sure to try the soul of any four-year-old, a microcosm of the eternal battle between impulse and restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control, 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.

5^th paragraph --- Those who had resisted temptation at four were now, as adolescents, more socially competent: personally effective, self-assertive, and better able to cope with the frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze, or regress under stress, or become rattled and disorganized when pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of giving up 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 able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals.

Page 83

2^nd paragraph --- His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

6^th paragraph --- Anxiety undermines the intellect. In a complex, intellectually demanding, and high-pressure task such as that of air traffic controllers, for example, having chronically high anxiety is an almost sure predictor that a person will eventually fail in training or in the field. The anxious are more likely to fail even given superior scores on intelligence tests, as a study of 1,790 students in training for air traffic control posts discovered. Anxiety also sabotages academic performance of all kinds:

Page 84

3^rd paragraph --- there are two kinds of anxious students: those whose anxiety undoes their academic performance, and those who are able to do well despite the stress --- or, perhaps, because of it. 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 sabotage success in others. For people who are too anxious, like Alpert, the pretest apprehension interferes with the clear thinking and memory necessary to study effectively, while during the test it disrupts the mental clarity essential for doing well.

4^th paragraph --- The mental resources expended on one cognitive task --- the worrying --- simply detract from the resources available for processing other information; if we are preoccupied by worries that we're going to flunk the test we're taking, we have that much less attention to expend on figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict.

Page 85

2^nd paragraph --- (hypomania) A mildly elated state --- hypomania, as it is technically called --- seems optimal for writers and others in creative callings that demand fluidity and imaginative diversity of thought; it is somewhere toward the peak of that inverted U. But let that euphoria get out of control to become outright mania, as in the mood swings of manic-depressives, and the agitation undermines the ability to think cohesively enough to write well, even though ideas flow freely --- indeed, much too freely to pursue any one of them far enough to produce a finished product. 

Page 86

3^rd paragraph --- 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, but had far less determination to pursue them. And, understandably, students with low levels of hope gave up on both counts, demoralized.

Page 87

1^st paragraph --- Pandora lifted the lid to peek in, letting loose in the world the grand afflictions --- disease, malaise, madness. But a compassionate god let her close the box just in time to capture the one antidote that makes life's misery bearable: hope.

2^nd paragraph --- Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out right. Snyder defines it with more specificity as "believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be."

Page 88

2^nd paragraph --- Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expectation that, in 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 in life (providing, of course, it is a realistic optimism; a too-naive optimism can be disastrous).

4^th paragraph --- (Seligman) "What's missing in tests of ability is motivation. What you need to know about someone is whether they will keep going when things get frustrating. My hunch is that for a given level of intelligence, your actual achievement is a function not just of talent, but also of the capacity to stand defeat."

Page 89

5^th paragraph --- Optimism and hope --- like helplessness and despair --- can be learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the events on one's life and can meet challenges as they come up.  Developing a competency of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding challenges.

Page 90

2^nd paragraph --- Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: "Peoples beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed 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."

5^th paragraph --- (The Zone) Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow.

Page 94

1^st paragraph --- (learning and flow) For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for the low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often than not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities.

2^nd paragraph --- 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 the inside rather than by threat or promise of reward. "We should use kid's positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies."

Page 95

1^st paragraph --- initial passion can be the seed for high levels of attainment, as the child comes to realize that pursuing the field --- whether it be dance, math, or music --- is a source of the joy of flow. And since it takes pushing the limits of one's ability to sustain flow, that becomes a prime motivator for getting better and better; it makes the child happy. This, of course, is a more positive model of learning and education than most of us encountered in school.

Chapter 7 --- The Roots of Empathy

Page 96

1^st paragraph --- Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings.

Page 97

2^nd paragraph --- the benefits of being able to read feelings from non-verbal cues included being better adjusted emotionally, more popular, more outgoing, and --- perhaps not surprisingly --- more sensitive.

3^rd paragraph --- In tests with 1,011 children, those who showed and aptitude for reading feelings nonverbally were among the most popular in their schools, the most emotionally stable. They also did better in school, even though, on average, their IQs were not higher than those of children who were less skilled at reading nonverbal messages --- suggesting that mastering this empathic ability smoothes the way for classroom effectiveness (or simply makes the teachers like them more).

Page 98

3^rd paragraph --- 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 about it.

Page 99

3^rd paragraph --- Children, they found, were more empathetic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: "Look how sad you've made her feel" instead of "That was naughty." They found too that children's empathy is also shaped by seeing how others react when someone else is distressed; by imitating that they see, children develop a repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping other people who are distressed.

Page 100

2^nd paragraph --- (Daniel Stern) countless repeated moments of attunement or misattunement between parent and child shape the emotional expectations adults bring to their close relationships --- perhaps far more than the more dramatic events of childhood.

Page 101

3^rd paragraph --- Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and child takes a tremendous emotional toll on the child. When a parent consistently fails to show any empathy with a particular range of emotion in the child --- joys, tears, needing to cuddle --- the child begins to avoid expressing, and perhaps even feeling, those same emotions. In this way, presumably, entire ranges of emotion can begin to be obliterated from the repertoire for intimate relations, especially if through childhood those feelings continue to be covertly or overtly discouraged.

5^th paragraph --- (Stern) But there is hope in "reparative" relationships: "Relationships throughout life --- with friends or relatives, for example, or in psychotherapy --- continually reshape your working model of relationships. An imbalance at one point can be corrected later; it's an ongoing, lifelong process."

Page 102

2^nd paragraph --- The lifetime emotional costs of lack of attunement in childhood can be great --- and not just for the child. A study of criminals who 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.

3^rd paragraph --- While emotional neglect seems to dull empathy, there is a paradoxical result from intense, sustained emotional abuse, including cruel, sadistic threats, humiliations, and plain meanness. Children who endure such abuse can become hyper alert to the emotions of those around them, in what amounts to a post-traumatic vigilance to cues that have signaled threat. Such an obsessive preoccupation with the feelings of others is typical of psychologically abused children who in adulthood suffer the mercurial, intense emotional ups and downs that are sometimes diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder". Many such people are gifted at sensing what others around them are feeling and it is quite common for them to report having suffered emotional abuse in childhood.

Page 103

4^th paragraph --- But the 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.

Page 104

6^th paragraph --- "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" is one of the most famous lines in English literature. John Donne's sentiment 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.

Page 105

4^th paragraph --- By late childhood the most advanced level of empathy emerges, as children are also able to understand distress beyond the immediate situation, and to see that someone's condition or station in life may be a source of chronic distress. At this point, they can feel for the plight of an entire group, such as the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast. That understanding, in adolescence, can buttress moral convictions centered on wanting to alleviate misfortune and injustice.

Page 106

3^rd paragraph --- for physically abusive parents, "This is just good discipline." The self-justifications are all collected from what people being treated for these problems say they have told themselves as they were brutalizing their victims, or preparing to do so.

Page 108

5^th paragraph --- Of course, in behavior as complex as crime, there are many plausible explanations that do not evoke a biological basis. One might be that a perverse kind of emotional skill --- intimidating other people --- has survival value in violent neighborhoods, as might turning to crime; in these cases too much empathy might be counterproductive. Indeed, and opportunistic lack of empathy may be a "virtue" in many roles in life, from "bad cop" police interrogator to corporate raider.

Chapter 8 --- The Social Arts

Page 112

2^nd paragraph --- In his urgent attempts to soothe his brother, Jay is able to draw on a large repertoire of tactics, ranging from a simple plea, to seeking an ally in his mother (no help, she) to physically comforting him, to lending a helping hand, to distraction, threats, and direct commands. No doubt Jay relies on an arsenal that has been tried with him in his own moments of distress.

3^rd paragraph --- Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core of the art of handling relationships.

5^th paragraph --- These are the social competencies that make for effectiveness in dealings with others; deficits here lead to ineptness in the social world or repeated 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 relationships, to persuade and influence, to put others at ease.

Page 114

2^nd paragraph --- The rule being learned by the child is something like, "Mask your feelings when they will hurt someone you love; substitute a phony, but less hurtful feeling instead." Such rules for expressing emotions are more than part of the lexicon of social propriety; they dictate how our own feelings impact on everyone else. To follow these rules is to have optimal impact; to do so poorly is to foment emotional havoc.

6^th paragraph --- Most emotional contagion is far more subtle, part of a tacit exchange that 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.

Page 114

2^nd paragraph --- We are all part of each other's tool kit for emotional change, for better or for worse.

Page 116

5^th paragraph --- 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 while interacting. In general, a high level of synchrony in an interaction means the people involved like each other.

Page 117

3^rd paragraph --- Setting the emotional tone of an interaction is, in a sense, a sign of dominance at a deep and intimate level: it means driving the emotional state of the other person.

Page 118

6^th paragraph (bulleted list) --- Social analysis --- being able to detect and have insights about people's feelings, motives, and concerns. This knowledge of how others feel can lead to an easy intimacy or sense of rapport. At its best, this ability makes one a competent counselor --- or, if combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or dramatist.

7^th paragraph --- Taken together, these skills are the stuff of interpersonal polish, the neccessary ingredients for charm, social success, even charisma.

Page 119

3^rd paragraph --- (Mark Snyder) --- social chameleons, champions at making a good impression. Their social credo might well be a remark by W.H. Auden, who said that his private image of himself "is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me." That trade-off can be made if social skills outstrip the ability to know and honor one's own feelings: 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 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.

Page 120

4^th paragraph --- all his life he had felt socially at ease only when he was with his older brother, who somehow helped ease things for him. But once he left home, his ineptitude was overwhelming; he was socially paralyzed.

Page 121

4^th paragraph (dyssemia, from the Greek dys- for "difficulty" and semes for "signal" for what amounts to a learning disability in the realm of nonverbal messages; about one-in-ten children has one or more problems in this realm.) --- 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 themselves all the time, without the least interest in anyone else, and who ignore tentative attempts to refocus on another topic; people who intrude or ask "nosy" questions. These derailments of a smooth social trajectory all bespeak a deficit in the rudimentary building blocks of interaction.

Page 122

1^st paragraph --- If children to poorly in language, people assume they are not very bright or poorly educated; but when they do poorly in the nonverbal rules of interaction, people --- especially playmates --- see them as "strange", and avoid them. These are the children who don't know how to join a game gracefully, who touch others in ways that make for discomfort rather than camaraderie --- in short, who are "off". They are children who have failed to master the silent language of emotion, and who unwittingly send messages that cause uneasiness.

2^nd paragraph --- Such kids end up feeling no sense of control over how other people treat them, that their actions have no impact on what happens to them. It leaves them feeling powerless, depressed, and apathetic.

Page 123

6^th paragraph --- 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 abruptly or too soon, or offering their own opinions, or simply disagreeing with the others right way --- all apparent attempts to draw attention to themselves. Paradoxically, this results in their being ignored or rejected.

Page 124

3^rd paragraph --- 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 own helicopters or planes and, literally and figuratively, fly away from each other."  

Page 125

2^nd paragraph --- "Aikido is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it."

Chapter 9 --- Intimate Enemies

Page 129

4^th paragraph --- But if social pressures are no longer the glue that holds a marriage together, then the emotional forces between wife and husband are that much more crucial if their union is to survive.

Page 130

3^rd paragraph --- One study of children's friendships found that three-year-olds say about half their friends are of the opposite sex; for five-year-olds it's about 20 percent, and by age seven almost no boys or girls say they have a best friend of the opposite sex. These separate social universes intersect little until teenagers start dating.

Page 131

2^nd paragraph (Brody and Hall) --- because girls develop facility with language more quickly than do boys, this leads them to be more experienced at articulating their feelings and more skilled than boys at using words to explore and substitute for emotional reactions such as physical fights; in contrast, they note, "boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may become largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in themselves and in others."

3^rd paragraph --- This is just one of many ways that boys --- and later, men --- are less sophisticated than the opposite sex in the byways of emotional life.

4^th paragraph (Carol Gilligan) --- 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 boys are threatened by anything that might challenge their independence, while girls are more threatened by a rupture in their relationships.

Page 132

2^nd paragraph --- with girls becoming "adept at reading both verbal and nonverbal emotional signals, at expressing and communicating their feelings," and boys becoming adept at "minimizing emotions having to do with vulnerability, guilt, fear and hurt."

3^rd paragraph --- All of this means that, in general, women come into a marriage groomed for the role of emotional manager, while men arrive with much less appreciation of the importance of this task for helping a relationship to survive. Indeed, the most important element for women --- but not for men --- in satisfaction with their relationship reported in a study of 264 couples was the sense that the couple has "good communication".

Page 133

3^rd paragraph --- Rather, it is how a couple discusses such sore points that matters more for the fate of their marriage. Simply having 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 shall see, these rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both partners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence.

Page 135

3^rd paragraph --- The differences between complaints and personal criticisms are simple. In a complaint, a wife states specifically what is upsetting her, and criticizes her husband's action, not her husband, saying how it made her feel: "When you forgot to pick up my clothes at the cleaner's it made me feel like you don't care about me." It is an expression of basic emotional intelligence: assertive, not belligerent or passive.

Page 136

3^rd paragraph --- Stonewalling is the ultimate defense. The stonewaller just goes blank, in effect withdrawing from the conversation by responding with a stony expression and silence. Stonewalling sends a powerful, 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 criticism and contempt. As a habitual response stonewalling is devastating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all possibility of working out disagreements.

Page 137

3^rd paragraph (Aaron Beck-the founder of cognitive therapy) --- "automatic thoughts" --- fleeting, background assumptions about oneself and the people in one's life that reflect our deepest emotional attitudes. For Melanie the background thought is something like, "He's always bullying me with his anger." For Martin, the key thought is, "She has no right to treat me like this." Melanie feels like an innocent victim in their marriage, and Martin feels righteous indignation at what he feels is unjust treatment.

6^th paragraph --- Partners who are free of such distress-triggering views can entertain a more benign interpretation of what is going on in the same situations, and so are less likely to have such a hijacking, or if they do, tend to recover from it more readily.

Page 138

2^nd paragraph --- Partners who take the pessimistic stance are extremely prone to emotional hijackings; they get angry, hurt, or otherwise distressed by things their spouses do, and they stay disturbed once the episode begins. Their internal distress and pessimistic attitude, of course, makes it far more likely they will resort to criticism and contempt in confronting the partner, which in turn heightens the likelihood of defensiveness and stonewalling.

Page 139

3^rd paragraph --- The problem for a marriage begins when one or another spouse feels flooded almost continually. Then the partner feels overwhelmed by the other partner, is always on guard for an emotional assault or injustice, becomes hyper vigilant for any sign of attack,  insult, or grievance, and is sure to overreact to even the least sign.

Page 140

2^nd paragraph --- In this trajectory toward divorce the tragic consequences of deficits in emotional competences are self-evident. A couple gets caught in the reverberating cycle of criticism and contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling, distressing thoughts and emotional flooding, the cycle itself reflects a disintegration of emotional self-awareness and self-control, of empathy and the abilities to soothe each other and oneself.

4^th paragraph -- Husbands are prone to flooding at a lower intensity of negativity than are their wives; more men than women react to their spouse's criticism with flooding. Once flooded, husbands secrete more adrenaline into their bloodstreams, and the adrenaline flow is triggered by lower levels of negativity on their wife's part; it takes husbands longer to recover physiologically from flooding. The suggests the possibility that the stoic, Clint Eastwood type of male imperturbability may represent a defense against feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

Page 141

2^nd paragraph --- Just as men are far more likely to be stonewallers, so the women are more likely to criticize their husbands. This asymmetry arises as a result of wives pursuing their role as emotional managers. As they try to bring up and resolve disagreements and grievances, their husbands are more reluctant in what are bound to be heated discussions. As the wife sees her husband withdraw from engagement, she ups the volume and intensity of her complaint, starting to criticize him. As he becomes defensive or stonewalls in return, she feels frustrated and angry, and so adds contempt to underscore the strength of her frustration.

4^th paragraph --- But husbands need to realize that anger or discontent is not synonymous with personal attack --- their wives' emotions are simply underliners, emphasizing the strengths of her feelings about the matter.

Page 142

3^rd paragraph --- Since a major problem for men is that their wives are too intense in voicing complaints, wives need to make a purposeful effort to be careful not to attack their husbands --- to complain about what they did, but not criticize them as a person or express contempt.

Page 143

1^st paragraph --- But these couples go one important step further: they show each other that they are being listened to. Since feeling heard is often exactly what the aggrieved partner really is after, emotionally an act of empathy is a masterly tension reducer.

3^rd paragraph --- A handful of emotional competences --- mainly being able to calm down (and calm your partner), empathy, and listening well --- can make it more likely a couple will settle their disagreements effectively. These make possible healthy disagreements, the "good fights" that allow a marriage to flourish and which overcome the negativities that, if left to grow, can destroy a marriage.

4^th paragraph --- Many or most emotional responses triggered so easily in marriage have been sculpted since childhood, first learned in our most intimate relationships or modeled for us by our parents, and then brought to marriage fully formed. And so we are primed for certain emotional habits --- overreacting to perceived slights, say, or shutting down at the first sign of a confrontation --- even though we may have sworn that we would not act like our parents.

Page 145

3^rd paragraph --- Defensiveness in a listener takes the form of ignoring or immediately rebutting the spouse's complaint, reacting to it as though it were an attack rather than an attempt to change behavior. Of course, in an argument what one spouse says is often in the form of an attack, or is said with such strong negativity that it is hard to hear anything other than an attack.

Page 146

2^nd paragraph --- The effect of being mirrored accurately is not just feeling understood, but having the added sense of being in emotional attunement. That in itself can sometimes disarm an imminent attack, and goes far toward keeping discussions of grievances from escalating into fights.

3^rd paragraph (Haim Ginott) --- the best formula for a complaint is "XYZ": "When you did X, it made me feel Y, and I'd rather you did Z instead." For example: When you didn't call to tell me you were going to be late for our dinner appointment, I felt unappreciated and angry. I wish you'd call to let me know you'll be late" instead of "You're a thoughtless, self-centered bastard," which is how the issue is all too often put in couples' fights.

4^th paragraph --- Validation, of course, is a way to help soothe your spouse, or to build up emotional capital in the form of positive feelings.

Chapter 10 --- Managing with Heart

Page 148

5^th paragraph --- the destructive effects of miserable morale, intimidated workers, or arrogant bosses --- or any of the dozens of other permutations of emotional deficiencies in the workplace --- can go largely unnoticed by those outside the immediate scene. But the costs can be read in signs such as decreased productivity, and increase in missed deadlines, mistakes and mishaps, and an exodus of employees to more congenial settings. There is, inevitably, a cost to the bottom line from low levels of emotional intelligence on the job. When it is rampant, companies can crash and burn.

Page 149

2^nd paragraph --- a new competitive reality is putting emotional intelligence at a premium in the workplace and in the marketplace. As Shoshona Zuboff, a psychologist at Harvard Business School, pointed out to me, "corporations have gone through a radical revolution within this century, and with this has come a corresponding transformation of the emotional landscape. There was a long period of managerial domination of the corporate hierarchy when the manipulative, jungle-fighter boss was rewarded. But that rigid hierarchy started breaking down in the 1980s under the twin pressures of globalization and information technology. The jungle fighter symbolizes where the corporation has been; the virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future."

3^rd paragraph --- When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly. As one management consultant put it, "Stress makes people stupid."

Page 151

1^st paragraph --- Without feedback people are in the dark; they have no idea where they stand with their boss, with their peers, or in terms of what is expected of them, and any problems will only get worse as time passes.

3^rd paragraph (Worst way to motivate) --- there are ad hominem charges with dollops of disgust, sarcasm, and contempt; both give rise to defensiveness and dodging of responsibility and, finally, to stonewalling or the embittered passive resistance that comes from feeling unfairly treated.

Page 152

1^st paragraph --- these embittered employees would not doubt have been shown to be thinking the thoughts of innocent victimhood or righteous indignation typical of husbands or wives who feel unfairly attacked. --- And yet the managers were only further annoyed and provoked by these responses, suggesting the beginning of a cycle that, in the business world, ends in the employee quitting or being fired --- the business equivalent of a divorce.

3^rd paragraph --- The harsh criticism made those who received it so demoralized that they no longer tried as hard at their work and, perhaps most damaging, said they no longer felt capable of doing well. The personal attack was devastating to their morale.

Page 153

3^rd paragraph --- An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done.

Page 154

1^st paragraph --- Focus on the specifics, saying what the person did well, what was done poorly, and how it could be changed. Don't beat around the bush or be oblique or evasive; it will muddy the real message. This, of course, is akin to the advice t couples about the "XYZ" statement of a grievance: say exactly what the problem is, what's wrong with it or how it makes you feel, and what could be changed.

5^th paragraph (bulleted list - Levinson) --- Be sensitive. This is a call for empathy, for being attuned to the impact of what you say and how you say it on the person at the receiving end. Managers who have little empathy, Levinson points out, are most prone to giving feedback in a hurtful fashion, such as the withering put-down. The net effect of such criticism is destructive: instead of opening the way for a corrective, it creates an emotional backlash of resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and distance.

6^th paragraph --- Levinson also offers some emotional counsel for those at the receiving end of criticism. One is to see the criticism as valuable information about how to do better, not as a personal attack. Another is to watch for the impulse toward defensiveness instead of taking responsibility. And, if it gets too upsetting, ask to resume the meeting later, after a period to absorb the difficult message and cool down a bit.

Page 155

5^th paragraph --- with the growing realization by managers that even if people bring prejudices to work with them, they must learn to act as though they have none.

Page 156

4^th paragraph --- Prejudices are a kind of emotional learning that occurs early in life, making these reactions especially hard to eradicate entirely, even in people who as adults feel it is wrong to hold them. "The emotions of prejudice are formed in childhood, while the beliefs that are used to justify it come later.", explained Thomas Pettigrew, a social scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has studied prejudice for decades.

Page 159

2^nd paragraph --- What can make a difference, though, is sustained camaraderie and daily efforts toward a common goal by people of different backgrounds. -when students have worked to together as equals to attain a common goal, as on sports teams or in bands, their stereotypes break down --- as can happen naturally in the workplace, when people work together as peers over the years.

Page 160

3^rd paragraph --- Whenever people come together to collaborate, whether it be in an executive planning meeting or as a team working toward a shared product, there is a very real sense in which they have a group IQ, the sum total of the talents and skills of all those involved. And how well they accomplish their task will be determined by how high that IQ is. The single most important element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional intelligence. The key to a high group IQ is social harmony.

Page 162

1^st paragraph --- But after detailed interviews, the critical differences emerged in the internal and interpersonal strategies "stars" used to get their work done. One of the most important turned out to be a rapport with a network of key people. Things go more smoothly for the standouts because they put time into cultivating good relationships with people whose services might be needed in a crunch as part of an instant ad hoc team to solve a problem or handle a crisis.

4^th paragraph --- Indeed, a more sophisticated view of informal networks shows that there are at least three varieties: communications webs --- who talks to whom; expertise networks --- based on which people are turned to for advice, and --- trust networks.

Page 163

1^st paragraph --- Beyond a mastery of these essential networks, other forms of organizational savvy the Bell Labs stars had mastered included effectively coordinating their efforts in teamwork; being leaders in building consensus, being able to see things from the perspective of others, such as customers or others on a work team; persuasiveness; and promoting cooperation while avoiding conflicts. While all of these rely on social skills, the stars also displayed another kind of knack: taking initiative --- being self-motivated enough to take on responsibilities above and beyond their stated job --- and self-management in the sense of regulating their time and work commitments as well. All such skills, of course, are aspects of emotional intelligence.

Chapter 11 --- Mind and Medicine

Page 164

4^th paragraph --- In the land of the sick, emotions reign supreme, fear is a thought away. We can be so emotionally fragile while we are ailing because our mental well-being is based in part on the illusion of invulnerability. Sickness --- especially a severe illness --- bursts that illusion, attacking the premise that our private world is safe and secure. Suddenly we feel week, helpless, and vulnerable.

Page 165

2^nd paragraph --- But the trend is toward a professional universe in which institutional imperatives can leave medical staff oblivious to the vulnerabilities of patients,  or feeling too pressed to do anything about them. With the hard realities of a medical system increasingly timed by accountants, things seem to be getting worse.

4^th paragraph --- Historically, medicine in a modern society has defined its mission in terms of curing disease --- the medical disorder --- while overlooking the illness --- the patient's experience of disease. Patients, by going along with this view of their problem, join a quiet conspiracy to ignore how they are reacting emotionally to their medical problems --- or to dismiss those reactions as irrelevant to the course of the problem itself. That attitude is reinforced by a medical model that dismisses entirely the idea that mind influences body in any consequential way.

Page 166

5^th paragraph --- The immune system is the "body's brain", as neuroscientist Francisco Varela, at Paris's Ecole Polytechnique, puts it, defining the body's own sense of self --- of what belongs within it and what does not. Immune cells travel in the bloodstream throughout the entire body, contacting virtually every other cell. Those cells they recognize they leave alone; those they fail to recognize, they attack. The attack either defends us against viruses, bacteria, and cancer or, if the immune cells misidentify some of the body's own cells, creates an autoimmune disease such as allergy, or lupus.

Page 167

3^rd paragraph (David Felten) --- emotions have a powerful effect on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure levels.

5^th paragraph --- In short, the nervous system not only connects to the immune system, but is essential for proper immune function.

Page 168

1^st paragraph --- otherwise known as adrenaline and noradrenalin, cortisol and prolactin, and the natural opiates beta-endorphin and enkephalin are all released during stress arousal. Each has a strong impact on immune cells. -But if stress is constant and intense, that suppression may become long-lasting.   

2^nd paragraph --- Microbiologists and other scientists are finding more and more such connections between the brain and the cardiovascular and immune systems --- having first had to accept the once-radical notion that they exist at all.

Page 169

1^st paragraph --- People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double the risk of disease --- including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers, and heart disease (each representative of major, broad categories of disease). This order of magnitude makes distressing emotions as toxic a risk factor as, say, smoking or high cholesterol are for heart disease --- in others words, a major threat to health.

4^th paragraph --- suffered a first heart attack, and the question was whether anger might have a significant impact of some kind on their heart function. The effect was striking: while the patients recounted incidents that made them mad, the pumping efficiency of their hearts dropped by five percentage points. Some of the patients showed a drop in pumping efficiency of 7 percent or greater --- a range that cardiologists regard as a sign of a myocardial ischemia, an dangerous drop in blood flow to the heart itself.

5^th paragraph --- anger seems to be the one emotion that does the most harm to the heart.

Page 170

3^rd paragraph --- being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of dying young than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

4^th paragraph --- If your heart rate is faster and blood pressure higher because you're habitually angry, then over thirty years that may lead to a faster build-up of plaque, and so lead to coronary artery disease.

Page 171

1^st paragraph --- The Yale researchers point out that it may not be anger alone that heightens the risk of death from heart disease, but rather intense negative emotionality of any kind that regularly sends surges of stress hormones through the body.

Page 171

3^rd paragraph --- whether anger is expressed or not is less important than whether it is chronic. An occasional display of hostility is not dangerous to health; the problem arises when hostility becomes so constant as to define and antagonistic personal style --- one marked by repeated feelings of mistrust and cynicism and the propensity to snide comments and put-downs, as well as more obvious bouts of temper and rage.

Page 172

2^nd paragraph --- As Williams told me, "The antidote to hostility is to develop a more trusting heart. All it takes is the right motivation. When people see that their hostility can lead to an early grave, they are ready to try."

4^th paragraph --- Anxiety --- the distress evoked by life's pressures --- is perhaps the emotion with the greatest weight of scientific evidence connecting it to the onset of sickness and course of recovery. When anxiety helps us to deal with some danger (a presumed utility in evolution), then it has served us well. But in modern life anxiety is more often out of proportion and out of place --- distress comes in the face of situations that we must life with or that are conjured by the mind, not real dangers we need to confront. Repeated bouts of anxiety signal high levels of stress.

5^th paragraph --- In a 1993 review in the Archives of Internal Medicine of extensive research on the stress-disease link, Yale psychologist Bruce McEwen noted a broad spectrum of effects: compromising immune function to the point it can speed the metastasis of cancer; increasing the vulnerability to viral infections; exacerbating plaque formation leading to atherosclerosis and blood clotting leading to myocardial infarction; accelerating the onset of Type I diabetes and the course of Type II diabetes; and worsening or triggering an asthma attack.

Page 173

1^st paragraph --- In general, says McEwen, "evidence is mounting that the nervous system is subject to 'wear and tear' as a result of stressful experiences."

Page 174

2^nd paragraph --- The toll of anxiety is not just that it lowers the immune response; other research is showing adverse effects on the cardiovascular system. While chronic hostility and repeated episodes of anger seem to put men at greatest risk for heart disease, the more deadly emotion in women may be anxiety and fear.

Page 175

3^rd paragraph --- The evidence is mounting that for patients with serious disease who are depressed, it would pay medically to treat their depression too.

Page 176

2^nd paragraph --- Heart disease too seems to be exacerbated by depression. In a study of 2,832 middle-aged men and women tracked for twelve years, those who felt a sense of nagging despair and hopelessness had a heightened rate of death from heart disease. And for the 3 percent or so who were most severely depressed, the death rate from heart disease, compared with those with no feelings of depression, was four times greater.

Page 177

3^rd paragraph --- Their mental outlook proved to be a better predictor of survival than any medical risk factor, including the amount of damage to the heart in the first attack, artery blockage, cholesterol level, or blood pressure.

Page 178

2^nd paragraph --- Add the sounds of silence to the list of emotional risks to health --- and close emotional ties to the list of protective factors. Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation --- the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have personal contact --- doubles the chances of sickness or death.

4^th paragraph --- Rather, it is the subjective sense of being cut off from people and having no one to turn to that is the medical risk. This finding is ominous in light of the increasing isolation bred by solitary TV-watching and the falling away of social habits such as clubs and visits in modern urban societies---

Page 179

4^th paragraph --- Yet among men who said they had a dependable web of intimacy --- a wife, close friends, and the like --- there was no relationship whatever between high stress levels and death rate. Having people to turn to and talk with, people who could offer solace, help, and suggestions, protected them from the deadly impact of life's rigors and trauma.

5^th paragraph --- "It's the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health."

Page 182

3^rd paragraph --- Moments when patients face surgery of invasive and painful tests are fraught with anxiety --- and are a prime opportunity to deal with the emotional dimension. Some hospitals have developed presurgery instructions for patients that help them assuage their fears and handle their discomforts --- for example, by teaching patients relaxation techniques, answering their questions well in advance of the surgery, and telling them several days ahead of surgery precisely what they are likely to experience during their recovery. The result: patients recover from surgery an average of two to three days sooner.

Page 183

3^rd paragraph --- Finally, there is the added medical value of an empathic physician or nurse, attuned to patients, able to listen and be heard. This means fostering "relationship-centered care", recognizing that the relationship between physician and patient is itself a factor of significance. Such relationships would be fostered more readily if medical education included some basic tools of emotional intelligence, especially self-awareness and the arts of empathy and listening.

5^th paragraph --- Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings --- anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness --- is a form of disease prevention.

Page 184

3^rd paragraph --- But the changing culture of medicine itself, as it becomes more responsive to the imperatives of business, is making such care increasingly difficult to find.

6^th paragraph (Journal of the American Medical Association) --- depression increases fivefold the likelihood of dying after being treated for a heart attack, notes: "The clear demonstration that psychological factors like depression and social isolation distinguish the coronary heart disease patients at highest risk means it would be unethical not to start trying to treat these factors."

Page 185

2^nd paragraph --- What is now the exception could --- and should --- be part of the mainstream, so that a more caring medicine is available to us all. At the least it would make medicine more humane. And, for some, it could speed the course of recovery. "Compassion", as one patient put it in an open letter to his surgeon, "is not mere hand holding. It is good medicine."

Chapter 12 --- The Family Crucible

Page 189

9^th paragraph --- Family life is our first school for emotional learning; in this intimate cauldron we learn how to feel about ourselves and how others will react to our feeling; how to think about these feelings and what choices we have in reacting; how to read and express hopes and fears. This emotional schooling operates not just through the thing that parents say and do directly to children, but also in the models they offer for handling their own feelings and those that pass between husband and wife. Some parents are gifted emotional teachers, others atrocious.

Page 190

4^th paragraph --- overbearing, losing patience with their child’s ineptness, raising their voices in disgust or exasperation, some even putting their child down as “stupid” --- in short, falling prey to the same tendencies toward contempt and disgust that eat away at a marriage. Others, however, were patient with their child’s errors, helping the child figure the game out in his or her own way rather than imposing the parent’s will.

Page 192

1^st paragraph --- The children are also more relaxed biologically, with lower levels of stress hormones and other physiological indicators of emotional arousal (a pattern that, if sustained through life, might well augur better physical health, as we saw in Chapter 11).

Finally, the benefits are cognitive; these children can pay attention better, and so are more effective learners. Holding IQ constant, the five-year-olds whose parents were good coaches had higher achievement scores in math and reading when they reached third grade (a powerful argument for teaching emotional skills to help children prepare for learning as well as for life).

4^th paragraph --- Babies like these have gotten a goodly dose of approval and encouragement from the adults in their lives; they expect to succeed in life’s little challenges. By contrast, babies who come from homes too bleak, chaotic, or neglectful go about the same small task in a way that signals they already expect to fail.

Page 193

4^th paragraph --- Almost all students who do poorly in school, says the report, lack one or more of these elements of emotional intelligence (regardless of whether they also have cognitive difficulties such as learning disabilities).

The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity --- all related to emotional intelligence. The are: Confidence, Curiosity, Intentionality, Self-control, Relatedness, Capacity to communicate, and Cooperativeness. (See page 194)

Page 195

2^nd paragraph --- But to the degree that one or the other is typical of how parents treat a child over the years, basic emotional lessons will be imparted about how secure a child is in the world, how effective he feels, and how dependable others are. Erik Erikson put it in terms of whether a child comes to feel a “basic trust” or a basic mistrust.

Page 197

2^nd paragraph --- if their parents were in a bad mood, they would be severely punished; if their parents were in a good mood, they could get away with mayhem in the home. Thus punishment came not so much because of what a child had done, but by virtue of how the parent felt. This is a recipe for feelings of worthlessness and helplessness, and for the sense that threats are everywhere and may strike at any time. Seen in the light of the home life that spawns it, such children’s combative and defiant posture toward the world at large makes a certain sense, unfortunate though it remains. What is disheartening is how early these dispiriting lessons can be learned, and how grim the costs for a child’s emotional can be.

Page 198

4^th paragraph --- These children, of course, treat others as they themselves have been treated. And the callousness of these abused children is simply a more extreme version of that seen in children whose parents are critical, threatening, and harsh in their punishments. Such children also tend to lack concern when playmates get hurt or cry; they seem to represent one end of a continuum of coldness that peaks with the brutality of the abused children.

Page 199

2^nd paragraph --- But given the physical beatings they received as a sometimes daily diet, the emotional lessons are all too clear. Remember that it is in moments when passions run high or a crisis is upon us that the primitive proclivities of the brain’s limbic centers take on a more dominant role. At such moments, the habits the emotional brain has learned over and over will dominate, for better or worse.

Chapter 13 --- Trauma and Emotional Relearning

Page 202

2^nd paragraph --- Any traumatizing event can implant such trigger memories in the amygdala: a fire or an auto accident, being in a natural catastrophe such as an earthquake or a hurricane, being raped or mugged. Hundreds of thousands of people each year endure such disasters, and many or most come away with the kind of emotional wounding that leaves its imprint on the brain.

Page 203

3^rd paragraph --- While the PTSD findings are typically based on the impact of a single episode, similar results can come from cruelties inflicted over a period of years, as is the case with children who are sexually, physically, or emotionally abused.

Page 204

1^st paragraph --- “It does not matter if it was the incessant terror of combat, torture, or repeated abuse in childhood, or a one-time experience, like being trapped in a hurricane or nearly dying in an auto accident. All uncontrollable stress can have the same biological impact.”

2^nd paragraph --- The operative word is uncontrollable. If people feel there is something they can do I a catastrophic situation, some control they can exert, no matter how minor, they fare far better emotionally than do those who feel utterly helpless. The element of helplessness is what makes an given event subjectively overwhelming.

3^rd paragraph --- Helplessness as the wild card in triggering PTSD has been shown in dozens of studies on pairs of laboratory rats, each in a different cage, each being given mild --- but, to a rat, very stressful --- electric shocks of identical severity. --- But the rat with the power to turn the shock off comes through without lasting signs of stress.

Page 205

3^rd paragraph --- Changes in these circuits are thought to underlie PTSD symptoms, which include anxiety, fear, hyper-vigilance, being easily upset and aroused, readiness for fight or flight, and the indelible encoding of intense memories.

Page 207

5^th paragraph --- In PTSD spontaneous relearning fails to occur. Charney proposes that this may be due to the brain changes of PTSD, which are so strong that, in effect, the amygdala hijacking occurs every time something even vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma comes along, strengthening the fear pathway. This means that there is never a time when what is feared is paired with a feeling of calm --- the amygdala never relearns a more mild reaction. "Extinction" of the fear, he observes, "appears to involve an active learning process", which is itself impaired in people with PTSD, "leading to the abnormal persistence of emotional memories."

Page 209

3^rd paragraph --- While adults who have been through overwhelming trauma can suffer a psychic numbing, blocking out memory of or feeling about the catastrophe, children's psyches often handle it differently. They less often become numb to the trauma, Terr believes, because they use fantasy, play, and daydreams to recall and rethink their ordeals. Such voluntary replays of trauma seem to head off the need for damning them up in potent memories that can later burst through as flashbacks. If the trauma is minor, such as going to the dentist for a filling, just once or twice may be enough. But if it's overwhelming, a child needs endless repetitions, replaying the trauma over and over again in a grim, monotonous ritual.

Page 210

3^rd paragraph --- Herman sees three stages: attaining a sense of safety, remembering the details of the trauma and mourning the loss it has brought, and finally reestablishing a normal life. There is a biological logic to the ordering of these steps, as we shall see: this sequence seems to reflect how the emotional brain learns once again that life need not be regarded as an emergency about to happen.

6^th paragraph --- The sense in which PTSD patients feel "unsafe" goes beyond fears that dangers lurk around them; their insecurity begins more intimately, in the feeling that they have no control over what is happening in their body and to their emotions. This is understandable, given the hair trigger for emotional hijacking that PTSD creates by hypersensitizing the amygdala circuitry.

Page 212

1^st paragraph --- By putting sensory details and feelings into words, presumably memories are brought more under control of the neocortex, where the reactions they kindle can be rendered more understandable and so more manageable. The emotional relearning at this point is largely accomplished through reliving the events and their emotions, but this time in surroundings of safety and security, in the company of a trusted therapist.

3^rd paragraph --- Finally, Herman finds that patients need to mourn the loss the trauma brought --- whether and injury, the death of a loved one or a rupture in a relationship, regret over some step not taken to save someone, or just the shattering of confidence that people can be trusted.

Page 213

3^rd paragraph --- "Once your emotional system learns something, it seems you never let it go. What therapy does is teach you to control it --- it teaches your neocortex how to inhibit your amygdala. The propensity to act is suppressed, while your basic emotion about it remains in a subdued form."

Page 214

3^rd paragraph --- In brain terms, we can speculate, the limbic circuitry would send alarm signals in response to cues of a feared event, but the prefrontal cortex and related zones would have learned a new, more healthy response. In short, emotional lessons --- even the most deeply implanted habits of the heart learned in childhood --- can be reshaped. Emotional learning is lifelong.

Chapter 14 --- Temperament Is Not Destiny

Page 215

2^nd paragraph --- Kagan posits that there are at least four temperamental types --- timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy --- and that each is due to a different pattern of brain activity. There are likely innumerable differences in temperamental endowment, each based in innate differences in emotional circuitry; for any given emotion people can differ in how easily it triggers, how long it lasts, how intense it becomes.

Page 216

2^nd paragraph --- Kagan finds that children who are overly sensitive and fearful grow into shy and timorous adults; from birth about 15 to 20 percent of children are "behaviorally inhibited" as he calls them. As infants, these children are timid about anything unfamiliar. This makes them finicky about eating new foods, reluctant to approach new animals or places, and shy around strangers. It also renders them sensitive in other ways --- for example, prone to guilt and self-reproach. These are the children who become paralyzingly anxious in social situations: in class and on the playground, when meeting new people, whenever the social spotlight shines on them. As adults, they are prone to be wallflowers, and morbidly afraid of having to give a speech or perform in public.

4^th paragraph --- By contrast, Ralph was one of the boldest and most outgoing children at every age. Always relaxed and talkative, at thirteen he sat back at ease in his chair, had no nervous mannerisms, and spoke in a confident, friendly tone, as though the interviewer were a peer --- though the difference in their ages was twenty-five years. --- Sociable and popular, Ralph has never thought of himself as shy.

Page 217

2^nd paragraph --- Perhaps as a result, middle-aged women who remember having been especially shy in childhood, when compared with their more outgoing peers, tend to go through life with more fears, worries, and guilt, and to suffer more from stress-related problems such as migraine headaches, irritable bowel, and other stomach problems.

Page 218

2^nd paragraph --- Timid children, Kagan postulates, may have inherited chronically high levels of norepinephrine or other brain chemicals that activate the amygdala and so create a low threshold of excitability, making the amygdala more easily triggered.

4^th paragraph --- Silence is another barometer of timidity. Whenever Kagan's team observed shy and bold children in a natural setting --- in their kindergarten classes, with other children they did not know, or talking with an interviewer --- the timid children talked less. One timid kindergartener would say nothing when other children spoke to her, and spent most of the day just watching the others play. Kagan speculates that a timid silence in the face of novelty or a perceived threat is a sign of the activity of a neural circuit running between the forebrain, the amygdala, and nearby limbic structures that control the ability to vocalize (these same circuits make us "choke up" under stress).

Page 220

2^nd paragraph --- By contrast to their melancholy counterparts, those with a stronger left frontal activity saw the world very differently. Sociable and cheerful, they typically felt a sense of enjoyment, were frequently in good moods, had a strong sense of self-confidence, and felt rewardingly engaged in life. Their scores on psychological tests suggested a lower lifetime risk for depression and other emotional disorders.

Page 221

2^nd paragraph --- Thus we seem by temperament primed to respond to life in either a negative or a positive emotional register. The tendency toward a melancholy or upbeat temperament --- like that toward timidity or boldness --- emerges within the first year of life, a fact that strongly suggests it too is genetically determined.

4^th paragraph --- What makes the difference are the emotional lessons and responses children learn as they grow. For the timid child, what matters at the outset is how they are treated by their parents, and so how they learn to handle their natural timidness. Those parents who engineer gradual emboldening experiences for their children offer them what may be a lifelong corrective to their fearfulness.  

Page 223

1^st paragraph --- Kagan’s conclusion: “It appears that mothers who protect their highly reactive infants from frustration and anxiety in the hope of effecting a benevolent outcome seem to exacerbate the infant’s uncertainty and produce the opposite effect.” In other words, the protective strategy backfires by depriving timid toddlers of the very opportunity to learn to calm themselves in the face of the unfamiliar, and so gain some small mastery of their fears.

2^nd paragraph --- In contrast, as Kagan told me, “Those children who had become less timid by kindergarten seem to have had parents who put gentle pressure on them to be more outgoing. Although this temperamental trait seems slightly harder than others to change --- probably because of its physiological basis --- no human quality is beyond change.”

Page 224

1^st paragraph --- Our emotional capacities are not a given; with the right learning, they can be improved. The reasons for this lie in how the human brain matures.

Page 225

2^nd paragraph (Rich Rats, Poor Rats) --- A vivid demonstration of the impact of experience on the developing brain is in studies of “rich” and “poor” rats. The “rich” rats lived in small groups in cages with plenty of rat diversions such as ladders and treadmills. The “poor” rats lived in cages that were similar but barren and lacking diversions. Over a period of months the neocortices or the rich rats developed far more complex networks of synaptic circuits interconnecting the neurons; the poor rat’s neuronal circuitry was sparse by comparison. The difference was so great that the rich rat’s brains were heavier, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they were far smarter at solving mazes than the poor rats. Similar experiments with monkeys show these differences between those “rich” and “poor” in experience, and the same effect is sure to occur in humans.

5^th paragraph --- The remarkable finding, though, was a PET scan test showing that the behavior therapy patients had as significant a decrease in the activity of a key part of the emotional brain, the caudate nucleus, as did the patients successfully treated with the drug fluoxetine (Prozac). Their experience had changed brain function --- and relieved symptoms --- as effectively as the medication!

Page 226

2^nd paragraph --- The habits of emotional management that are repeated over and over again during childhood and the teenage years will themselves help mold this circuitry. This makes childhood a crucial window of opportunity for shaping lifelong emotional propensities; habits acquired in childhood become set in the basic synaptic wiring or neural architecture, and are harder to change later in life. Given the importance of the prefrontal lobes for managing emotion, the very long window for synaptic sculpting in this brain region may well mean that, in the grand design of the brain, a child’s experiences over the years can mold lasting connections I the regulatory circuitry of the emotional brain.

4^th paragraph --- To be sure, the art of soothing oneself is mastered over many years, and with new means, as brain maturation offers a child progressively more sophisticated tools.

Page 227

3^rd paragraph --- It stands to reason that the key skills of emotional intelligence each have critical periods extending over several years in childhood. Each period represents a window for helping that child instill beneficial emotional habits, or, if missed, to make it that much harder to offer corrective lessons later in life. The massive sculpting and pruning of neural circuits in childhood may be an underlying reason why early emotional hardships and trauma have such enduring and pervasive effects in childhood.

5^th paragraph --- Some of the most telling of such lessons come from parent to child. There are very different emotional habits instilled by parents whose attunement means an infant’s emotional needs are acknowledged and met or whose discipline includes empathy, on the one hand, or self-absorbed parents who ignore a child’s distress or discipline capriciously by yelling and hitting. Much psychotherapy is, in a sense, a remedial tutorial for what was skewed or missed completely earlier in life. But why not do what we can to prevent that need, by giving children the nurturing and guidance that cultivates the essential emotional skills in the first place?