EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE
WHY IT CAN MATTER MORE THAN IQ

DANIEL GOLEMAN

From the
Library of Unviolent
Revolution

UnviolentPeacemaker
at ThePirateBay
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BLOOMSBURY
For Tara, wellspring of emotional wisdom
 Contents
Aristotle's Challenge

PART ONE
THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN

1. What Are Emotions For?

2. Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking

PART TWO
THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

3. When Smart Is Dumb

4. Know Thyself
5. Passion's Slaves
6. The Master Aptitude
7. The Roots of Empathy
8. The Social Arts

PART THREE
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED

9. Intimate Enemies
10. Managing with Heart
11. Mind and Medicine

PART FOUR
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WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
12. The Family Crucible
13. Trauma and Emotional Relearning
14. Temperament Is Not Destiny

PART FIVE
EMOTIONAL LITERACY

15. The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy

16. Schooling the Emotions

Appendix A: What Is Emotion?

Appendix B: Hallmarks of the Emotional Mind

Appendix C: The Neural Circuitry of Fear

Appendix D: W. T Grant Consortium: Active In-

gredients of Prevention Programs

Appendix E: The Self Science Curriculum

Appendix F: Social and Emotional Learning:

Results

Notes

Acknowledgments
 Aristotle's Challenge
Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to
be angry with the right person, to the right de-
gree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and
in the right way —this is not easy.
ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics

It was an unbearably steamy August afternoon in New

York City, the kind of sweaty day that makes people sul-
len with discomfort. I was heading back to a hotel, and
as I stepped onto a bus up Madison Avenue I was
startled by the driver, a middle-aged black man with an
enthusiastic smile, who welcomed me with a friendly,
"Hi! How you doing?" as I got on, a greeting he
proffered to everyone else who entered as the bus
wormed through the thick midtown traffic. Each passen-
ger was as startled as I, and, locked into the morose
mood of the day, few returned his greeting.
But as the bus crawled uptown through the gridlock, a
slow, rather magical transformation occurred. The
driver gave a running monologue for our benefit, a lively
commentary on the passing scene around us: there was
a terrific sale at that store, a wonderful exhibit at this
museum, did you hear about the new movie that just
opened at that cinema down the block? His delight in
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the rich possibilities the city offered was infectious. By

the time people got off the bus, each in turn had shaken
off the sullen shell they had entered with, and when the
driver shouted out a "So long, have a great day!" each
gave a smiling response.
The memory of that encounter has stayed with me for
close to twenty years. When I rode that Madison Avenue
bus, I had just finished my own doctorate in psycho-
logy—but there was scant attention paid in the psycho-
logy of the day to just how such a transformation could
happen. Psychological science knew little or nothing of
the mechanics of emotion. And yet, imagining the
spreading virus of good feeling that must have rippled
through the city, starting from passengers on his bus, I
saw that this bus driver was an urban peacemaker of
sorts, wizardlike in his power to transmute the sullen ir-
ritability that seethed in his passengers, to soften and
open their hearts a bit.
In stark contrast, some items from this week's paper:

• At a local school, a nine-year-old goes on a rampage,

pouring paint over school desks, computers, and print-
ers, and vandalizing a car in the school parking lot. The
reason: some third-grade classmates called him a "baby"
and he wanted to impress them.
• Eight youngsters are wounded when an inadvertent
bump in a crowd of teenagers milling outside a
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Manhattan rap club leads to a shoving match, which

ends when one of those affronted starts shooting a .38
caliber automatic handgun into the crowd. The report
notes that such shootings over seemingly minor slights,
which are perceived as acts of disrespect, have become
increasingly common around the country in recent
years.
• For murder victims under twelve, says a report, 57
percent of the murderers are their parents or steppar-
ents. In almost half the cases, the parents say they were
"merely trying to discipline the child." The fatal beatings
were prompted by "infractions" such as the child block-
ing the TV, crying, or soiling diapers.
• A German youth is on trial for murdering five Turk-
ish women and girls in a fire he set while they slept. Part
of a neo-Nazi group, he tells of failing to hold jobs, of
drinking, of blaming his hard luck on foreigners. In a
barely audible voice, he pleads, "I can't stop being sorry
for what we've done, and I am infinitely ashamed."

Each day's news comes to us rife with such reports of

the disintegration of civility and safety, an onslaught of
mean-spirited impulse running amok. But the news
simply reflects back to us on a larger scale a creeping
sense of emotions out of control in our own lives and in
those of the people around us. No one is insulated from
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this erratic tide of outburst and regret; it reaches into all

of our lives in one way or another.
The last decade has seen a steady drumroll of reports
like these, portraying an uptick in emotional ineptitude,
desperation, and recklessness in our families, our com-
munities, and our collective lives. These years have
chronicled surging rage and despair, whether in the
quiet loneliness of latchkey kids left with a TV for a
babysitter, or in the pain of children abandoned, neg-
lected, or abused, or in the ugly intimacy of marital viol-
ence. A spreading emotional malaise can be read in
numbers showing a jump in depression around the
world, and in the reminders of a surging tide of aggres-
sion—teens with guns in schools, freeway mishaps end-
ing in shootings, disgruntled ex-employees massacring
former fellow workers. Emotional abuse, drive-by
shooting, and post-traumatic stress all entered the
common lexicon over the last decade, as the slogan of
the hour shifted from the cheery "Have a nice day" to
the testiness of "Make my day."
This book is a guide to making sense of the senseless-
ness. As a psychologist, and for the last decade as a
journalist for The New York Times, I have been tracking
the progress of our scientific understanding of the realm
of the irrational. From that perch I have been struck by
two opposing trends, one portraying a growing calamity
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in our shared emotional life, the other offering some

hopeful remedies.

WHY THIS EMOTION NOW

The last decade, despite its bad news, has also seen an
unparalleled burst of scientific studies of emotion. Most
dramatic are the glimpses of the brain at work, made
possible by innovative methods such as new brain-ima-
ging technologies. They have made visible for the first
time in human history what has always been a source of
deep mystery: exactly how this intricate mass of cells
operates while we think and feel, imagine and dream.
This flood of neurobiological data lets us understand
more clearly than ever how the brain's centers for emo-
tion move us to rage or to tears, and how more ancient
parts of the brain, which stir us to make war as well as
love, are channeled for better or worse. This unpreced-
ented clarity on the workings of emotions and their fail-
ings brings into focus some fresh remedies for our col-
lective emotional crisis.
I have had to wait till now before the scientific harvest
was full enough to write this book. These insights are so
late in coming largely because the place of feeling in
mental life has been surprisingly slighted by research
over the years, leaving the emotions a largely unex-
plored continent for scientific psychology. Into this void
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has rushed a welter of self-help books, well-intentioned

advice based at best on clinical opinion but lacking
much, if any, scientific basis. Now science is finally able
to speak with authority to these urgent and perplexing
questions of the psyche at its most irrational, to map
with some precision the human heart.
This mapping offers a challenge to those who sub-
scribe to a narrow view of intelligence, arguing that IQ is
a genetic given that cannot be changed by life experi-
ence, and that our destiny in life is largely fixed by these
aptitudes. That argument ignores the more challenging
question: What can we change that will help our chil-
dren fare better in life? What factors are at play, for ex-
ample, when people of high IQ flounder and those of
modest IQ do surprisingly well? I would argue that the
difference quite often lies in the abilities called here
emotional intelligence, which include self-control, zeal
and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself. And
these skills, as we shall see, can be taught to children,
giving them a better chance to use whatever intellectual
potential the genetic lottery may have given them.
Beyond this possibility looms a pressing moral imper-
ative. These are times when the fabric of society seems
to unravel at ever-greater speed, when selfishness, viol-
ence, and a meanness of spirit seem to be rotting the
goodness of our communal lives. Here the argument for
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the importance of emotional intelligence hinges on the

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

OUR JOURNEY
In this book I serve as a guide in a journey through these
scientific insights into the emotions, a voyage aimed at
bringing greater understanding to some of the most per-
plexing moments in our own lives and in the world
around us. The journey's end is to understand what it
means—and how—to bring intelligence to emotion. This
understanding itself can help to some degree; bringing
cognizance to the realm of feeling has an effect
something like the impact of an observer at the
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quantum level in physics, altering what is being

observed.
Our journey begins in Part One with new discoveries
about the brain's emotional architecture that offer an
explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives
when feeling overwhelms all rationality. Understanding
the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments
of rage and fear—or passion and joy—reveals much
about how we learn the emotional habits that can un-
dermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do
to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emo-
tional impulses. Most important, the neurological data
suggest an opportunity for shaping our children's emo-
tional habits.
The next major stop on our journey, Part Two of this
book, is in seeing how neurological givens play out in
the basic flair for living called emotional intelligence:
being able, for example, to rein in emotional impulse; to
read another's innermost feelings; to handle relation-
ships smoothly—as Aristotle put it, the rare skill "to be
angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the
right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way."
(Readers who are not drawn to neurological detail may
want to proceed directly to this section.)
This expanded model of what it means to be "intelli-
gent" puts emotions at the center of aptitudes for living.
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Part Three examines some key differences this aptitude

makes: how these abilities can preserve our most prized
relationships, or their lack corrode them; how the mar-
ket forces that are reshaping our work life are putting an
unprecedented premium on emotional intelligence for
on-the-job success; and how toxic emotions put our
physical health at as much risk as does chain-smoking,
even as emotional balance can help protect our health
and well-being.
Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series
of emotional set-points that determines our tempera-
ment. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily
malleable; temperament is not destiny. As Part Four
shows, the emotional lessons we learn as children at
home and at school shape the emotional circuits, mak-
ing us more adept—or inept—at the basics of emotional
intelligence. This means that childhood and adolescence
are critical for setting down the essential emotional
habits that will govern our lives.
Part Five explores what hazards await those who, in
growing to maturity, fail to master the emotional
realm—how deficiencies in emotional intelligence
heighten a spectrum of risks, from depression or a life of
violence to eating disorders and drug abuse. And it doc-
uments how pioneering schools are teaching children
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the emotional and social skills they need to keep their

lives on track.
Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in
this book comes from a massive survey of parents and
teachers and shows a worldwide trend for the present
generation of children to be more troubled emotionally
than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry
and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more im-
pulsive and aggressive.
If there is a remedy, I feel it must lie in how we pre-
pare our young for life. At present we leave the emotion-
al education of our children to chance, with ever more
disastrous results. One solution is a new vision of what
schools can do to educate the whole student, bringing
together mind and heart in the classroom. Our journey
ends with visits to innovative classes that aim to give
children a grounding in the basics of emotional intelli-
gence. I can foresee a day when education will routinely
include inculcating essential human competencies such
as self-awareness, self-control, and empathy, and the
arts of listening, resolving conflicts, and cooperation.
In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's philosophical
enquiry into virtue, character, and the good life, his
challenge is to manage our emotional life with intelli-
gence. Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom;
they guide our thinking, our values, our survival. But
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they can easily go awry, and do so all too often. As Aris-

totle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with
the appropriateness of emotion and its expression. The
question is, how can we bring intelligence to our emo-
tions—and civility to our streets and caring to our com-
munal life?
 PART ONE
THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
 1
What Are Emotions For?
It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is
essential is invisible to the eye.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY,
The Little Prince

Ponder the last moments of Gary and Mary Jane Chaun-

cey, a couple completely devoted to their eleven-year-
old daughter Andrea, who was confined to a wheelchair
by cerebral palsy. The Chauncey family were passengers
on an Amtrak train that crashed into a river after a
barge hit and weakened a railroad bridge in Louisiana's
bayou country. Thinking first of their daughter, the
couple tried their best to save Andrea as water rushed
into the sinking train; somehow they managed to push
Andrea through a window to rescuers. Then, as the car
sank beneath the water, they perished.1
Andrea's story, of parents whose last heroic act is to
ensure their child's survival, captures a moment of al-
most mythic courage. Without doubt such incidents of
parental sacrifice for their progeny have been repeated
countless times in human history and prehistory, and
countless more in the larger course of evolution of our
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2
species. Seen from the perspective of evolutionary bio-
logists, such parental self-sacrifice is in the service of
"reproductive success" in passing on one's genes to fu-
ture generations. But from the perspective of a parent
making a desperate decision in a moment of crisis, it is
about nothing other than love.
As an insight into the purpose and potency of emo-
tions, this exemplary act of parental heroism testifies to
the role of altruistic love—and every other emotion we
feel—in human life.3 It suggests that our deepest feel-
ings, our passions and longings, are essential guides,
and that our species owes much of its existence to their
power in human affairs. That power is extraordinary:
Only a potent love—the urgency of saving a cherished
child—could lead a parent to override the impulse for
personal survival. Seen from the intellect, their self-sac-
rifice was arguably irrational; seen from the heart, it was
the only choice to make.
Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over
head at such crucial moments when they conjecture
about why evolution has given emotion such a central
role in the human psyche. Our emotions, they say, guide
us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to
leave to intellect alone—danger, painful loss, persisting
toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate,
building a family. Each emotion offers a distinctive
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readiness to act; each points us in a direction that has

worked well to handle the recurring challenges of hu-
man life.4 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.
A view of human nature that ignores the power of
emotions is sadly shortsighted. The very name Homo
sapiens, the thinking species, is misleading in light of
the new appreciation and vision of the place of emotions
in our lives that science now offers. As we all know from
experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and
our actions, feeling counts every bit as much—and often
more—than thought. We have gone too far in emphasiz-
ing the value and import of the purely rational—of what
IQ measures—in human life. Intelligence can come to
nothing when the emotions hold sway.

WHEN PASSIONS OVERWHELM

REASON
It was a tragedy of errors. Fourteen-year-old Matilda Cr-
abtree was just playing a practical joke on her father:
she jumped out of a closet and yelled "Boo!" as her par-
ents came home at one in the morning from visiting
friends.
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But Bobby Crabtree and his wife thought Matilda was

staying with friends that night. Hearing noises as he
entered the house, Crabtree reached for his .357 caliber
pistol and went into Matilda's bedroom to investigate.
When his daughter jumped from the closet, Crabtree
shot her in the neck. Matilda Crabtree died twelve hours
later.5
One emotional legacy of evolution is the fear that mo-
bilizes us to protect our family from danger; that im-
pulse impelled Bobby Crabtree to get his gun and search
his house for the intruder he thought was prowling
there. Fear primed Crabtree to shoot before he could
fully register what he was shooting at, even before he
could recognize his daughter's voice. Automatic reac-
tions of this sort have become etched in our nervous sys-
tem, evolutionary biologists presume, because for a long
and crucial period in human prehistory they made the
difference between survival and death. Even more im-
portant, they mattered for the main task of evolution:
being able to bear progeny who would carry on these
very genetic predispositions—a sad irony, given the
tragedy at the Crabtree household.
But while our emotions have been wise guides in the
evolutionary long run, the new realities civilization
presents have arisen with such rapidity that the slow
march of evolution cannot keep up. Indeed, the first
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laws and proclamations of ethics—the Code of Hammur-

abi, 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 de-
scribed 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.
Despite these social constraints, passions overwhelm
reason time and again. This given of human nature
arises from the basic architecture of mental life. In
terms of biological design for the basic neural circuitry
of emotion, what we are born with is what worked best
for the last 50,000 human generations, not the last 500
generations—and certainly not the last five. The slow,
deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emo-
tions have done their work over the course of a million
years; the last 10,000 years—despite having witnessed
the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of
the human population from five million to five bil-
lion—have left little imprint on our biological templates
for emotional life.
For better or for worse, our appraisal of every person-
al encounter and our responses to it are shaped not just
by our rational judgments or our personal history, but
also by our distant ancestral past. This leaves us with
sometimes tragic propensities, as witness the sad events
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at the Crabtree household. In short, we too often con-

front postmodern dilemmas with an emotional reper-
toire tailored to the urgencies of the Pleistocene. That
predicament is at the heart of my subject.

Impulses to Action
One early spring day I was driving along a highway over
a mountain pass in Colorado, when a snow flurry sud-
denly blotted out the car a few lengths ahead of me. As I
peered ahead I couldn't make out anything; the swirling
snow was now a blinding whiteness. Pressing my foot on
the brake, I could feel anxiety flood my body and hear
the thumping of my heart.
The anxiety built to full fear: I pulled over to the side
of the road, waiting for the flurry to pass. A half hour
later the snow stopped, visibility returned, and I contin-
ued on my way—only to be stopped a few hundred yards
down the road, where an ambulance crew was helping a
passenger in a car that had rear-ended a slower car in
front; the collision blocked the highway. If I had contin-
ued driving in the blinding snow, I probably would have
hit them.
The caution fear forced on me that day may have
saved my life. Like a rabbit frozen in terror at the hint of
a passing fox—or a protomammal hiding from a ma-
rauding dinosaur—I was overtaken by an internal state
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that compelled me to stop, pay attention, and take heed

of a coming clanger.
All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the in-
stant 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 impli-
cit in every emotion. That emotions lead to actions is
most obvious in watching animals or children; it is only
in "civilized" adults we so often find the great anomaly
in the animal kingdom, emotions—root impulses to
act—divorced from obvious reaction.6
In our emotional repertoire each emotion plays a
unique role, as revealed by their distinctive biological
signatures (see Appendix A for details on "basic" emo-
tions). With new methods to peer into the body and
brain, researchers are discovering more physiological
details of how each emotion prepares the body for a very
different kind of response:7

• With anger blood flows to the hands, making it easi-

er to grasp a weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate in-
creases, and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline gen-
erates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous
action.
• With fear blood goes to the large skeletal muscles,
such as in the legs, making it easier to flee—and making
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the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it (creat-

ing the feeling that the blood "runs cold"). At the same
time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps al-
lowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better
reaction. Circuits in the brain's emotional centers trigger
a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert,
making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fix-
ates on the threat at hand, the better to evaluate what
response to make.
• Among the main biological changes in happiness is
an increased activity in a brain center that inhibits neg-
ative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy,
and a quieting of those that generate worrisome
thought. But there is no particular shift in physiology
save a quiescence, which makes the body recover more
quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emo-
tions. This configuration offers the body a general rest,
as well as readiness and enthusiasm for whatever task is
at hand and for striving toward a great variety of goals.
• Love, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction entail
parasympathetic arousal—the physiological opposite of
the "fight-or-flight" mobilization shared by fear and an-
ger. The parasympathetic pattern, dubbed the "relaxa-
tion response," is a body wide set of reactions that gen-
erates a general state of calm and contentment, facilitat-
ing cooperation.
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• The lifting of the eyebrows in surprise allows the

taking in of a larger visual sweep and also permits more
light to strike the retina. This offers more information
about the unexpected event, making it easier to figure
out exactly what is going on and concoct the best plan
for action.
• Around the world an expression of disgust looks the
same, and sends the identical message: something is of-
fensive in taste or smell, or metaphorically so. The facial
expression of disgust—the upper lip curled to the side as
the nose wrinkles slightly—suggests a primordial at-
tempt, as Darwin observed, to close the nostrils against
a noxious odor or to spit out a poisonous food.
• A main function for sadness is to help adjust to a sig-
nificant loss, such as the death of someone close or a
major disappointment. Sadness brings a drop in energy
and enthusiasm for life's activities, particularly diver-
sions and pleasures, and, as it deepens and approaches
depression, slows the body's metabolism. This intro-
spective withdrawal creates the opportunity to mourn a
loss or frustrated hope, grasp its consequences for one's
life, and, as energy returns, plan new beginnings. This
loss of energy may well have kept saddened—and vul-
nerable—early humans close to home, where they were
safer.
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These biological propensities to act are shaped further

by our life experience and our culture. For instance, uni-
versally the loss of a loved one elicits sadness and grief.
But how we show our grieving—how emotions are dis-
played or held back for private moments—is molded by
culture, as are which particular people in our lives fall
into the category of "loved ones" to be mourned.
The protracted period of evolution when these emo-
tional responses were hammered into shape was cer-
tainly a harsher reality than most humans endured as a
species after the dawn of recorded history. It was a time
when few infants survived to childhood and few adults
to thirty years, when predators could strike at any mo-
ment, when the vagaries of droughts and floods meant
the difference between starvation and survival. But with
the coming of agriculture and even the most rudiment-
ary human societies, the odds for survival began to
change dramatically. In the last ten thousand years,
when these advances took hold throughout the world,
the ferocious pressures that had held the human popu-
lation in check eased steadily.
Those same pressures had made our emotional re-
sponses so valuable for survival; as they waned, so did
the goodness of fit of parts of our emotional repertoire.
While in the ancient past a hair-trigger anger may have
offered a crucial edge for survival, the availability of
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automatic weaponry to thirteen-year-olds has made it

too often a disastrous reaction.8

Our Two Minds

A friend was telling me about her divorce, a painful sep-
aration. Her husband had fallen in love with a younger
woman at work, and suddenly announced he was leav-
ing to live with the other woman. Months of bitter
wrangling over house, money, and custody of the chil-
dren followed. Now, some months later, she was saying
that her independence was appealing to her, that she
was happy to be on her own. "I just don't think about
him anymore—I really don't care," she said. But as she
said it, her eyes momentarily welled up with tears.
That moment of teary eyes could easily pass unnoted.
But the empathic understanding that someone's water-
ing eyes means she is sad despite her words to the con-
trary is an act of comprehending just as surely as is dis-
tilling 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 two minds, one that
thinks and one that feels.
These two fundamentally different ways of knowing
interact to construct our mental life. One, the rational
mind, is the mode of comprehension we are typically
conscious of: more prominent in awareness, thoughtful,
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able to ponder and reflect. But alongside that there is

another system of knowing: impulsive and powerful, if
sometimes illogical—the emotional mind. (For a more
detailed description of the characteristics of the emo-
tional mind, see Appendix B.)
The emotional/rational dichotomy approximates the
folk (distinction between "heart" and "head"; knowing
something is right "in your heart" is a different order of
conviction—somehow a deeper kind of certainty—than
thinking so with your rational mind. There is a steady
gradient in the ratio of rational-to-emotional control
over the mind; the more intense the feeling, the more
dominant the emotional mind becomes—and the more
ineffectual the rational. This is an arrangement that
seems to stem from eons of evolutionary advantage to
having emotions and intuitions guide our instantaneous
response in situations where our lives are in peril—and
where pausing to think over what to do could cost us our
lives.
These two minds, the emotional and the rational, op-
erate in tight harmony for the most part, intertwining
their very different ways of knowing to guide us through
the world. Ordinarily there is a balance between emo-
tional and rational minds, with emotion feeding into
and informing the operations of the rational mind, and
the rational mind refining and sometimes vetoing the
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inputs of the emotions. Still, the emotional and rational

minds are semi-independent faculties, each, as we shall
see, reflecting the operation of distinct, but interconnec-
ted, circuitry in the brain.
In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely
coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought
to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is
the emotional mind that captures the upper hand,
swamping the rational mind. The sixteenth-century hu-
manist Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in a satirical vein of
this perennial tension between reason and emotion:9

Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reas-

on—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, re-
peating formulas of virtue, while the other two bid
her go hang herself, and are increasingly noisy and
offensive, until at last their Ruler is exhausted, gives
up, and surrenders.

HOW THE BRAIN GREW

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To better grasp the potent hold of the emotions on the

thinking mind—and why feeling and reason are so read-
ily at war—consider how the brain evolved. Human
brains, with their three pounds or so of cells and neural
juices, are about triple the size of those in our nearest
cousins in evolution, the nonhuman primates. Over mil-
lions of years of evolution, the brain has grown from the
bottom up, with its higher centers developing as elabor-
ations of lower, more ancient parts. (The growth of the
brain in the human embryo roughly retraces this evolu-
tionary course.)
The most primitive part of the brain, shared with all
species that have more than a minimal nervous system,
is the brainstem surrounding the top of the spinal cord.
This root brain regulates basic life functions like breath-
ing and the metabolism of the body's other organs, as
well as controlling stereotyped reactions and move-
ments. This primitive brain cannot be said to think or
learn; rather it is a set of preprogrammed regulators
that keep the body running as it should and reacting in a
way that ensures survival. This brain reigned supreme
in the Age of the Reptiles: Picture a snake hissing to sig-
nal the threat of an attack.
From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged
the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolu-
tion, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking
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brain or "neocortex," the great bulb of convoluted tis-

sues that make up the top layers. The fact that the think-
ing brain grew from the emotional reveals much about
the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emo-
tional brain long before there was a rational one.
The most ancient root of our emotional life is in the
sense of smell, or, more precisely, in the olfactory lobe,
the cells that take in and analyze smell. Every living en-
tity, be it nutritious, poisonous, sexual partner, predator
or prey, has a distinctive molecular signature that can be
carried in the wind. In those primitive times smell com-
mended itself as a paramount sense for survival.
From the olfactory lobe the ancient centers for emo-
tion began to evolve, eventually growing large enough to
encircle the top of the brainstem. In its rudimentary
stages, the olfactory center was composed of little more
than thin layers of neurons gathered to analyze smell.
One layer of cells took in what was smelled and sorted it
out into the relevant categories: edible or toxic, sexually
available, enemy or meal. A second layer of cells sent re-
flexive messages throughout the nervous system telling
the body what to do: bite, spit, approach, flee, chase.10
With the arrival of the first mammals came new, key
layers of the emotional brain. These, surrounding the
brainstem, look roughly like a bagel with a bite taken
out at the bottom where the brainstem nestles into
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them. Because this part of the brain rings and borders

the brainstem, it was called the "limbic" system, from
"limbus," the Latin word for "ring." This new neural ter-
ritory added emotions proper to the brain's repertoire.11
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.
As it evolved, the limbic system refined two powerful
tools: learning and memory. These revolutionary ad-
vances allowed an animal to be much smarter in its
choices for survival, and to fine-tune its responses to ad-
apt to changing demands rather than having invariable
and automatic reactions. If a food led to sickness, it
could be avoided next time. Decisions like knowing what
to eat and what to spurn were still determined largely
through smell; the connections between the olfactory
bulb and the limbic system now took on the tasks of
making distinctions among smells and recognizing
them, comparing a present smell with past ones, and so
discriminating good from bad. This was done by the
"rhinencephalon," literally, the "nose brain," a part of
the limbic wiring, and the rudimentary basis of the neo-
cortex, the thinking brain.
About 100 million years ago the brain in mammals
took a great growth spurt. Piled on top of the thin two-
layered cortex—the regions that plan, comprehend what
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is sensed, coordinate movement—several new layers of

brain cells were added to form the neocortex. In con-
trast to the ancient brain's two-layered cortex, the neo-
cortex offered an extraordinary intellectual edge.
The Homo sapiens neocortex, so much larger than in
any other species, has added all that is distinctly human.
The neocortex is the seat of thought; it contains the cen-
ters that put together and comprehend what the senses
perceive. It adds to a feeling what we think about
it—and allows us to have feelings about ideas, art, sym-
bols, imaginings.
In evolution the neocortex allowed a judicious fine-
tuning that no doubt has made enormous advantages in
an organism's ability to survive adversity, making it
more likely that its progeny would in turn pass on the
genes that contain that same neural circuitry. The sur-
vival edge is due to the neocortex's talent for
strategizing, long-term planning, and other mental
wiles. Beyond that, the triumphs of art, of civilization
and culture, are all fruits of the neocortex.
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
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the family unit and the long-term commitment to chil-

drearing that makes human development possible. (Spe-
cies that have no neocortex, such as reptiles, lack mater-
nal affection; when their young hatch, the newborns
must hide to avoid being cannibalized.) In humans the
protective bond between parent and child allows much
of maturation to go on over the course of a long child-
hood—during which the brain continues to develop.
As we proceed up the phylogenetic scale from reptile
to rhesus to human, the sheer mass of the neocortex in-
creases; with that increase comes a geometric rise in the
interconnections in brain circuitry. The larger the num-
ber of such connections, the greater the range of pos-
sible 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. While a rabbit or
rhesus has a restricted set of typical responses to fear,
the larger human neocortex allows a far more nimble
repertoire—including calling 999. The more complex the
social system, the more essential is such flexibility—and
there is no more complex social world than our own.12
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But these higher centers do not govern all of emotion-

al life; in crucial matters of the heart—and most espe-
cially in emotional emergencies—they can be said to de-
fer to the limbic system. Because so many of the brain's
higher centers sprouted from or extended the scope of
the limbic area, the emotional brain plays a crucial role
in neural architecture. As the root from which the newer
brain grew, the emotional areas are intertwined via
myriad connecting circuits to all parts of the neocortex.
This gives the emotional centers immense power to in-
fluence the functioning of the rest of the brain—includ-
ing its centers for thought.
 2
Anatomy of an Emotional Hijacking
Life is a comedy for those who think and a
tragedy for those who feel.
HORACE WALPOLE

It was a hot August afternoon in 1963, the same day that

the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a
Dream" speech to a civil rights march on Washington.
On that day Richard Robles, a seasoned burglar who
had just been paroled from a three-year sentence for the
more than one hundred break-ins he had pulled to sup-
port a heroin habit, decided to do one more. He wanted
to renounce crime, Robles later claimed, but he desper-
ately needed money for his girlfriend and their three-
year-old daughter.
The apartment he broke into that day belonged to two
young women, twenty-one-year-old Janice Wylie, a re-
searcher at Newsweek magazine, and twenty-three-
year-old Emily Hoffert, a grade-school teacher. Though
Robles chose the apartment on New York's swanky Up-
per East Side to burglarize because he thought no one
would be there, Wylie was home. Threatening her with a
knife, Robles tied her up. As he was leaving, Hoffert
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came home. To make good his escape, Robles began to

tie her up, too.
As Robles tells the tale years later, while he was tying
up Hoffert, Janice Wylie warned him he would not get
away with this crime: She would remember his face and
help the police track him down. Robles, who had prom-
ised himself this was to have been his last burglary, pan-
icked at that, completely losing control. In a frenzy, he
grabbed a soda bottle and clubbed the women until they
were unconscious, then, awash in rage and fear, he
slashed and stabbed them over and over with a kitchen
knife. Looking back on that moment some twenty-five
years later, Robles lamented, "I just went bananas. My
head just exploded."
To this day Robles has lots of time to regret those few
minutes of rage unleashed. At this writing he is still in
prison, some three decades later, for what became
known as the "Career Girl Murders."
Such emotional explosions are neural hijackings. At
those moments, evidence suggests, a center in the limbic
brain proclaims an emergency, recruiting the rest of the
brain to its urgent agenda. The hijacking occurs in an in-
stant, 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
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moment passes, those so possessed have the sense of

not knowing what came over them.
These hijacks are by no means isolated, horrific incid-
ents that lead to brutal crimes like the Career Girl
Murders. In less catastrophic form—but not necessarily
less intense—they happen to us with fair frequency.
Think back to the last time you "lost it," blowing up at
someone—your spouse or child, or perhaps the driver of
another car—to a degree that later, with some reflection
and hindsight, seemed uncalled for. 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.
Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke
strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter is
almost explosive, that, too, is a limbic response. It is at
work also in moments of intense joy: When Dan Jansen,
after several heartbreaking failures to capture an
Olympic Gold Medal for speed skating (which he had
vowed to do for his dying sister), finally won the Gold in
the 1,000-meter race in the 1994 Winter Olympics in
Norway, his wife was so overcome by the excitement
and happiness that she had to be rushed to emergency
physicians at rinkside.

THE SEAT OF ALL PASSION

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In humans the amygdala (from the Greek word for "al-

mond") is an almond-shaped cluster of interconnected
structures perched above the brainstem, near the bot-
tom of the limbic ring. There are two amygdalas, one on
each side of the brain, nestled toward the side of the
head. The human amygdala is relatively large compared
to that in any of our closest evolutionary cousins, the
primates.
The hippocampus and the amygdala were the two key
parts of the primitive "nose brain" that, in evolution,
gave rise to the cortex and then the neocortex. To this
day these limbic structures do much or most of the
brain's learning and remembering; the amygdala is the
specialist for emotional matters. If the amygdala is
severed from the rest of the brain, the result is a striking
inability to gauge the emotional significance of events;
this condition is sometimes called "affective blindness."
Lacking emotional weight, encounters lose their hold.
One young man whose amygdala had been surgically re-
moved to control severe seizures became completely un-
interested in people, preferring to sit in isolation with no
human contact. While he was perfectly capable of con-
versation, he no longer recognized close friends, relat-
ives, or even his mother, and remained impassive in the
face of their anguish at his indifference. Without an
amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of
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1
feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings. The amyg-
dala acts as a storehouse of emotional memory, and thus
of significance itself; life without the amygdala is a life
stripped of personal meanings.
More than affection is tied to the amygdala; all pas-
sion depends on it. Animals that have their amygdala re-
moved or severed lack fear and rage, lose the urge to
compete or cooperate, and no longer have any sense of
their place in their kind's social order; emotion is blun-
ted or absent. Tears, an emotional signal unique to hu-
mans, are triggered by the amygdala and a nearby struc-
ture, the cingulate gyrus; being held, stroked, or other-
wise comforted soothes these same brain regions, stop-
ping the sobs. Without an amygdala, there are no tears
of sorrow to soothe.
Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for
Neural Science at New York University, was the first to
discover the key role of the amygdala in the emotional
brain.2 LeDoux is part of a fresh breed of neuroscientists
who draw on innovative methods and technologies that
bring a previously unknown level of precision to map-
ping the brain at work, and so can lay bare mysteries of
mind that earlier generations of scientists have found
impenetrable. His findings on the circuitry of the emo-
tional brain overthrow a long-standing notion about the
limbic system, putting the amygdala at the center of the
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action and placing other limbic structures in very differ-

ent roles.3
LeDoux's research explains how the amygdala can
take control over what we do even as the thinking brain,
the neocortex, is still coming to a decision. As we shall
see, the workings of the amygdala and its interplay with
the neocortex are at the heart of emotional intelligence.

THE NEURAL TRIPWIRE

Most intriguing for understanding the power of emo-
tions in mental life are those moments of impassioned
action that we later regret, once the dust has settled; the
question is how we so easily become so irrational. Take,
for example, a young woman who drove two hours to
Boston to have brunch and spend the day with her boy-
friend. During brunch he gave her a present she'd been
wanting for months, a hard-to-find art print brought
back from Spain. But her delight dissolved the moment
she suggested that after brunch they go to a matinee of a
movie she'd been wanting to see and her friend stunned
her by saying he couldn't spend the day with her be-
cause he had Softball practice. Hurt and incredulous,
she got up in tears, left the cafe, and, on impulse, threw
the print in a garbage can. Months later, recounting the
incident, it's not walking out she regrets, but the loss of
the print.
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It is in moments such as these—when impulsive feel-

ing 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 neur-
al tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts
of the brain.
In the brain's architecture, the amygdala is poised
something like an alarm company where operators
stand ready to send out emergency calls to the fire de-
partment, police, and a neighbor whenever a home se-
curity system signals trouble.
When it sounds an alarm of, say, fear, it sends urgent
messages to every major part of the brain: it triggers the
secretion of the body's fight-or-flight hormones, mobil-
izes the centers for movement, and activates the cardi-
ovascular system, the muscles, and the gut.4 Other cir-
cuits from the amygdala signal the secretion of emer-
gency dollops of the hormone norepinephrine to height-
en the reactivity of key brain areas, including those that
 45/661

make the senses more alert, in effect setting the brain on

edge. Additional signals from the amygdala tell the
brainstem to fix the face in a fearful expression, freeze
unrelated movements the muscles had underway, speed
heart rate and raise blood pressure, slow breathing. Oth-
ers rivet attention on the source of the fear, and prepare
the muscles to react accordingly. Simultaneously, cortic-
al memory systems are shuffled to retrieve any know-
ledge relevant to the emergency at hand, taking preced-
ence over other strands of thought.
And these are just part of a carefully coordinated array
of changes the amygdala orchestrates as it command-
eers areas throughout the brain (for a more detailed ac-
count, see Appendix C). The amygdala's extensive web
of neural connections allows it, during an emotional
emergency, to capture and drive much of the rest of the
brain—including the rational mind.

THE EMOTIONAL SENTINEL

A friend tells of having been on vacation in England, and
eating brunch at a canalside cafe. Taking a stroll after-
ward along the stone steps down to the canal, he sud-
denly saw a girl gazing at the water, her face frozen in
fear. Before he knew quite why, he had jumped in the
water—in his coat and tie. Only once he was in the water
 46/661

did he realize that the girl was staring in shock at a tod-

dler who had fallen in—whom he was able to rescue.
What made him jump in the water before he knew
why? The answer, very likely, was his amygdala.
In one of the most telling discoveries about emotions
of the last decade, LeDoux's work revealed how the ar-
chitecture of the brain gives the amygdala a privileged
position as an emotional sentinel, able to hijack the
brain.5 His 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 neocor-
tex—the thinking brain. This branching allows the amy-
gdala to begin to respond before the neocortex, which
mulls information through several levels of brain cir-
cuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its
more finely tailored response.
LeDoux's research is revolutionary for understanding
emotional life because it is the first to work out neural
pathways for feelings that bypass the neocortex. Those
feelings that take the direct route through the amygdala
include our most primitive and potent; this circuit does
much to explain the power of emotion to overwhelm
rationality.
The conventional view in neuroscience had been that
the eye, ear, and other sensory organs transmit signals
 47/661

to the thalamus, and from there to sensory processing

areas of the neocortex, where the signals are put togeth-
er into objects as we perceive them. The signals are sor-
ted for meanings so that the brain recognizes what each
object is and what its presence means. From the neocor-
tex, the old theory held, the signals are sent to the limbic
brain, and from there the appropriate response radiates
out through the brain and the rest of the body. That is
the way it works much or most of the time—but LeDoux
discovered a smaller bundle of neurons that leads dir-
ectly from the thalamus to the amygdala, in addition to
those going through the larger path of neurons to the
cortex. This smaller and shorter pathway—something
like a neural back alley—allows the amygdala to receive
some direct inputs from the senses and start a response
before they are fully registered by the neocortex.
This discovery overthrows the notion that the amyg-
dala must depend entirely on signals from the neocortex
to formulate its emotional reactions. The amygdala can
trigger an emotional response via this emergency route
even as a parallel reverberating circuit begins between
the amygdala and neocortex. The amygdala can have us
spring to action while the slightly slower—but more fully
informed—neocortex unfolds its more refined plan for
reaction.
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LeDoux overturned the prevailing wisdom about the

pathways traveled by emotions through his research on
fear in animals. In a crucial experiment he destroyed the
auditory cortex of rats, then exposed them to a tone
paired with an electric shock. The rats quickly learned to
fear the tone, even though the sound of the tone could
not register in their neocortex. Instead, the sound took
the direct route from ear to thalamus to amygdala, skip-
ping all higher avenues. In short, the rats had learned an
emotional reaction without any higher cortical involve-
ment: The amygdala perceived, remembered, and or-
chestrated their fear independently.
"Anatomically the emotional system can act inde-
pendently of the neocortex," LeDoux told me. "Some
emotional reactions and emotional memories can be
formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at
all." The amygdala can house memories and response
repertoires that we enact without quite realizing why we
do so because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala
completely bypasses the neocortex. This bypass seems
to allow the amygdala to be a repository for emotional
impressions and memories that we have never known
about in full awareness. LeDoux proposes that it is the
amygdala's subterranean role in memory that explains,
for example, a startling experiment in which people ac-
quired a preference for oddly shaped geometric figures
 49/661

that had been flashed at them so quickly that they had

no conscious awareness of having seen them at all!6

A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thal-

amus, where it is translated into the language of the
brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual
cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for mean-
ing and appropriate response; if that response is
emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate
the emotional centers. But a smaller portion of the
 50/661

original signal goes straight from the thalamus to

the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a
faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amyg-
dala can trigger an emotional response before the
cortical centers have fully understood what is
happening.
Other research has shown that in the first few milli-
seconds of our perceiving something we not only uncon-
sciously 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.7 Our emotions have a mind of their
own, one which can hold views quite independently of
our rational mind.

THE SPECIALIST IN EMOTIONAL

MEMORY
Those unconscious opinions are emotional memories;
their storehouse is the amygdala. Research by LeDoux
and other neuroscientists now seems to suggest that the
hippocampus, which has long been considered the key
structure of the limbic system, is more involved in regis-
tering and making sense of perceptual patterns than
with emotional reactions. The hippocampus's main in-
put is in providing a keen memory of context, vital for
emotional meaning; it is the hippocampus that
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recognizes the differing significance of, say, a bear in the

zoo versus one in your backyard.
While the hippocampus remembers the dry facts, the
amygdala retains the emotional flavor that goes with
those facts. If we try to pass a car on a two-lane highway
and narrowly miss having a head-on collision, the hip-
pocampus retains the specifics of the incident, like what
stretch of road we were on, who was with us, what the
other car looked like. But it is the amygdala that ever-
after will send a surge of anxiety through us whenever
we try to pass a car in similar circumstances. As LeDoux
put it to me, "The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing
a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that
adds you don't really like her."
The brain uses a simple but cunning method to make
emotional memories register with special potency: the
very same neurochemical alerting systems that prime
the body to react to life-threatening emergencies by
fighting or fleeing also stamp the moment in memory
with vividness.8 Under stress (or anxiety, or presumably
even the intense excitement of joy) a nerve running
from the brain to the adrenal glands atop the kidneys
triggers a secretion of the hormones epinephrine and
norepinephrine, which surge through the body priming
it for an emergency. These hormones activate receptors
on the vagus nerve; while the vagus nerve carries
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messages from the brain to regulate the heart, it also

carries signals back into the brain, triggered by epineph-
rine and norepinephrine. The amygdala is the main site
in the brain where these signals go; they activate neur-
ons within the amygdala to signal other brain regions to
strengthen memory for what is happening.
This amygdala arousal seems to imprint in memory
most moments of emotional arousal with an added de-
gree of strength—that's why we are more likely, for ex-
ample, to remember where we went on a first date, or
what we were doing when we heard the news that the
space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The more in-
tense the amygdala arousal, the stronger the imprint;
the experiences that scare or thrill us the most in life are
among our most indelible memories. This means that, in
effect, the brain has two memory systems, one for ordin-
ary facts and one for emotionally charged ones. A spe-
cial 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.

OUT-OF-DATE NEURAL ALARMS

One drawback of such neural alarms is that the urgent
message the amygdala sends is sometimes, if not often,
 53/661

out-of-date—especially in the fluid social world we hu-

mans inhabit. As the repository for emotional memory,
the amygdala scans experience, comparing what is hap-
pening now with what happened in the past. Its method
of comparison is associative: when one key element of a
present situation is similar to the past, it can call it a
"match"—which is why this circuit is sloppy: it acts be-
fore there is full confirmation. It frantically commands
that we react to the present in ways that were imprinted
long ago, with thoughts, emotions, reactions learned in
response to events perhaps only dimly similar, but close
enough to alarm the amygdala.
Thus a former army nurse, traumatized by the relent-
less flood of ghastly wounds she once tended in war-
time, is suddenly swept with a mix of dread, loathing,
and panic—a repeat of her battlefield reaction triggered
once again, years later, by the stench when she opens a
closet door to find her toddler had stashed a stinking di-
aper there. A few spare elements of the situation is all
that need seem similar to some past danger for the amy-
gdala 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.
The emotional brain's imprecision in such moments is
added to by the fact that many potent emotional
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memories date from the first few years of life, in the re-
lationship between an infant and its caretakers. This is
especially true for traumatic events, like beatings or out-
right neglect. During this early period of life other brain
structures, particularly the hippocampus, which is cru-
cial for narrative memories, and the neocortex, seat of
rational thought, have yet to become fully developed. In
memory, the amygdala and hippocampus work hand-in-
hand; each stores and retrieves its special information
independently. While the hippocampus retrieves in-
formation, the amygdala determines if that information
has any emotional valence. But the amygdala, which
matures very quickly in the infant's brain, is much closer
to fully formed at birth.
LeDoux turns to the role of the amygdala in childhood
to support what has long been a basic tenet of psycho-
analytic thought: that the interactions of life's earliest
years lay down a set of emotional lessons based on the
attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant
and caretakers.9 These emotional lessons are so potent
and yet so difficult to understand from the vantage point
of adult life because, believes LeDoux, they are stored in
the amygdala as rough, wordless blueprints for emotion-
al life. Since these earliest emotional memories are es-
tablished at a time before infants have words for their
experience, when these emotional memories are
 55/661

triggered in later life there is no matching set of articu-

lated thoughts about the response that takes us over.
One reason we can be so baffled by our emotional out-
bursts, then, is that they often date from a time early in
our lives when things were bewildering and we did not
yet have words for comprehending events. We may have
the chaotic feelings, but not the words for the memories
that formed them.

WHEN EMOTIONS ARE FAST AND

SLOPPY
It was somewhere around three in the morning when a
huge object came crashing through the ceiling in a far
corner of my bedroom, spilling the contents of the attic
into the room. In a second I leapt out of bed and ran out
of the room, terrified the entire ceiling would cave in.
Then, realizing I was safe, I cautiously peered back in
the bedroom to see what had caused all the dam-
age—only to discover that the sound I had taken to be
the ceiling caving in was actually the fall of a tall pile of
boxes my wife had stacked in the corner the day before
while she sorted out her closet. Nothing had fallen from
the attic: there was no attic. The ceiling was intact, and
so was I.
My leap from bed while half-asleep—which might
have saved me from injury had it truly been the ceiling
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falling—illustrates the power of the amygdala to propel

us to action in emergencies, vital moments before the
neocortex has time to fully register what is actually go-
ing on. The emergency route from eye or ear to thal-
amus to amygdala is crucial: it saves time in an emer-
gency, when an instantaneous response is required. But
this circuit from thalamus to amygdala carries only a
small portion of sensory messages, with the majority
taking the main route up to the neocortex. So what re-
gisters in the amygdala via this express route is, at best,
a rough signal, just enough for a warning. As LeDoux
points out, "You don't need to know exactly what
something is to know that it may be dangerous."10
The direct route has a vast advantage in brain time,
which is reckoned in thousandths of a second. The amy-
gdala in a rat can begin a response to a perception in as
little as twelve milliseconds—twelve thousandths of a
second. The route from thalamus to neocortex to amyg-
dala takes about twice as long. Similar measurements
have yet to be made in the human brain, but the rough
ratio would likely hold.
In evolutionary terms, the survival value of this direct
route would have been great, allowing a quick-response
option that shaves a few critical milliseconds in reaction
time to dangers. Those milliseconds could well have
saved the lives of our protomammalian ancestors in
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such numbers that this arrangement is now featured in

every mammalian brain, including yours and mine. In
fact, while this circuit may play a relatively limited role
in human mental life, largely restricted to emotional
crises, much of the mental life of birds, fish, and reptiles
revolves around it, since their very survival depends on
constantly scanning for predators or prey. "This primit-
ive, minor brain system in mammals is the main brain
system in non-mammals," says LeDoux. "It offers a very
rapid way to turn on emotions. But it's a quick-and-dirty
process; the cells are fast, but not very precise."
Such imprecision in, say, a squirrel, is fine, since it
leads to erring on the side of safety, springing away at
the first sign of anything that might signal a looming en-
emy, or springing toward a hint of something edible. But
in human emotional life that imprecision can have dis-
astrous consequences for our relationships, since it
means, figuratively speaking, we can spring at or away
from the wrong thing—or person. (Consider, for ex-
ample, the waitress who dropped a tray of six dinners
when she glimpsed a woman with a huge, curly mane of
red hair—exactly like the woman her ex-husband had
left her for.)
Such inchoate emotional mistakes are based on feel-
ing prior to thought. LeDoux calls it "precognitive emo-
tion," a reaction based on neural bits and pieces of
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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
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.
Small wonder we can have so little insight into the
murk of our more explosive emotions, especially while
they still hold us in thrall. The amygdala can react in a
delirium of rage or fear before the cortex knows what is
going on because such raw emotion is triggered inde-
pendent of, and prior to, thought.

THE EMOTIONAL MANAGER

A friend's six-year-old daughter Jessica was spending
her first night ever sleeping over at a playmate's, and it
was unclear who was more nervous about it, mother or
daughter. While the mother tried not to let Jessica see
the intense anxiety she felt, her tension peaked near
midnight that night, as she was getting ready for bed
and heard the phone ring. Dropping her toothbrush, she
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raced to the phone, her heart pounding, images of Jes-

sica in terrible distress racing through her mind.
The mother snatched the receiver, and blurted, "Jes-
sica!" into the phone—only to hear a woman's voice say,
"Oh, I think this must be a wrong number...."
At that, the mother recovered her composure, and in a
polite, measured tone, asked, "What number were you
calling?"
While the amygdala is at work in priming an anxious,
impulsive reaction, another part of the emotional brain
allows for a more fitting, corrective response. The
brain's clamper switch for the amygdala's surges ap-
pears to lie at the other end of a major circuit to the neo-
cortex, in the prefrontal lobes just behind the forehead.
The prefrontal cortex seems to be at work when
someone is fearful or enraged, but stifles or controls the
feeling in order to deal more effectively with the situ-
ation at hand, or when a reappraisal calls for a com-
pletely different response, as with the worried mother
on the phone. This neocortical area of the brain brings a
more analytic or appropriate response to our emotional
impulses, modulating the amygdala and other limbic
areas.
Ordinarily the prefrontal areas govern our emotional
reactions from the start. The largest projection of sens-
ory information from the thalamus, remember, goes not
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to the amygdala, but to the neocortex and its many cen-

ters for taking in and making sense of what is being per-
ceived; that information and our response to it is co-
ordinated by the prefrontal lobes, the seat of planning
and organizing actions toward a goal, including emo-
tional ones. In the neocortex a cascading series of cir-
cuits registers and analyzes that information, compre-
hends it, and, through the prefrontal lobes, orchestrates
a reaction. If in the process an emotional response is
called for, the prefrontal lobes dictate it, working hand-
in-hand with the amygdala and other circuits in the
emotional brain.
This progression, which allows for discernment in
emotional response, is the standard arrangement, with
the significant exception of emotional emergencies.
When an emotion triggers, within moments the pre-
frontal lobes perform what amounts to a risk/benefit ra-
tio of myriad possible reactions, and bet that one of
them is best.11 For animals, when to attack, when to run.
And for we humans . . . when to attack, when to
run—and also, when to placate, persuade, seek sym-
pathy, stonewall, provoke guilt, whine, put on a facade
of bravado, be contemptuous—and so on, through the
whole repertoire of emotional wiles.
The neocortical response is slower in brain time than
the hijack mechanism because it involves more circuitry.
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It can also be more judicious and considered, since more

thought precedes feeling. When we register a loss and
become sad, or feel happy after a triumph, or mull over
something someone has said or done and then get hurt
or angry, the neocortex is at work.
Just as with the amygdala, absent the workings of the
prefrontal lobes, much of emotional life would fall away;
lacking an understanding that something merits an
emotional response, none comes. This role of the pre-
frontal lobes in emotions has been suspected by neuro-
logists since the advent in the 1940s of that rather des-
perate—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 the 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—sever the links between the
prefrontal lobes and the rest of the brain, and patients'
distress was "relieved." Unfortunately, the cost was that
most of patients' emotional lives seemed to vanish, too.
The key circuitry had been destroyed.
Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynam-
ics: triggering of the amygdala and a failure to activate
the neocortical processes that usually keep emotional
response in balance—or a recruitment of the neocortical
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12
zones to the emotional urgency. 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.13
The key “off switch” for distressing emotion seems to
be the left prefrontal lobe. Neuropsychologists studying
moods in patients with injuries to parts of the frontal
lobes have determined that one of the tasks of the left
frontal lobe is to act as a neural thermostat, regulating
unpleasant emotions. The right prefrontal lobes are a
seat of negative feelings like fear and aggression, while
the left lobes keep those raw emotions in check, prob-
ably by inhibiting the right lobe.14 In one group of stroke
patients, for example, those whose lesions were in the
left prefrontal cortex were prone to catastrophic worries
and fears; those with lesions on the right were "unduly
cheerful"; during neurological exams they joked around
and were so laid back they clearly did not care how well
they did.15 And then there was the case of the happy
husband: a man whose right prefrontal lobe had been
partially removed in surgery for a brain malformation.
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His wife told physicians that after the operation he un-

derwent a dramatic personality change, becoming less
easily upset and, she was happy to say, more affection-
ate.16
The left prefrontal lobe, in short, seems to be part of a
neural circuit that can switch off, or at least dampen
down, all but the strongest negative surges of emotion.
If the amygdala often acts as an emergency trigger, the
left prefrontal lobe appears to be part of the brain's “off
switch” for disturbing emotion: the amygdala proposes,
the prefrontal lobe disposes. These prefrontal-limbic
connections are crucial in mental life far beyond fine-
tuning emotion; they are essential for navigating us
through the decisions that matter most in life.

HARMONIZING EMOTION AND

THOUGHT
The connections between the amygdala (and related
limbic structures) and the neocortex are the hub of the
battles or cooperative treaties struck between head and
heart, thought and feeling. This circuitry explains why
emotion is so crucial to effective thought, both in mak-
ing wise decisions and in simply allowing us to think
clearly.
Take the power of emotions to disrupt thinking itself.
Neuroscientists use the term "working memory" for the
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capacity of attention that holds in mind the facts essen-

tial for completing a given task or problem, whether it
be the ideal features one seeks in a house while touring
several prospects, or the elements of a reasoning prob-
lem on a test. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region
responsible for working memory.17 But circuits from the
limbic brain to the prefrontal lobes mean that the sig-
nals 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, crip-
pling the capacity to learn.
These deficits, if more subtle, are not always tapped
by IQ testing, though they show up through more tar-
geted neuropsychological measures, as well as in a
child's continual agitation and impulsivity. In one study,
for example, primary school boys who had above-aver-
age IQ scores but nevertheless were doing poorly in
school were found via these neuropsychological tests to
have impaired frontal cortex functioning.18 They also
were impulsive and anxious, often disruptive and in
trouble—suggesting faulty prefrontal control over their
limbic urges. Despite their intellectual potential, these
are the children at highest risk for problems like
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academic failure, alcoholism, and criminality—not be-

cause their intellect is deficient, but because their con-
trol over their emotional life is impaired. 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.
Consider, too, the role of emotions in even the most
"rational" decision-making. In work with far-reaching
implications for understanding mental life, Dr. Antonio
Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa College
of Medicine, has made careful studies of just what is im-
paired in patients with damage to the prefrontal-amyg-
dala circuit.19 Their decision-making is terribly
flawed—and yet they show no deterioration at all in IQ
or any cognitive ability. Despite their intact intelligence,
they make disastrous choices in business and their per-
sonal lives, and can even obsess endlessly over a de-
cision so simple as when to make an appointment.
Dr. Damasio argues that their decisions are so bad be-
cause they have lost access to their emotional learning.
As the meeting point between thought and emotion, the
prefrontal-amygdala circuit is a crucial doorway to the
repository for the likes and dislikes we acquire over the
course of a lifetime. Cut off from emotional memory in
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the amygdala, whatever the neocortex mulls over no

longer triggers the emotional reactions that have been
associated with it in the past—everything takes on a gray
neutrality. A stimulus, be it a favorite pet or a detested
acquaintance, no longer triggers either attraction or
aversion; these patients have "forgotten" all such emo-
tional lessons because they no longer have access to
where they are stored in the amygdala.
Evidence like this leads Dr. Damasio to the counter-
intuitive position that feelings are typically indispens-
able for rational decisions; they point us in the proper
direction, where dry logic can then be of best use. While
the world often confronts us with an unwieldy array of
choices (How should you invest your retirement sav-
ings? Whom should you marry?), the emotional learning
that life has given us (such as the memory of a dis-
astrous investment or a painful breakup) sends signals
that streamline the decision by eliminating some op-
tions and highlighting others at the outset. In this way,
Dr. Damasio argues, the emotional brain is as involved
in reasoning as is the thinking brain.
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 dis-
abling—thought itself. Likewise, the thinking brain plays
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an executive role in our emotions—except in those mo-

ments when emotions surge out of control and the emo-
tional brain runs rampant.
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, in-
tellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelli-
gence. Ordinarily the complementarity 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 intel-
lectual ability.
This turns the old understanding of the tension
between reason and feeling on its head: it is not that we
want to do away with emotion and put reason in its
place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent
balance of the two. The old paradigm held an ideal of
reason freed of the pull of emotion. The new paradigm
urges us to harmonize head and heart. To do that well in
our lives means we must first understand more exactly
what it means to use emotion intelligently.
 PART TWO
THE NATURE OF
EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
 3
When Smart Is Dumb
Exactly why David Pologruto, a high-school physics
teacher, was stabbed with a kitchen knife by one of his
star students is still debatable. But the facts as widely re-
ported are these:
Jason H., a sophomore and straight-A student at a
Coral Springs, Florida, high school, was fixated on get-
ting into medical school. Not just any medical
school—he dreamt of Harvard. But Pologruto, his phys-
ics teacher, had given Jason an 80 on a quiz. Believing
the grade—a mere B—put his dream in jeopardy, Jason
took a butcher knife to school and, in a confrontation
with Pologruto in the physics lab, stabbed his teacher in
the collarbone before being subdued in a struggle.
A judge found Jason innocent, temporarily insane
during the incident—a panel of four psychologists and
psychiatrists swore he was psychotic during the fight.
Jason claimed he had been planning to commit suicide
because of the test score, and had gone to Pologruto to
tell him he was killing himself because of the bad grade.
Pologruto told a different story: "I think he tried to com-
pletely do me in with the knife" because he was infuri-
ated over the bad grade.
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After transferring to a private school, Jason graduated

two years later at the top of his class. A perfect grade in
regular classes would have given him a straight-A, 4.0
average, but Jason had taken enough advanced courses
to raise his grade-point average to 4.614—way beyond
A+. Even as Jason graduated with highest honors, his
old physics teacher, David Pologruto, complained that
Jason had never apologized or even taken responsibility
for the attack.1
The question is, how could someone of such obvious
intelligence do something so irrational—so downright
dumb? The answer: Academic intelligence has little to
do with emotional life. The brightest among us can
founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly
impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor
pilots of their private lives.
One of psychology's open secrets is the relative inabil-
ity of grades, IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular
mystique, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life.
To be sure, there is a relationship between IQ and life
circumstances for large groups as a whole: many people
with very low IQs end up in menial jobs, and those with
high IQs tend to become well-paid—but by no means
always.
There are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ
predicts success—many (or more) exceptions than cases
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that fit the rule. At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent

to the factors that determine life success, which leaves
80 percent to other forces. As one observer notes, "The
vast majority of one's ultimate niche in society is de-
termined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to
luck."2
Even Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose
book The Bell Curve imputes a primary importance to
IQ, acknowledge this; as they point out, "Perhaps a
freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had better not
have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if in-
stead he wants to run his own business, become a U.S.
Senator or make a million dollars, he should not put
aside his dreams.... The link between test scores and
those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other
characteristics that he brings to life."3
My concern is with a key set of these "other character-
istics," emotional intelligence: abilities such as being
able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frus-
trations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to
regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping
the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. Unlike
IQ, with its nearly one-hundred-year history of research
with hundreds of thousands of people, emotional intelli-
gence is a new concept. No one can yet say exactly how
much of the variability from person to person in life's
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course it accounts for. But what data exist suggest it can

be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.
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.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND

DESTINY
I remember the fellow in my own class at Amherst Col-
lege who had attained five perfect 800 scores on the
SAT and other achievement tests he took before enter-
ing. Despite his formidable intellectual abilities, he
spent most of his time hanging out, staying up late, and
missing classes by sleeping until noon. It took him al-
most ten years to finally get his degree.
IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of
people with roughly equal promises, schooling, and op-
portunity. When ninety-five Harvard students from the
classes of the 1940s—a time when people with a wider
spread of IQ were at Ivy League schools than is
presently the case—were followed into middle age, the
men with the highest test scores in college were not par-
ticularly successful compared to their lower-scoring
peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in their
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field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor
the most happiness with friendships, family, and ro-
mantic relationships.4
A similar follow-up in middle age was done with 450
boys, most sons of immigrants, two thirds from families
on welfare, who grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts,
at the time a "blighted slum" a few blocks from Harvard.
A third had IQs below 90. But again IQ had little rela-
tionship to how well they had done at work or in the rest
of their lives; for instance, 7 percent of men with IQs un-
der 80 were unemployed for ten or more years, but so
were 7 percent of men with IQs over 100. To be sure,
there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ
and socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But child-
hood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations,
control emotions, and get on with other people made
the greater difference.5
Consider also data from an ongoing study of eighty-
one valedictorians and salutatorians from the 1981 class
in Illinois high schools. All, of course, had the highest
grade-point averages in their schools. But while they
continued to achieve well in college, getting excellent
grades, by their late twenties they had climbed to only
average levels of success. Ten years after graduating
from high school, only one in four were at the highest
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level of young people of comparable age in their chosen

profession, and many were doing much less well.
Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston
University, one of the researchers tracking the vale-
dictorians, explains, "I think we've discovered the 'duti-
ful'—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."6
And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers
virtually no preparation for the turmoil—or opportun-
ity—life's vicissitudes bring. Yet even though a high IQ is
no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life,
our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities,
ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits—some
might call it character—that also matters immensely for
our personal destiny. Emotional life is a domain that, as
surely as math or reading, can be handled with greater
or lesser skill, and requires its unique set of competen-
cies. And how adept a person is at those is crucial to un-
derstanding why one person thrives in life while anoth-
er, 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.
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Of course, there are many paths to success in life, and

many domains in which other aptitudes are rewarded.
In our increasingly knowledge-based society, technical
skill is certainly one. There is a children's joke: "What do
you call a nerd fifteen years from now?" The answer:
"Boss." But even among "nerds" emotional intelligence
offers an added edge in the workplace, as we shall see in
Part Three. Much evidence testifies that people who are
emotionally adept—who know and manage their own
feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with oth-
er people's feelings—are at an advantage in any domain
of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or
picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in or-
ganizational politics. People with well-developed emo-
tional skills are also more likely to be content and effect-
ive in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that
foster their own productivity; people who cannot mar-
shal some control over their emotional life fight inner
battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and
clear thought.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF
INTELLIGENCE
To the casual observer, four-year-old Judy might seem a
wallflower among her more gregarious playmates. She
hangs back from the action at playtime, staying on the
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margins of games rather than plunging into the center.

But Judy is actually a keen observer of the social politics
of her preschool classroom, perhaps the most sophistic-
ated of her playmates in her insights into the tides of
feeling within the others.
Her sophistication is not apparent until Judy's teacher
gathers the four-year-olds around to play what they call
the Classroom Game. The Classroom Game—a doll-
house replica of Judy's own preschool classroom, with
stick figures who have for heads small photos of the stu-
dents and teachers—is a test of social perceptiveness.
When Judy's teacher asks her to put each girl and boy in
the part of the room they like to play in most—the art
corner, the blocks corner, and so on—Judy does so with
complete accuracy. And when asked to put each boy and
girl with the children they like to play with most, Judy
shows she can match best friends for the entire class.
Judy's accuracy reveals that she has a perfect social
map of her class, a level of perceptiveness exceptional
for a four-year-old. These are the skills that, in later life,
might allow Judy to blossom into a star in any of the
fields where "people skills" count, from sales and man-
agement to diplomacy.
That Judy's social brilliance was spotted at all, let
alone this early, was due to her being a student at the
Eliot-Pearson Preschool on the campus of Tufts
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University, where Project Spectrum, a curriculum that

intentionally cultivates a variety of kinds of intelligence,
was then being developed. Project Spectrum recognizes
that the human repertoire of abilities goes far beyond
the three R's, the narrow band of word-and-number
skills that schools traditionally focus on. It acknow-
ledges that capacities such as Judy's social perceptive-
ness are talents that an education can nurture rather
than ignore or even frustrate. By encouraging children
to develop a full range of the abilities that they will actu-
ally draw on to succeed, or use simply to be fulfilled in
what they do, school becomes an education in life skills.
The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is
Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard School
of Education.7 "The time has come," Gardner told me,
"to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The
single most important contribution education can make
to a child's development is to help him toward a field
where his talents best suit him, where he will be satis-
fied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that.
Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if
you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college pro-
fessor. And we evaluate everyone along the way accord-
ing to whether they meet that narrow standard of suc-
cess. We should spend less time ranking children and
more time helping them to identify their natural
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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."8
If anyone sees the limits of the old ways of thinking
about intelligence, it is Gardner. He points out that the
glory days of the IQ tests began during World War I,
when two million American men were sorted out
through the first mass paper-and-pencil form of the IQ
test, freshly developed by Lewis Terman, a psychologist
at Stanford. This led to decades of what Gardner calls
the "IQ way of thinking": "that people are either smart
or not, are born that way, that there's nothing much you
can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one
of the smart ones or not. The SAT test for college admis-
sions is based on the same notion of a single kind of
aptitude that determines your future. This way of think-
ing permeates society."
Gardner'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 varieties. His list in-
cludes the two standard academic kinds, verbal and
mathematical-logical alacrity, but it goes on to include
the spatial capacity seen in, say, an outstanding artist or
architect; the kinesthetic genius displayed in the
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physical fluidity and grace of a Martha Graham or Magic

Johnson; and the musical gifts of a Mozart or YoYo Ma.
Rounding out the list are two faces of what Gardner calls
"the personal intelligences": interpersonal skills, like
those of a great therapist such as Carl Rogers or a world-
class leader such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and the "in-
trapsychic" capacity that could emerge, on the one hand,
in the brilliant insights of Sigmund Freud, or, with less
fanfare, in the inner contentment that arises from attun-
ing one's life to be in keeping with one's true feelings.
The operative word in this view of intelligences is
multiple: Gardner's model pushes way beyond the
standard concept of IQ as a single, immutable factor. It
recognizes that the tests that tyrannized us as we went
through school—from the achievement tests that sorted
us out into those who would be shunted toward technic-
al schools and those destined for college, to the SATs
that determined what, if any, college we would be al-
lowed to attend—are based on a limited notion of intelli-
gence, one out of touch with the true range of skills and
abilities that matter for life over and beyond IQ.
Gardner acknowledges that seven is an arbitrary fig-
ure for the variety of intelligences; there is no magic
number to the multiplicity of human talents. At one
point, Gardner and his research colleagues had
stretched these seven to a list of twenty different
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varieties of intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence, for

example, broke down into four distinct abilities: leader-
ship, the ability to nurture relationships and keep
friends, the ability to resolve conflicts, and skill at the
kind of social analysis that four-year-old Judy excels at.
This multifaceted view of intelligence offers a richer
picture of a child's ability and potential for success than
the standard IQ. When Spectrum students were evalu-
ated on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale—once the
gold standard of IQ tests—and again by a battery de-
signed to measure Gardner's spectrum of intelligences,
there was no significant relationship between children's
scores on the two tests.9 The five children with the
highest IQs (from 125 to 133) showed a variety of pro-
files on the ten strengths measured by the Spectrum
test. For example, of the five "smartest" children accord-
ing to the IQ tests, one was strong in three areas, three
had strengths in two areas, and one "smart" child had
just one Spectrum strength. Those strengths were
scattered: four of these children's strengths were in mu-
sic, two in the visual arts, one in social understanding,
one in logic, two in language. None of the five high-IQ
kids were strong in movement, numbers, or mechanics;
movement and numbers were actually weak spots for
two of these five.
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Gardner's conclusion was that "the Stanford-Binet In-

telligence Scale did not predict successful performance
across or on a consistent subset of Spectrum activities."
On the other hand, the Spectrum scores give parents
and teachers clear guidance about the realms that these
children will take a spontaneous interest in, and where
they will do well enough to develop the passions that
could one day lead beyond proficiency to mastery.
Gardner's thinking about the multiplicity of intelli-
gence continues to evolve. Some ten years after he first
published his theory, Gardner gave these nutshell sum-
maries of the personal intelligences:

Inter personal intelligence is the ability to under-

stand other people: what motivates them, how
they work, how to work cooperatively with them.
Successful salespeople, politicians, teachers, clini-
cians, and religious leaders are all likely to be indi-
viduals with high degrees of interpersonal intelli-
gence, Intrapersonal intelligence . . . is a correlat-
ive ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form
an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be
able to use that model to operate effectively in
life.10

In another rendering, Gardner noted that the core of

interpersonal intelligence includes the "capacities to
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discern and respond appropriately to the moods, tem-

peraments, motivations, and desires of other people." In
intra-personal 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
behavior."11

SPOCK VS. DATA WHEN COGNITION

IS NOT ENOUGH
There is one dimension of personal intelligence that is
broadly pointed to, but little explored, in Gardner's elab-
orations: the role of emotions. Perhaps this is so be-
cause, as Gardner suggested to me, his work is so
strongly informed by a cognitive-science model of mind.
Thus his view of these intelligences emphasizes cogni-
tion—the understanding of oneself and of others in
motives, in habits of working, and in putting that insight
into use in conducting one's own life and getting along
with others. But like the kinesthetic realm, where phys-
ical brilliance manifests itself nonverbally, the realm of
the emotions extends, too, beyond the reach of language
and cognition.
While there is ample room in Gardner's descriptions
of the personal intelligences for insight into the play of
emotions and mastery in managing them, Gardner and
those who work with him have not pursued in great
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detail the role of feeling in these intelligences, focusing

more on cognitions about feeling. This focus, perhaps
unintentionally, leaves unexplored the rich sea of emo-
tions that makes the inner life and relationships so com-
plex, so compelling, and so often puzzling. And it leaves
yet to be plumbed both the sense in which there is intel-
ligence in the emotions and the sense in which intelli-
gence can be brought to emotions.
Gardner's emphasis on the cognitive elements in the
personal intelligences reflects the Zeitgeist of psycho-
logy that has shaped his views. Psychology's overem-
phasis on cognition even in the realm of emotion is, in
part, due to a quirk in the history of that science. During
the middle decades of this century academic psychology
was dominated by behaviorists in the mold of B. F. Skin-
ner, who felt that only behavior that could be seen ob-
jectively, from the outside, could be studied with sci-
entific accuracy. The behaviorists ruled all inner life, in-
cluding emotions, out-of-bounds for science.
Then, with the coming in the late 1960s of the "cognit-
ive revolution," the focus of psychological science turned
to how the mind registers and stores information, and
the nature of intelligence. But emotions were still off-
limits. Conventional wisdom among cognitive scientists
held that intelligence entails a cold, hard-nosed pro-
cessing of fact. It is hyperrational, rather like Star Treks
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Mr. Spock, the archetype of dry information bytes un-

muddied by feeling, embodying the idea that emotions
have no place in intelligence and only muddle our pic-
ture of mental life.
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 silicon that has
spawned the guiding metaphor for mind. The predomin-
ant models among cognitive scientists of how the mind
processes information have lacked an acknowledgment
that rationality is guided by—and can be swamped
by—feeling. The cognitive model is, in this regard, an
impoverished view of the mind, one that fails to explain
the Sturm und Drang of feelings that brings flavor to the
intellect. In order to persist in this view, cognitive sci-
entists themselves have had to ignore the relevance for
their models of mind of their personal hopes and fears,
their marital squabbles and professional jealousies—the
wash of feeling that gives life its flavor and its urgencies,
and which in every moment biases exactly how (and
how well or poorly) information is processed.
The lopsided scientific vision of an emotionally flat
mental life—which has guided the last eighty years of re-
search on intelligence—is gradually changing as
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psychology has begun to recognize the essential role of

feeling in thinking. Rather like the Spockish character
Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, psychology is
coming to appreciate the power and virtues of emotions
in mental life, as well as their dangers. After all, as Data
sees (to his own dismay, could he feel dismay), his cool
logic fails to bring the right human solution. Our hu-
manity is most evident in our feelings; Data seeks to
feel, knowing that something essential is missing. He
wants friendship, loyalty; like the Tin Man in The Wiz-
ard of Oz, he lacks a heart. Lacking the lyrical sense that
feeling brings, Data can play music or write poetry with
technical virtuosity, but not feel its passion. The lesson
of Data's yearning for yearning itself is that the higher
values of the human heart—faith, hope, devotion,
love—are missing entirely from the coldly cognitive
view. Emotions enrich; a model of mind that leaves
them out is impoverished.
When I asked Gardner about his emphasis on
thoughts about feelings, or metacognition, more than on
emotions themselves, he acknowledged that he tended
to view intelligence in a cognitive way, but told me,
"When I first wrote about the personal intelligences, I
was talking about emotion, especially in my notion of
intrapersonal intelligence—one component is emotion-
ally tuning in to yourself. It's the visceral-feeling signals
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you get that are essential for interpersonal intelligence.

But as it has developed in practice, the theory of mul-
tiple intelligence has evolved to focus more on meta-
cognition"—that is, awareness of one's mental pro-
cesses—"rather than on the full range of emotional
abilities."
Even so, Gardner appreciates how crucial these emo-
tional and relationship abilities are in the rough-and-
tumble of life. He points out that "many people with IQs
of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if the former
have poor intrapersonal intelligence and the latter have
a high one. And in the day-to-day world no intelligence
is more important than the interpersonal. If you don't
have it, you'll make poor choices about who to marry,
what job to take, and so on. We need to train children in
the personal intelligences in school."

CAN EMOTIONS BE INTELLIGENT?

To get a fuller understanding of just what such training
might be like, we must turn to other theorists who are
following Gardner's intellectual lead—most notably a
Yale psychologist, Peter Salovey, who has mapped in
great detail the ways in which we can bring intelligence
to our emotions.12 This endeavor is not new; over the
years even the most ardent theorists of IQ have occa-
sionally tried to bring emotions within the domain of
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intelligence, rather than seeing "emotion" and "intelli-

gence" as an inherent contradiction in terms. Thus E. L.
Thorndike, an eminent psychologist who was also influ-
ential in popularizing the notion of IQ in the 1920s and
1930s, proposed in a Harper's Magazine article that one
aspect of emotional intelligence, "social" intelli-
gence—the ability to understand others and "act wisely
in human relations"—was itself an aspect of a person's
IQ. Other psychologists of the time took a more cynical
view of social intelligence, seeing it in terms of skills for
manipulating other people—getting them to do what you
want, whether they want to or not. But neither of these
formulations of social intelligence held much sway with
theorists of IQ, and by 1960 an influential textbook on
intelligence tests pronounced social intelligence a "use-
less" concept.
But personal intelligence would not be ignored,
mainly because it makes both intuitive and common
sense. For example, when Robert Steinberg, another
Yale psychologist, asked people to describe an "intelli-
gent person," practical people skills were among the
main traits listed. More systematic research by Stern-
berg led him back to Thorndike's conclusion: that social
intelligence is both distinct from academic abilities and
a key part of what makes people do well in the practical-
ities of life. Among the practical intelligences that are,
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for instance, so highly valued in the workplace is the

kind of sensitivity that allows effective managers to pick
up tacit messages.13
In recent years a growing group of psychologists has
come to similar conclusions, agreeing with Gardner that
the old concepts of IQ revolved around a narrow band of
linguistic and math skills, and that doing well on IQ
tests was most directly a predictor of success in the
classroom or as a professor but less and less so as life's
paths diverged from academe. These psycholo-
gists—Sternberg and Salovey among them—have taken a
wider view of intelligence, trying to reinvent it in terms
of what it takes to lead life successfully. And that line of
enquiry leads back to an appreciation of just how crucial
"personal" or emotional intelligence is.
Salovey subsumes Gardner's personal intelligences in
his basic definition of emotional intelligence, expanding
these abilities into five main domains:14

1. Knowing one's emotions. Self-awareness—recogniz-

ing a feeling as it happens —is the keystone of emotional
intelligence. As we will see in Chapter 4, the ability to
monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to
psychological insight and self-understanding. An inabil-
ity to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy.
People with greater certainty about their feelings are
better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how
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they really feel about personal decisions from whom to

marry to what job to take.
2. Managing emotions. Handling feelings so they are
appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness.
Chapter 5 will examine the capacity to soothe oneself, to
shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or irritability—and
the consequences of failure at this basic emotional skill.
People who are poor in this ability are constantly bat-
tling feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can
bounce back far more quickly from life's setbacks and
upsets.
3. Motivating oneself. As Chapter 6 will show, mar-
shaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential for
paying attention, for self-motivation and mastery, and
for creativity. Emotional self-control—delaying gratifica-
tion and stifling impulsiveness—underlies accomplish-
ment of every sort. And being able to get into the "flow"
state enables outstanding performance of all kinds.
People who have this skill tend to be more highly pro-
ductive and effective in whatever they undertake.
4. Recognizing emotions in others. Empathy, another
ability that builds on emotional self-awareness, is the
fundamental "people skill." Chapter 7 will investigate
the roots of empathy, the social cost of being
emotionally tone-deaf, and the reasons empathy kindles
altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to
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the subtle social signals that indicate what others need

or want. This makes them better at callings such as the
caring professions, teaching, sales, and management.
5. Handling relationships. The art of relationships is,
in large part, skill in managing emotions in others.
Chapter 8 looks at social competence and incompetence,
and the specific skills involved. These are the abilities
that undergird popularity, leadership, and interpersonal
effectiveness. People who excel in these skills do well at
anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others;
they are social stars.

Of course, people differ in their abilities in each of

these domains; some of us may be quite adept at hand-
ling, say, our own anxiety, but relatively inept at sooth-
ing someone else's upsets. The underlying basis for our
level of ability is, no doubt, neural, but as we will see,
the brain is remarkably plastic, constantly learning.
Lapses in emotional skills can be remedied: to a great
extent each of these domains represents a body of habit
and response that, with the right effort, can be improved
on.

IQ AND EMOTIONS INTELLIGENCE:

PURE TYPES
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IQ and emotional intelligence are not opposing compet-

encies, but rather separate ones. We all mix intellect and
emotional acuity; people with a high IQ but low emo-
tional intelligence (or low IQ and high emotional intelli-
gence) are, despite the stereotypes, relatively rare.
Indeed, there is a slight correlation between IQ and
some aspects of emotional intelligence—though small
enough to make clear these are largely independent
entities.
Unlike the familiar tests for IQ, there is, as yet, no
single paper-and-pencil test that yields an "emotional
intelligence score" and there may never be one. Al-
though there is ample research on each of its compon-
ents, some of them, such as empathy, are best tested by
sampling a person's actual ability at the task—for ex-
ample, by having them read a person's feelings from a
video of their facial expressions. Still, using a measure
for what he calls "ego resilience" which is quite similar
to emotional intelligence (it includes the main social and
emotional competences), Jack Block, a psychologist at
the University of California at Berkeley, has made a
comparison of two theoretical pure types: people high in
IQ versus people high in emotional aptitudes.15 The dif-
ferences are telling.
The high-IQ pure type (that is, setting aside emotional
intelligence) is almost a caricature of the intellectual,
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adept in the realm of 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 ambi-
tious and productive, predictable and dogged, and un-
troubled by concerns about himself. He also tends to be
critical and condescending, fastidious and inhibited, un-
easy with sexuality and sensual experience, unexpress-
ive and detached, and emotionally bland and cold.
By contrast, men who are high in emotional intelli-
gence 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 an ethical out-
look; they are sympathetic and caring in their relation-
ships. 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 in-
tellectual 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).
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Emotionally intelligent women, by contrast, tend to be

assertive and express their feelings directly, and to feel
positive about themselves; life holds meaning for them.
Like the men, they are outgoing and gregarious, and ex-
press their feelings 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 experi-
ence. 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 di-
mensions adds separately to a person's qualities. To the
degree a person has both cognitive and emotional intel-
ligence, these pictures merge. Still, of the two, emotional
intelligence adds far more of the qualities that make us
more fully human.
 4
Know Thyself
A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once
challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heav-
en and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, "You're
nothing but a lout—I can't waste my time with the likes
of you!"
His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage
and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, "I could
kill you for your impertinence."
"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed
out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai
calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking
the monk for the insight.
"And that," said the monk, "is heaven."
The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agit-
ated state illustrates the crucial difference between be-
ing caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you
are being swept away by it. Socrates's injunction "Know
thyself speaks to this keystone of emotional intelligence:
awareness of one's own feelings as they occur.
It might seem at first glance that our feelings are obvi-
ous; more thoughtful reflection reminds us of times we
have been all too oblivious to what we really felt about
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something, or awoke to these feelings late in the game.

Psychologists use the rather ponderous term metacog-
nition to refer to an awareness of thought process, and
metamood to mean awareness of one's own emotions. I
prefer the term self-awareness, in the sense of an ongo-
ing attention to one's internal states.1 In this self-reflex-
ive awareness mind observes and investigates experi-
ence itself, including the emotions.2
This quality of awareness is akin to what Freud de-
scribed as an "evenly hovering attention," and which he
commended to those who would do psychoanalysis.
Such attention takes in whatever passes through aware-
ness with impartiality, as an interested yet unreactive
witness. Some psychoanalysts call it the "observing ego,"
the capacity of self-awareness that allows the analyst to
monitor his own reactions to what the patient is saying,
and which the process of free association nurtures in the
patient.3
Such self-awareness would seem to require an activ-
ated neocortex, particularly the language areas, attuned
to identify and name the emotions being aroused. Self-
awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by
emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is per-
ceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-
reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions. William
Styron seems to be describing something like this
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faculty of mind in writing of his deep depression, telling

of a sense "of being accompanied by a second self—a
wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his
double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as
his companion struggles."4
At its best, self-observation allows just such an equan-
imous awareness of passionate or turbulent feelings. At
a minimum, it manifests itself simply as a slight
stepping-back from experience, a parallel stream of con-
sciousness that is "meta": hovering above or beside the
main flow, aware of what is happening rather than being
immersed and lost in it. It is the difference between, for
example, being murderously enraged at someone and
having the self-reflexive thought "This is anger I'm feel-
ing" even as you are enraged. In terms of the neural
mechanics of awareness, this subtle shift in mental
activity presumably signals that neocortical circuits are
actively monitoring the emotion, a first step in gaining
some control. This awareness of emotions is the funda-
mental emotional competence on which others, such as
emotional self-control, build.
Self-awareness, in short, means being "aware of both
our mood and our thoughts about that mood," in the
words of John Mayer, a University of New Hampshire
psychologist who, with Yale's Peter Salovey, is a cofor-
mulator of the theory of emotional intelligence.5 Self-
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awareness can be a nonreactive, nonjudgmental atten-

tion to inner states. But Mayer finds that this sensibility
also can be less equanimous; typical thoughts bespeak-
ing emotional self-awareness include "I shouldn't feel
this way," "I'm thinking good things to cheer up," and,
for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting
thought "Don't think about it" in reaction to something
highly upsetting.
Although there is a logical distinction between being
aware of feelings and acting to change them, Mayer
finds that for all practical purposes the two usually go
hand-in-hand: to recognize a foul mood is to want to get
out of it. This recognition, however, is distinct from the
efforts we make to keep from acting on an emotional im-
pulse. When we say "Stop that!" to a child whose anger
has led him to hit a playmate, we may stop the hitting,
but the anger still simmers. The child's thoughts are still
fixated on the trigger for the anger—"But he stole my
toy!"—and the anger continues unabated. Self-aware-
ness has a more powerful effect on strong, aversive feel-
ings: the realization "This is anger I'm feeling" offers a
greater degree of freedom—not just the option not to act
on it, but the added option to try to let go of it.
Mayer finds that people tend to fall into distinctive
styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions:6
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• Self-aware. Aware of their moods as they are having

them, these people understandably have some sophistic-
ation 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
manage their emotions.
• Engulfed. These are people who often feel swamped
by their emotions and helpless to escape them, as
though their moods have taken charge. They are mer-
curial and not very aware of their feelings, so that they
are lost in them rather than having some perspective. As
a result, they do little to try to escape bad moods, feeling
that they have no control over their emotional life. They
often feel overwhelmed and emotionally out of control.
• Accepting. While these people are often clear about
what they are feeling, they also tend to be accepting of
their moods, and so don't try to change them. There
seem to be two branches of the accepting type: those
who are usually in good moods and so have little motiv-
ation to change them, and people who, despite their
clarity about their moods, are susceptible to bad ones
but accept them with a laissez-faire attitude, doing
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nothing to change them despite their distress—a pattern

found among, say, depressed people who are resigned to
their despair.

THE PASSIONATE AND THE

INDIFFERENT
Imagine for a moment that you're on an airplane flying
from New York to San Francisco. It's been a smooth
flight, but as you approach the Rockies the pilot's voice
comes over the plane intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen,
there's some turbulence ahead. Please return to your
seats and fasten your seat-belts." And then the plane
hits the turbulence, which is rougher than you've ever
endured—the airplane is tossed up and down and side to
side like a beach ball in the waves.
The question is, what do you do? Are you the kind of
person who buries yourself in your book or magazine, or
continues watching the movie, tuning out the turbu-
lence? Or are you likely to take out the emergency card
and review the precautions, or watch the flight attend-
ants to see if they show signs of panic, or strain to hear
the engines to see if there's anything worrisome?
Which of these responses comes more naturally to us
is a sign of our favored attentional stance under duress.
The airplane scenario itself is an item from a psycholo-
gical test developed by Suzanne Miller, a psychologist at
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Temple University, to assess whether people tend to be

vigilant, attending carefully to every detail of a distress-
ing predicament, or, in contrast, deal with such anxious
moments by trying to distract themselves. These two at-
tentional stances toward distress have very different
consequences for how people experience their own emo-
tional reactions. Those who tune in under duress can, by
the very act of attending so carefully, unwittingly ampli-
fy the magnitude of their own reactions—especially if
their tuning in is devoid of the equanimity of self-aware-
ness. The result is that their emotions seem all the more
intense. Those who tune out, who distract themselves,
notice less about their own reactions, and so minimize
the experience of their emotional response, if not the
size of the response itself.
At the extremes, this means that for some people
emotional awareness is overwhelming, while for others
it barely exists. Consider the college student who, one
evening, spotted a fire that had broken out in his dorm,
went to get a fire extinguisher, and put the fire out.
Nothing unusual—except that on his way to get the ex-
tinguisher and then on the way back to the fire, he
walked instead of running. The reason? He didn't feel
there was any urgency.
This story was told to me by Edward Diener, a
University of Illinois at Urbana psychologist who has
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been studying the intensity with which people experi-

ence their emotions.7 The college student stood out in
his collection of case studies as one of the least intense
Diener had ever encountered. He was, essentially, a man
without passions, someone who goes through life feeling
little or nothing, even about an emergency like a fire.
By contrast, consider a woman at the opposite end of
Diener's spectrum. When she once lost her favorite pen,
she was distraught for days. Another time she was so
thrilled on seeing an ad for a big sale on women's shoes
at an expensive store that she dropped what she was do-
ing, hopped in her car, and drove three hours to the
store in Chicago.
Diener finds that women, in general, feel both positive
and negative emotions more strongly than do men. And,
sex differences aside, emotional life is richer for those
who notice more. For one thing, this enhanced emotion-
al sensitivity means that for such people the least pro-
vocation unleashes emotional storms, whether heavenly
or hellish, while those at the other extreme barely exper-
ience any feeling even under the most dire
circumstances.

THE MAN WITHOUT FEELINGS

Gary infuriated his fiancée, Ellen, because even though
he was intelligent, thoughtful, and a successful surgeon,
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Gary was emotionally flat, completely unresponsive to

any and all shows of feeling. While Gary could speak
brilliantly of science and art, when it came to his feel-
ings—even for Ellen—he fell silent. Try as she might to
elicit some passion from him, Gary was impassive, obli-
vious. "I don't naturally express my feelings,' Gary told
the therapist he saw at Ellen's insistence. When it came
to emotional life, he added, "I don't know what to talk
about; I have no strong feelings, either positive or
negative."
Ellen was not alone in being frustrated by Gary's
aloofness; as he confided to his therapist, he was unable
to speak openly about his feelings with anyone in his
life. The reason: He did not know what he felt in the first
place. So far as he could tell, he had no angers, no sad-
nesses, no joys.8
As his own therapist observes, this emotional blank-
ness makes Gary and others like him colorless, bland:
"They bore everybody. That's why their wives send them
into treatment." Gary's emotional flatness exemplifies
what psychiatrists call alexithymia, from the Greek a-
fox "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 actu-
ally be because of their inability to express emotion
rather than from an absence of emotion altogether. Such
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people were first noticed by psychoanalysts; puzzled by

a class of patients who were untreatable by that method
because: they reported no feelings, no fantasies, and col-
orless dreams—in short, no inner emotional life to talk
about at all.9 The clinical features that mark alexithym-
ics include having difficulty describing feelings—their
own or anyone else's—and a sharply limited emotional
vocabulary.10 What's more, they have trouble discrimin-
ating among emotions as well as between emotion and
bodily sensation, so that they might tell of having but-
terflies in the stomach, palpitations, sweating, and dizzi-
ness—but they would not know they are feeling anxious.
"They give the impression of being different, alien be-
ings, having come from an entirely different world, liv-
ing in the midst of a society which is dominated by feel-
ings," is the description given by Dr. Peter Sifneos, the
Harvard psychiatrist who in 1972 coined the term alexi-
thymia.11 Alexithymics rarely cry, for example, but if
they do their tears are copious. Still, they are bewildered
if asked what the tears are all about. One patient with
alexithymia was so upset after seeing a movie about a
woman with eight children who was dying of cancer that
she cried herself to sleep. When her therapist suggested
that perhaps she was upset because the movie reminded
her of her own mother, who was in actuality dying of
cancer, the woman sat motionless, bewildered and
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silent. When her therapist then asked her how she felt at
that moment, she said she felt "awful," but couldn't cla-
rify her feelings beyond that. And, she added, from time
to time she found herself crying, but never knew exactly
what she was crying about.12
And that is the nub of the problem. It is not that alexi-
thymics never feel, but that they are unable to
know—and especially unable to put into words—pre-
cisely what their feelings are. They are utterly lacking in
the fundamental skill of emotional intelligence, self-
awareness—knowing what we are feeling as emotions
roil within us. Alexithymics belie the common-sense no-
tion that it is perfectly self-evident what we are feeling:
they haven't a clue. When something—or more likely,
someone—does move them to feeling, they find the ex-
perience baffling and overwhelming, something to avoid
at all costs. Feelings come to them, when they come at
all, as a befuddling bundle of distress; as the patient
who cried at the movie put it, they feel "awful," but can't
say exactly which kind of awful it is they feel.
This basic confusion about feelings often seems to
lead them to complain of vague medical problems when
they are actually experiencing emotional distress—a
phenomenon known in psychiatry as somaticizing, mis-
taking an emotional ache for a physical one (and differ-
ent from a psychosomatic disease, in which emotional
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problems cause genuine medical ones). Indeed, much of

the psychiatric interest in alexithymics is in weeding
them out from among those who come to doctors seek-
ing help, for they are prone to lengthy—and fruit-
less—pursuit of a medical diagnosis and treatment for
what is actually an emotional problem.
While no one can as yet say for sure what causes alexi-
thymia, Dr. Sifneos proposes a disconnection between
the limbic system and the neocortex, particularly its
verbal centers, which fits well with what we are learning
about the emotional brain. Patients with severe seizures
who had that connection surgically severed to relieve
their symptoms, notes Sifneos, became emotionally flat,
like people with alexithymia, unable to put their feelings
into words and suddenly devoid of fantasy life. In short,
though the circuits of the emotional brain may react
with feelings, the neocortex is not able to sort out these
feelings and add the nuance of language to them. As
Henry Roth observed in his novel Call It Sleep about
this power of language, "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.

IN PRAISE OF GUT FEELING

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Elliot's tumor, growing just behind his forehead, was the

size of a small orange; surgery removed it completely.
Although the surgery was declared a success, afterward
people who knew him well said that Elliot was no longer
Elliot—he had undergone a drastic personality change.
Once a successful corporate lawyer, Elliot could no
longer hold a job. His wife left him. Squandering his
savings in fruitless investments, he was reduced to living
in a spare bedroom at his brother's home.
There was a puzzling pattern to Elliot's problem. In-
tellectually he was as bright as ever, but he used his time
terribly, getting lost in minor details; he seemed to have
lost all sense of priority. Reprimands made no differ-
ence; he was fired from a succession of legal jobs.
Though extensive intellectual tests found nothing wrong
with Elliot's mental faculties, he went to see a neurolo-
gist anyway, hoping that discovery of a neurological
problem might get him the disability benefits to which
he felt he was entitled. Otherwise the conclusion seemed
to be that he was just a malingerer.
Antonio Damasio, the neurologist Elliot consulted,
was struck by one element missing from Elliot's mental
repertoire: though nothing was wrong with his logic,
memory, attention, or any other cognitive ability, Elliot
was virtually oblivious to his feelings about what had
happened to him.13 Most strikingly, Elliot could narrate
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the tragic events of his life with complete dispassion, as

though he were an onlooker to the losses and failures of
his past—without a note of regret or sadness, frustration
or anger at life's unfairness. His own tragedy brought
him no pain; Damasio felt more upset by Elliot's story
than did Elliot himself.
The source of this emotional unawareness, Damasio
concluded, was the removal, along with the brain tumor,
of part of Elliot's prefrontal lobes. In effect, the surgery
had severed ties between the lower centers of the emo-
tional brain, especially the amygdala and related cir-
cuits, and the thinking abilities of the neocortex. Elliot's
thinking had become computerlike, able to make every
step in the calculus of a decision, but unable to assign
values to differing possibilities. Every option was neut-
ral. And that overly dispassionate reasoning, suspected
Damasio, was the core of Elliot's problem: too little
awareness of his own feelings about things made Elliot's
reasoning faulty.
The handicap showed up even in mundane decisions.
When Damasio tried to choose a time and date for the
next appointment with Elliot, the result was a muddle of
indecisiveness: Elliot could find arguments for and
against every date and time that Damasio proposed, but
could not choose among them. At the rational level,
there were perfectly good reasons for objecting to or
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accepting virtually every possible time for the appoint-

ment. But Elliot lacked any sense of how he felt about
any of the times. Lacking that awareness of his own feel-
ings, he had no preferences at all.
One lesson from Elliot's indecisiveness is the crucial
role of feeling in navigating the endless stream of life's
personal decisions. While strong feelings can create hav-
oc 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 pur-
sue, 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 can-
not 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 realms where reason without
feeling is blind.
The intuitive signals that guide us in these moments
come in the form of limbic-driven surges from the vis-
cera that Damasio calls "somatic markers"—literally, gut
feelings. The somatic marker is a kind of automatic
alarm, typically calling attention to a potential danger
from a given course of action. More often than not these
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markers steer us away from some choice that experi-

ence warns us against, though they can also alert us to a
golden opportunity. We usually do not, at that moment,
recall what specific experiences formed this negative
feeling; all we need is the signal that a given potential
course of action could be disastrous. Whenever such a
gut feeling rises up, we can immediately drop or pursue
that avenue of consideration with greater confidence,
and so pare down our array of choices to a more man-
ageable decision matrix. The key to sounder personal
decision-making, in short: being attuned to our feelings.

PLUMBING THE UNCONSCIOUS

Elliot's emotional vacuity suggests that there may be a
spectrum of people's ability to sense their emotions as
they have them. By the logic of neuroscience, if the ab-
sence of a neural circuit leads to a deficit in an ability,
then the relative strength or weakness of that same cir-
cuit in people; whose brains are intact should lead to
comparable levels of competence in that same ability. In
terms of the role of prefrontal circuits in emotional at-
tunement, this suggests that for neurological reasons
some of us may more easily detect the stirring of fear or
joy than do others, and so be more emotionally self-
aware.
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It may be that a talent for psychological introspection

hinges on this same circuitry. 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 de-
termine the flow of narrative, abiding by the logic of the
emotional mind. Those who have a natural attunement
to their own heart's voice—the language of emotion—are
sure to be more adept at articulating its messages,
whether as a novelist, songwriter, or psychotherapist.
This inner attunement should make them more gifted in
giving voice to the "wisdom of the unconscious"—the felt
meanings of our dreams and fantasies, the symbols that
embody our deepest wishes.
Self-awareness is fundamental to psychological in-
sight; this is the faculty that much of psychotherapy
means to strengthen. Indeed, Howard Gardner's model
for intrapsychic intelligence is Sigmund Freud, the great
mapper of the psyche's secret dynamics. As Freud made
clear, much of emotional life is unconscious; feelings
that stir within us do not always cross the threshold into
awareness. Empirical verification of this psychological
axiom comes, for instance, from experiments on uncon-
scious emotions, such as the remarkable finding that
people form definite likings for things they do not even
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realize they have seen before. Any emotion can be—and

often is—unconscious.
The physiological beginnings of an emotion typically
occur before a person is consciously aware of the feeling
itself. For example, when people who fear snakes are
shown pictures of snakes, sensors on their skin will de-
tect sweat breaking out, a sign of anxiety, though they
say they do not feel any fear. The sweat shows up in
such people even when the picture of a snake is presen-
ted so rapidly that they have no conscious idea of what,
exactly, they just saw, let alone that they are beginning
to get anxious. As such preconscious emotional stirrings
continue to build, they eventually become strong
enough to break into awareness. Thus there are two
levels of emotion, conscious and unconscious. The mo-
ment of an emotion coming into awareness marks its re-
gistering as such in the frontal cortex.14
Emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of
awareness can have a powerful impact on how we per-
ceive and react, even though we have no idea they are at
work. Take someone who is annoyed by a rude en-
counter early in the day, and then is peevish for hours
afterward, taking affront where none is intended and
snapping at people for no real reason. He may well be
oblivious to his continuing irritability and will be sur-
prised if someone calls attention to it, though it stews
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just out of his awareness and dictates his curt replies.

But once that reaction is brought into awareness—once
it registers in the cortex—he can evaluate things anew,
decide to shrug off the feelings left earlier in the day,
and change his outlook and mood. In this way emotional
self-awareness is the building block of the next funda-
mental of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off
a bad mood.
 5
Passion's Slaves
Thou has been . . .
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Has taken with equal thanks. ... Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of hearts
As I do thee.. ..
—HAMLET TO HIS FRIEND HORATIO

A sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the

emotional storms that the buffeting of Fortune brings
rather than being "passion's slave," has been praised as
a virtue since the time of Plato. The ancient Greek word
for it was sophrosyne, "care and intelligence in conduct-
ing one's life; a tempered balance and wisdom," as Page
DuBois, a Greek scholar, translates it. The Romans and
the early Christian church called it temperantia, tem-
perance, the restraining of emotional excess. The goal is
balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its
value and significance. A life without passion would be a
dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from
the richness of life itself. But, as Aristotle observed,
what is wanted is appropriate emotion, feeling
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proportionate to circumstance. When emotions are too

muted they create dullness and distance; when out of
control, too extreme and persistent, they become patho-
logical, as in immobilizing depression, overwhelming
anxiety, raging anger, manic agitation.
Indeed, keeping our distressing emotions in check is
the key to emotional well-being; extremes—emotions
that wax too intensely or for too long—undermine our
stability. Of course, it is not that we should feel only one
kind of emotion; being happy all the time somehow sug-
gests 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.
Downs as well as ups spice life, but need to be in bal-
ance. In the calculus of the heart it is the ratio of positive
to negative emotions that determines the sense of well-
being—at least that is the verdict from studies of mood
in which hundreds of men and women have carried
beepers that reminded them at random times to record
their emotions at that moment.1 It is not that people
need to avoid unpleasant feelings to feel content, but
rather that stormy feelings not go unchecked, displacing
all pleasant moods. 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
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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.
Just as there is a steady murmur of background
thoughts in the mind, there is a constant emotional
hum; beep someone at six A.M. or seven P.M. and he
will always be in some mood or other. Of course, on any
two mornings someone can have very different moods;
but when people's moods are averaged over weeks or
months, they tend to reflect that person's overall sense
of well-being. It turns out that for most people, ex-
tremely intense feelings are relatively rare; most of us
fall into the gray middle range, with mild bumps in our
emotional roller coaster.
Still, managing our emotions is something of a full-
time job: much of what we do—especially in our free
time—is an attempt to manage mood. Everything from
reading a novel or watching television to the activities
and companions we choose can be a way to make
ourselves feel better. The art of soothing ourselves is a
fundamental life skill; some psychoanalytic thinkers,
such as John Bowlby and D. W. Winnicott, see this as
one of the most essential of all psychic tools. The theory
holds that emotionally sound infants learn to soothe
themselves by treating themselves as their caretakers
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have treated them, leaving them less vulnerable to the

upheavals of the emotional brain.
As we have seen, the design of the brain means that
we very often have little or no control over when we are
swept by emotion, nor over what emotion it will be. But
we can have some say in how long an emotion will last.
The issue arises not with garden-variety sadness, worry,
or anger; normally such moods pass with time and pa-
tience. But when these emotions are of great intensity
and linger past an appropriate point, they shade over in-
to their distressing extremes—chronic anxiety, uncon-
trollable rage, depression. And, at their most severe and
intractable, medication, psychotherapy, or both may be
needed to lift them.
In these times, one sign of the capacity for emotional
self-regulation may be recognizing when chronic agita-
tion of the emotional brain is too strong to be overcome
without pharmacologic help. For example, two thirds of
those who suffer from manic-depression have never
been treated for the disorder. But lithium or newer med-
ications can thwart the characteristic cycle of paralyzing
depression alternating with manic episodes that mix
chaotic elation and grandiosity with irritation and rage.
One problem with manic-depression is that while people
are in the throes of mania they often feel so overly con-
fident that they see no need for help of any kind despite
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the disastrous decisions they are making. In such severe

emotional disorders psychiatric medication offers a tool
for managing life better.
But when it comes to vanquishing the more usual
range of bad moods, we are left to our own devices. Un-
fortunately, those devices are not always effective—at
least such is the conclusion reached by Diane Tice, a
psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, who
asked more than four hundred men and women about
the strategies they used to escape foul moods, and how
successful those tactics were for them.2
Not everyone agrees with the philosophical premise
that bad moods should be changed; there are, Tice
found, "mood purists," the 5 percent or so of people who
said they never try to change a mood since, in their view,
all emotions are "natural" and should be experienced
just as they present themselves, no matter how dispirit-
ing. And then there were those who regularly sought to
get into unpleasant moods for pragmatic reasons: physi-
cians who needed to be somber to give patients bad
news; social activists who nurtured their outrage at in-
justice so as to be more effective in battling it; even a
young man who told of working up his anger to help his
little brother with playground bullies. And some people
were positively Machiavellian about manipulating
moods—witness the bill collectors who purposely
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worked themselves into a rage in order to be all the

firmer with deadbeats.3 But these rare purposive cultiv-
ations of unpleasantness aside, most everyone com-
plained of being at the mercy of their moods. People's
track records at shaking bad moods were decidedly
mixed.

THE ANATOMY OF RAGE?

Say someone in another car cuts dangerously close to
you as you are driving on the freeway. If your reflexive
thought is "That son of a bitch!" it matters immensely
for the trajectory of rage whether that thought is fol-
lowed by more thoughts of outrage and revenge: "He
could have hit me! That bastard—I can't let him get
away with that!" Your knuckles whiten as you tighten
your hold on the steering wheel, a surrogate for
strangling his throat. Your body mobilizes to fight, not
run—leaving you trembling, beads of sweat on your
forehead, your heart pounding, the muscles in your face
locked in a scowl. You want to kill the guy. Then, should
a car behind you honk because you have slowed down
after the close call, you are apt to explode in rage at that
driver too. Such is the stuff of hypertension, reckless
driving, even freeway shootings.
Contrast that sequence of building rage with a more
charitable line of thought toward the driver who cut you
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off: "Maybe he didn't see me, or maybe he had some

good reason for driving so carelessly, such as a medical
emergency." That line of possibility tempers anger with
mercy, or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the
buildup of rage. 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."
There are, of course, different kinds of anger. The
amygdala may well be a main source of the sudden
spark of rage we feel at the driver whose carelessness
endangers us. But the other end of the emotional cir-
cuitry, the neocortex, most likely foments more calcu-
lated angers, such as cool-headed revenge or outrage at
unfairness or injustice. Such thoughtful angers are those
most likely, as Franklin put it, to "have good reasons" or
seem to.
Of all the moods that people want to escape, rage
seems to be the most intransigent; Tice found anger is
the mood people are worst at controlling. Indeed, 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 exhilar-
ating. Anger's seductive, persuasive power may in itself
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explain why some views about it are so common: that

anger is uncontrollable, or that, at any rate, it should not
be controlled, and that venting anger in "catharsis" is all
to the good. A contrasting view, perhaps a reaction
against the bleak picture of these other two, holds that
anger can be prevented entirely. But a careful reading of
research findings suggests that all these common atti-
tudes toward anger are misguided, if not outright
myths.4
The train of angry thoughts that stokes anger is also
potentially the key to one of the most powerful ways to
defuse anger: undermining the convictions that are fuel-
ing the anger in the first place. The longer we ruminate
about what has made us angry, the more "good reasons"
and self-justifications for being angry we can invent.
Brooding fuels anger's flames. But seeing things differ-
ently douses those flames. Tice found that reframing a
situation more positively was one of the most potent
ways to put anger to rest.

The Rage "Rush"

That finding squares well with the conclusions of
University of Alabama psychologist Dolf Zillmann, who,
in a lengthy series of careful experiments, has taken pre-
cise measure of anger and the anatomy of rage.5 Given
the roots of anger in the fight wing of the fight-or-flight
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response, it is no surprise that Zillmann finds that a uni-

versal 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. These percep-
tions act as the instigating trigger for a limbic surge that
has a dual effect on the brain. One part of that surge is a
release of catecholamines, which generate a quick, epis-
odic rush of energy, enough for "one course of vigorous
action," as Zillmann puts it, "such as in fight or flight."
This energy surge lasts for minutes, during which it
readies the body for a good fight or a quick flight, de-
pending on how the emotional brain sizes up the
opposition.
Meanwhile, another amygdala-driven ripple through
the adrenocortical branch of the nervous system creates
a general tonic background of action readiness, which
lasts much longer than the catecholamine energy surge.
This generalized adrenal and cortical excitation can last
for hours and even days, keeping the emotional brain in
special readiness for arousal, and becoming a founda-
tion on which subsequent reactions can build with par-
ticular quickness. In general, the hair-trigger condition
created by adrenocortical arousal explains why people
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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, lower-
ing the threshold for what provokes anger. Thus
someone who has had a hard day at work is especially
vulnerable to becoming enraged later at home by
something—the kids being too noisy or messy, say—that
under other circumstances would not be powerful
enough to trigger an emotional hijacking.
Zillmann comes to these insights on anger through
careful experimentation. In a typical study, for example,
he had a confederate provoke men and women who had
volunteered by making snide remarks about them. The
volunteers then watched a pleasant or upsetting film.
Later the volunteers were given the chance to retaliate
against the confederate by giving an evaluation they
thought would be used in a decision whether or not to
hire him. The intensity of their retaliation was directly
proportional to how aroused they had gotten from the
film they had just watched; they were angrier after see-
ing the unpleasant film, and gave the worst ratings.

Anger Builds on Anger

Zillmann's studies seem to explain the dynamic at work
in a familiar domestic drama I witnessed one day while
shopping. Down the supermarket aisle drifted the
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emphatic, measured tones of a young mother to her son,

about three: "Put ... it ... back!"
"But I want it!" he whined, clinging more tightly to a
Ninja Turtles cereal box.
"Put it back!" Louder, her anger taking over.
At that moment the baby in her shopping cart seat
dropped the jar of jelly she had been mouthing. When it
shattered on the floor the mother yelled, "That's it!" and,
in a fury, slapped the baby, grabbed the three-year-old's
box and slammed it onto the nearest shelf, scooped him
up by the waist, and rushed down the aisle, the shop-
ping cart careening perilously in front, the baby now
crying, her son, his legs dangling, protesting, "Put me
down, put me down!"
Zillmann has found that when the body is already in a
state of edginess, like the mother's, and something trig-
gers an emotional hijacking, the subsequent emotion,
whether anger or anxiety, is of especially great intensity.
This dynamic is at work when someone becomes en-
raged. Zillmann sees escalating anger as "a sequence of
provocations, each triggering an excitatory reaction that
dissipates slowly." In this sequence every successive
anger-provoking thought or perception becomes a mini-
trigger for amygdala-driven surges of catecholamines,
each building on the hormonal momentum of those that
went before. A second comes before the first has
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subsided, and a third on top of those, and so on; each

wave rides the tails of those before, quickly escalating
the body's level of physiological arousal. A thought that
comes later in this buildup triggers a far greater intens-
ity of anger than one that comes at the beginning. Anger
builds on anger; the emotional brain heats up. By then
rage, unhampered by reason, easily erupts in violence.
At this point people are unforgiving and beyond being
reasoned with; their thoughts revolve around revenge
and reprisal, oblivious to what the consequences may
be. This high level of excitation, Zillmann says, "fosters
an illusion of power and invulnerability that may inspire
and facilitate aggression" as the enraged person, "failing
cognitive guidance," falls back on the most primitive of
responses. The limbic urge is ascendant; the rawest les-
sons of life's brutality become guides to action.

Balm for Anger

Given this analysis of the anatomy of rage, Zillmann
sees two main ways of intervening. One way of defusing
anger is to seize on and challenge the thoughts that trig-
ger the surges of anger, since it is the original appraisal
of an interaction that confirms and encourages the first
burst of anger, and the subsequent reappraisals that fan
the flames. Timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle
the more effective. Indeed, anger can be completely
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short-circuited if the mitigating information comes be-

fore the anger is acted on.
The power of understanding to deflate anger is clear
from another of Zillmann's experiments, in which a rude
assistant (a confederate) insulted and provoked volun-
teers who were riding an exercise bike. When the volun-
teers 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 an angry glee. But in one version of
the experiment another confederate entered after the
volunteers had been provoked, and just before the
chance to retaliate; she told the provocative experi-
menter he had a phone call down the hall. As he left he
made a snide remark to her too. But she took it in good
spirits, explaining after he left that he was under terrible
pressures, upset about his upcoming graduate orals.
After that the irate volunteers, when offered the chance
to retaliate against the rude fellow, chose not to; instead
they expressed compassion for his plight.
Such mitigating information allows a reappraisal of
the anger-provoking events. But there is a specific win-
dow of opportunity for this de-escalation. Zillmann
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
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can no longer think straight. When people were already

highly enraged, they dismissed the mitigating informa-
tion with "That's just too bad!" or "the strongest vulgar-
ities the English language has to offer," as Zillmann put
it with delicacy.

Cooling Down
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked
out of the house vowing I would never return. It was
a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely
lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed
and soothed me, and after some hours I returned re-
pentant and almost melted. Since then when I am
angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.

The account is by a subject in one of the very first sci-

entific studies of anger, done in 1899.6 It still stands as a
model of the second way of de-escalating anger: cooling
off physiologically by waiting out the adrenal surge in a
setting where there are not likely to be further triggers
for rage. In an argument, for instance, that means get-
ting away from the other person for the time being. Dur-
ing the cooling-off period, the angered person can put
the brakes on the cycle of escalating hostile thought by
seeking out distractions. Distraction, Zillmann finds, is a
highly powerful mood-altering device, for a simple
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reason: It's hard to stay angry when we're having a

pleasant time. The trick, of course, is to get anger to cool
to the point where someone can have a pleasant time in
the first place.
Zillmann's analysis of the ways anger escalates and
de-escalates explains many of Diane Tice's findings
about the strategies people commonly say they use to
ease anger. One such fairly effective strategy is going off
to be alone while cooling down. A large proportion of
men translate this into going for a drive—a finding that
gives one pause when driving (and, Tice told me, in-
spired her to drive more defensively). Perhaps a safer al-
ternative is going for a long walk; active exercise also
helps with anger. So do relaxation methods such as deep
breathing and muscle relaxation, perhaps because they
change the body's physiology from the high arousal of
anger to a low-arousal state, and perhaps too because
they distract from whatever triggered the anger. Active
exercise may cool anger for something of the same reas-
on: after high levels of physiological activation during
the exercise, the body rebounds to a low level once it
stops.
But a cooling-down period will not work if that time is
used to pursue the train of anger-inducing thought,
since each such thought is in itself a minor trigger for
more cascades of anger. The power of distraction is that
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it stops that angry train of thought. In her survey of

people's strategies for handling anger, Tice found that
distractions by and large help calm anger: TV, movies,
reading, and the like all interfere with the angry
thoughts that stoke rage. But, Tice found, indulging in
treats such as shopping for oneself and eating do not
have much effect; it is all too easy to continue with an
indignant train of thought while cruising a shopping
mall or devouring a piece of chocolate cake.
To these strategies add those developed by Redford
Williams, a psychiatrist at Duke University who sought
to help hostile people, who are at higher risk for heart
disease, to control their irritability.7 One of his recom-
mendations 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.

The Ventilation Fallacy

As I settle into a New York City cab, a young man cross-
ing the street stops in front of the cab to wait for traffic
to clear. The driver, impatient to start, honks, motioning
for the young man to move out of the way. The reply is a
scowl and an obscene gesture.
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"You son of a bitch!" the driver yells, making threaten-

ing lunges with the cab by hitting the accelerator and
brake at the same time. At this lethal threat, the young
man sullenly moves aside, barely, and smacks his fist
against the cab as it inches by into traffic. At this, the
driver shouts a foul litany of expletives at the man.
As we move along the driver, still visibly agitated, tells
me, "You can't take any shit from anyone. You gotta yell
back—at least it makes you feel 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 find-
ings suggest, there is an argument against catharsis. It
has been made since the 1950s, when psychologists star-
ted 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).8 There may be
some specific conditions under which lashing out in an-
ger does work: when it is expressed directly to the per-
son who is its target, when it restores a sense of control
or rights an injustice, or when it inflicts "appropriate
harm" on the other person and gets him to change some
grievous activity without retaliating. But because of the
incendiary nature of anger, this may be easier to say
than to do.9
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Tice found that ventilating anger is one of the worst

ways to cool down: outbursts of rage typically pump up
the emotional brain's arousal, leaving people feeling
more angry, not less. Tice found that when people told
of times they had taken their rage out on the person who
provoked it, the net effect was to prolong the mood
rather than end it. Far more effective was when people
first cooled down, and then, in a more constructive or
assertive manner, confronted the person to settle their
dispute. As I once heard Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan
teacher, reply when asked how best to handle anger:
"Don't suppress it. But don't act on it."

SOOTHING ANXIETY: WHAT, ME

WORRY?
Oh, no! The muffler sounds bad. . . . What if I have to
take it to the shop?... I can't afford the expense.... I'd
have to draw the money from Jamie's college fund..
What if I can't afford his tuition?... That bad school
report last week.... What if his grades go down and he
can't get into college?... Muffler sounds bad. . . .

And so the worrying mind spins on in an endless loop

of low-grade melodrama, one set of concerns leading on
to the next and back again. The above specimen is
offered by Lizabeth Roemer and Thomas Borkovec,
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Pennsylvania State University psychologists, whose re-

search on worrying—the heart of all anxiety—has raised
the topic from neurotic's art to science.10 There is, of
course, no hitch when worry works; by mulling over a
problem—that is, employing constructive reflection,
which can look like worrying—a solution can appear.
Indeed, the reaction that underlies worry is the vigilance
for potential danger that has, no doubt, been essential
for survival over the course of evolution. When fear trig-
gers the emotional brain, part of the resulting anxiety
fixates attention on the threat at hand, forcing the mind
to obsess about how to handle it and ignore anything
else for the time being. Worry is, in a sense, a rehearsal
of what might go wrong and how to deal with it; the task
of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for
life's perils by anticipating dangers before they arise.
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 sug-
gests that it has all the attributes of a low-grade emo-
tional 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.
When this same cycle of worry intensifies and persists, it
shades over the line into full-blown neural hijackings,
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the anxiety disorders: phobias, obsessions and compul-

sions, panic attacks. In each of these disorders worry
fixates in a distinct fashion; for the phobic, anxieties riv-
et on the feared situation; for the obsessive, they fixate
on preventing some feared calamity; in panic attacks,
the worries can focus on a fear of dying or on the pro-
spect of having the attack itself.
In all these conditions the common denominator is
worry run amok. For example, a woman being treated
for obsessive-compulsive disorder had a series of rituals
that took most of her waking hours: forty-five-minute
showers several times daily, washing her hands for five
minutes twenty or more times a day. She would not sit
down unless she first swabbed the seat with rubbing al-
cohol to sterilize it. Nor would she touch a child or an
animal—both were "too dirty." All these compulsions
were stirred by her underlying morbid fear of germs; she
worried constantly that without her washing and steril-
izing she would catch a disease and die.11
A woman being treated for "generalized anxiety dis-
order"—the psychiatric nomenclature for being a con-
stant worrier—responded to the request 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
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the real thing, I won't get well. And if I don't get well
I'll never be happy. 12

In this virtuoso display of worrying about worrying,

the very request to worry for one minute had, within a
few short seconds, escalated to contemplation of a
lifelong catastrophe: "I'll never be happy." Worries typ-
ically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps
from concern to concern and more often than not in-
cludes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy.
Worries are almost always expressed in the mind's ear,
not its eye—that is, in words, not images—a fact that has
significance for controlling worry.
Borkovec and his colleagues began to study worrying
per se when they were trying to come up with a treat-
ment for insomnia. Anxiety, other researchers have ob-
served, comes in two forms: cognitive, or worrisome
thoughts, and somatic, the physiological symptoms of
anxiety, such as sweating, a racing heart, or muscle ten-
sion. The main trouble with insomniacs, Borkovec
found, was not the somatic arousal. What kept them up
were intrusive thoughts. They were chronic worriers,
and could not stop worrying, no matter how sleepy they
were. The one thing that worked in helping them get to
sleep was getting their minds off their worries, focusing
instead on the sensations produced by a relaxation
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method. In short, the worries could be stopped by shift-

ing attention away.
Most worriers, however, can't seem to do this. The
reason, Borkovec believes, has to do with a partial payoff
from worrying that is highly reinforcing to the habit.
There is, it seems, something positive in worries: wor-
ries are ways to deal with potential threats, with
clangers that may come one's way. The work of worry-
ing—when it succeeds—is to rehearse what those
dangers are, and to reflect on ways to deal with them.
But worry doesn't work all that well. New solutions and
fresh ways of seeing a problem do not typically come
from worrying, especially chronic worry. Instead of
coming up with solutions to these potential problems,
worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger itself,
immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread as-
sociated with it while staying in the same rut of thought.
Chronic worriers worry about a wide range of things,
most of which have almost no chance of happening; they
read dangers into life's journey that others never notice.
Yet chronic worriers tell Borkovec that worrying helps
them, and that their worries are self-perpetuating, an
endless loop of angst-ridden thought. Why should worry
become what seems to amount to a mental addiction?
Oddly, as Borkovec points out, the worry habit is rein-
forcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since
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people worry about many things that have a very low

probability of actually occurring—a loved one dying in a
plane crash, going bankrupt, and the like—there is, to
the primitive limbic brain at least, something magical
about it. Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated
evil, the worry psychologically gets the credit for pre-
venting the danger it obsesses about.

The Work of Worrying

She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest,
lured by a job with a publisher. But the publisher was
bought by another soon after, and she was left
without a job. Turning to freelance writing, an erratic
marketplace, she found herself either swamped with
work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ra-
tion phone calls, and for the first time was without
health insurance. This lack of coverage was particu-
larly distressing: she found herself catastrophizing
about her health, sure every headache signaled a
brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenev-
er she had to drive somewhere. She often found her-
self lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of dis-
tress. But, she said, she found her worries almost
addictive.
Borkovec discovered another unexpected benefit to
worrying. While people are immersed in their worried
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thoughts, they do not seem to notice the subjective sen-

sations of the anxiety those worries stir—the speedy
heartbeat, the beads of sweat, the shakiness—and as the
worry proceeds it actually seems to suppress some of
that anxiety, at least as reflected in heart rate. The se-
quence presumably goes something like this: The worri-
er notices something that triggers the image of some po-
tential threat or danger; that imagined catastrophe in
turn triggers a mild attack of anxiety. The worrier then
plunges into a long series of distressed thoughts, each of
which primes yet another topic for worry; as attention
continues to be carried along by this train of worry, fo-
cusing on these very thoughts takes the mind off the ori-
ginal catastrophic image that triggered the anxiety.
Images, Borkovec found, are more powerful triggers for
physiological anxiety than are thoughts, so immersion in
thoughts, to the exclusion of catastrophic images, par-
tially alleviates the experience of being anxious. And, to
that extent, the worry is also reinforced, as a halfway an-
tidote to the very anxiety it evoked.
But chronic worries are self-defeating too in that they
take the form of stereotyped, rigid ideas, not creative
breakthroughs that actually move toward solving the
problem. This rigidity shows up not just in the manifest
content of worried thought, which simply repeats more
or less the same ideas over and over. But at a
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neurological level there seems to be a cortical rigidity, a

deficit in the emotional brain's ability to respond flex-
ibly to changing circumstance. In short, chronic worry
works in some ways, but not in other, more consequen-
tial ones: it eases some anxiety, but never solves the
problem.
The one thing that chronic worriers cannot do is fol-
low the advice they are most often given: "Just stop wor-
rying" (or, worse, "Don't worry—be happy"). Since
chronic worries seem to be low-grade amygdala epis-
odes, they come unbidden. And, by their very nature,
they persist once they arise in the mind. But after much
experimentation, Borkovec discovered some simple
steps that can help even the most chronic worrier con-
trol the habit.
The first step is self-awareness, catching the worri-
some episodes as near their beginning as pos-
sible—ideally, as soon as or just after the fleeting cata-
strophic image triggers the worry-anxiety cycle.
Borkovec trains people in this approach by first teaching
them to monitor cues for anxiety, especially learning to
identify situations that trigger worry, or the fleeting
thoughts and images that initiate the worry, as well as
the accompanying sensations of anxiety in the body.
With practice, people can identify the worries at an
earlier and earlier point in the anxiety spiral. People also
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learn relaxation methods that they can apply at the mo-

ment they recognize the worry beginning, and practice
the relaxation method daily so they will be able to use it
on the spot, when they need it the most.
The relaxation method, though, is not enough in itself.
Worriers also need to actively challenge the worrisome
thoughts; failing this, the worry spiral will keep coming
back. So the next step is to take a critical stance toward
their assumptions: Is it very probable that the dreaded
event will occur? Is it necessarily the case that there is
only one or no alternative to letting it happen? Are there
constructive steps to be taken? Does it really help to run
through these same anxious thoughts over and over?
This combination of mindfulness and healthy skepti-
cism would, presumably, act as a brake on the neural ac-
tivation that underlies low-grade anxiety. Actively gen-
erating such thoughts may prime the circuitry that can
inhibit the limbic driving of worry; at the same time,
actively inducing a relaxed state counters the signals for
anxiety the emotional brain is sending throughout the
body.
Indeed, Borkovec points out, these strategies establish
a train of mental activity that is incompatible with
worry. When a worry is allowed to repeat over and over
unchallenged, it gains in persuasive power; challenging
it by contemplating a range of equally plausible points of
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view keeps the one worried thought from being naively

taken as true. Even some people whose worrying is seri-
ous enough to qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis have
been relieved of the worrying habit this way.
On the other hand, for people with worries so severe
they have flowered into phobia, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, or panic disorder, it may be prudent—indeed,
a sign of self-awareness—to turn to medication to inter-
rupt the cycle. A retraining of the emotional circuitry
through therapy is still called for, however, in order to
lessen the likelihood that anxiety disorders will recur
when medication is stopped.13

MANAGING MELANCHOLY
The single mood people generally put most effort into
shaking is sadness; Diane Tice found that people are
most inventive when it comes to trying to escape the
blues. Of course, not all sadness should be escaped; mel-
ancholy, like every other mood, has its benefits. The
sadness that a loss brings has certain invariable effects:
it closes down our interest in diversions and pleasures,
fixes attention on what has been lost, and saps our en-
ergy 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,
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finally, make the psychological adjustments and new

plans that will allow our lives to continue.
Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not.
William Styron renders an eloquent description of "the
many dreadful manifestations of the disease," among
them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a "dank joy-
lessness" with "gloom crowding in on me, a sense of
dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety."14
Then there are the intellectual marks: "confusion, fail-
ure of mental focus and lapse of memories," and, at a
later stage, his mind "dominated by anarchic distor-
tions," and "a sense that my thought processes were en-
gulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated
any enjoyable response to the living world." There are
the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a
zombie, "a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more
particularly an odd fragility," along with a "fidgety rest-
lessness." Then there is the loss of pleasure: "Food, like
everything else within the scope of sensation, was ut-
terly without savor." Finally, there was the vanishing of
hope as the "gray drizzle of horror" took on a despair so
palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable
that suicide seemed a solution.
In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new be-
ginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression be-
speak a life on hold. For Styron, no medication or
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therapy helped; it was the passing of time and the refuge

of a hospital that finally cleared away the despondency.
But for most people, especially those with less severe
cases, psychotherapy can help, as can medication—Proz-
ac is the treatment of the hour, but there are more than
a dozen other compounds offering some help, especially
for major depression.
My focus here is the far more common sadness that at
its upper limits becomes, technically speaking, a "sub-
clinical depression"—that is, ordinary melancholy. This
is a range of despondency that people can handle on
their own, if they have the internal resources. Unfortu-
nately, some of the strategies most often resorted to can
backfire, leaving people feeling worse than before. One
such strategy is simply staying alone, which is often ap-
pealing when people are feeling down; more often than
not, however, it only adds a sense of loneliness and isol-
ation to the sadness. That may partly explain why Tice
found the most popular tactic for battling depression is
socializing—going out to eat, to a ballgame or movie; in
short, doing something with friends or family. That
works well if the net effect is to get the person's mind off
his sadness. But it simply prolongs the mood if he uses
the occasion just to mull over what put him in the funk.
Indeed, one of the main determinants of whether a
depressed mood will persist or lift is the degree to which
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people ruminate. Worrying about what's depressing us,

it seems, makes the depression all the more intense and
prolonged. In depression, worry takes several forms, all
focusing on some aspect of the depression itself—how
tired we feel, how little energy or motivation we have,
for instance, or how little work we're getting done. Typ-
ically none of this reflection is accompanied by any con-
crete course of action that might alleviate the problem.
Other common worries include "isolating yourself and
thinking about how terrible you feel, worrying that your
spouse might reject you because you are depressed, and
wondering whether you are going to have another sleep-
less night," says Stanford psychologist Susan Nolen-
Hoeksma, who has studied rumination in depressed
people.15
Depressed people sometimes justify this kind of ru-
mination by saying they are trying to "understand them-
selves better"; in fact, they are priming the feelings of
sadness without taking any steps that might actually lift
their mood. Thus in therapy it might be perfectly helpful
to reflect deeply on the causes of a depression, if that
leads to insights or actions that will change the condi-
tions that cause it. But a passive immersion in the sad-
ness simply makes it worse.
Rumination can also make the depression stronger by
creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.
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Nolen-Hoeksma gives the example of a saleswoman who

gets depressed and spends so many hours worrying
about it that she doesn't get around to important sales
calls. Her sales then decline, making her feel like a fail-
ure, which feeds her depression. But if she reacted to de-
pression by trying to distract herself, she might well
plunge into the sales calls as a way to get her mind off
the sadness. Sales would be less likely to decline, and
the very experience of making a sale might bolster her
self-confidence, lessening the depression somewhat.
Women, Nolen-Hoeksma finds, are far more prone to
ruminate when they are depressed than are 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 dis-
tress 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.
Cognitive therapy aimed at changing these thought
patterns has been found in some studies to be on a par
with medication for treating mild clinical depression,
and superior to medication in preventing the return of
mild depression. Two strategies are particularly effective
in the battle.16 One is to learn to challenge the thoughts
at the center of rumination—to question their validity
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and think of more positive alternatives. The other is to

purposely schedule pleasant, distracting events.
One reason distraction works is that depressing
thoughts are automatic, intruding on one's state of mind
unbidden. Even when depressed people try to suppress
their depressing thoughts, they often cannot come up
with better alternatives; once the depressive tide of
thought has started, it has a powerful magnetic effect on
the train of association. For example, when depressed
people were asked to unscramble jumbled six-word sen-
tences, they were much better at figuring out the de-
pressing messages ("The future looks very dismal") than
the upbeat ones ("The future looks very bright").17
The tendency for depression to perpetuate itself
shades even the kinds of distractions people choose.
When depressed people were given a list of upbeat or
ponderous ways to get their minds off something sad,
such as the funeral of a friend, they picked more of the
melancholy activities. Richard Wenzlaff, the University
of Texas psychologist who did these studies, concludes
that people who are already depressed need to make a
special effort to get their attention on something that is
completely upbeat, being careful not to inadvertently
choose something—a tearjerker movie, a tragic nov-
el—that will drag their mood down again.

Mood-lifters
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Imagine that you're driving on an unfamiliar, steep,

and winding road through fog. Suddenly a car pulls
out of a driveway only a few feet in front of you, too
close for you to stop in time. Your foot slams the
brake to the floor and you go into a skid, your car
sliding into the side of the other one. You see that the
car is full of youngsters, a carpool on the way to
preschool—just before the explosion of glass shatter-
ing and metal bending into metal. Then, out of the
sudden silence after the collision, you hear a chorus
of crying. You manage to run to the other car, and see
that one of the children is lying motionless. You are
flooded with remorse and sadness over this
tragedy....

Such heart-wrenching scenarios were used to get vo-

lunteers upset in one of Wenzlaff s experiments. The vo-
lunteers then tried to keep the scene out of their minds
while they jotted notes about the stream of their
thoughts for nine minutes. Each time the thought of the
disturbing scene intruded into their minds, they made a
check mark as they wrote. While most people thought
about the upsetting scene less and less as time went on,
those volunteers who were more depressed actually
showed a pronounced increase in intruding thoughts of
the scene as time passed, and even made oblique
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references to it in the thoughts that were supposed to be

distractions from it.
What's more, the depression-prone volunteers used
other distressing thoughts to distract themselves. As
Wenzlaff told me, "Thoughts are associated in the mind
not just by content, but by mood. 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 net-
works 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 one de-
pressing topic to get their minds off another, which only
stirs more negative emotions."
Crying, one theory holds, may be nature's way of
lowering levels of the brain chemicals that prime dis-
tress. While crying can sometimes break a spell of sad-
ness, it can also leave the person still obsessing about
the reasons for despair. The idea of a "good cry" is mis-
leading: crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs
the misery. Distractions break the chain of sadness-
maintaining thinking; one of the leading theories of why
electroconvulsive therapy is effective for the most severe
depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term
memory—patients feel better because they can't remem-
ber why they were so sad. At any rate, to shake garden-
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variety sadness, Diane Tice found, many people repor-

ted turning to distractions such as reading, TV and
movies, video games and puzzles, sleeping, and day-
dreams such as planning a fantasy vacation. Wenzlaff
would add that the most effective distractions are ones
that will shift your mood—an exciting sporting event, a
funny movie, an uplifting book. (A note of caution here:
Some distractors in themselves can perpetuate depres-
sion. Studies of heavy TV watchers have found that,
after watching TV, they are generally more depressed
than before they started!)
Aerobic exercise, Tice found, is one of the more effect-
ive tactics for lifting mild depression, as well as other
bad moods. But the caveat here is that the mood-lifting
benefits of exercise work best for the lazy, those who
usually do not work out very much. For those with a
daily exercise routine, whatever mood-changing benefits
it offers were probably strongest when they first took up
the exercise habit. In fact, for habitual exercisers there is
a reverse effect on mood: they start to feel bad on those
days when they skip their workout. Exercise seems to
work well because it changes the physiological state the
mood evokes: depression is a low-arousal state, and aer-
obics pitches the body into high arousal. By the same
token, relaxation techniques, which put the body into a
low-arousal state, work well for anxiety, a high-arousal
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state, but not so well for depression. Each of these ap-

proaches seems to work to break the cycle of depression
or anxiety because it pitches the brain into a level of
activity incompatible with the emotional state that has
had it in its grip.
Cheering oneself up through treats and sensual pleas-
ures was another fairly popular antidote to the blues.
Common ways people soothed themselves when de-
pressed ranged from taking hot baths or eating favorite
foods, to listening to music or having sex. Buying one-
self a gift or treat to get out of a bad mood was particu-
larly popular among women, as was shopping in gener-
al, even if only window-shopping. Among those in col-
lege, Tice found that eating was three times as common
a strategy for soothing sadness among women than
men; men, on the other hand, were five times as likely to
turn to drinking or drugs when they felt down. The
trouble with overeating or alcohol as antidotes, of
course, is that they can easily backfire: eating to excess
brings regret; alcohol is a central nervous system de-
pressant, and so only adds to the effects of depression
itself.
A more constructive approach to mood-lifting, Tice
reports, is engineering a small triumph or easy success:
tackling some long-delayed chore around the house or
getting to some other duty they've been wanting to clear
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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.
One of the most potent—and, outside therapy, little
used—antidotes to depression is seeing things differ-
ently, or cognitive reframing. It is natural to bemoan
the end of a relationship and to wallow in self-pitying
thoughts such as the conviction that "this means I'll al-
ways be alone," but it's sure to thicken the sense of des-
pair. However, stepping back and thinking about the
ways the relationship wasn't so great, and ways you and
your partner were mismatched—in other words, seeing
the loss differently, in a more positive light—is an anti-
dote to the sadness. By the same token, cancer patients,
no matter how serious their condition, were in better
moods if they were able to bring to mind another patient
who was in even worse shape ("I'm not so bad off—at
least I can walk"); those who compared themselves to
healthy people were the most depressed.18 Such down-
ward comparisons are surprisingly cheering: suddenly
what had seemed quite dispiriting doesn't look all that
bad.
Another effective depression-lifter is helping others in
need. Since depression feeds on ruminations and preoc-
cupations with the self, helping others lifts us out of
those preoccupations as we empathize with people in
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pain of their own. Throwing oneself into volunteer

work—coaching Little League, being a Big Brother, feed-
ing 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, especially depression."

REPRESSORS: UPBEAT DENIAL

"He kicked his roommate in the stomach . . ." the sen-
tence begins. It ends, "... but he meant to turn on the
light."
That transformation of an act of aggression into an in-
nocent, if slightly implausible, mistake is repression
captured in vivo. It was composed by a college student
who had volunteered for a study of repressors, people
who habitually and automatically seem to blot emotion-
al disturbance from their awareness. The beginning
fragment "He kicked his roommate in the stomach . . ."
was given to this student as part of a sentence-comple-
tion test. Other tests showed that this small act of men-
tal avoidance was part of a larger pattern in his life, a
pattern of tuning out most emotional upset. 19 While at
first researchers saw repressors as a prime example of
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the inability to feel emotion—cousins of alexithymics,

perhaps—current thinking sees them as quite proficient
in regulating emotion. They have become so adept at
buffering themselves against negative feelings, it seems,
that they are not even aware of the negativity. Rather
than calling them repressors, as has been the custom
among researchers, a more apt term might be
unflappables.
Much of this research, done principally by Daniel
Weinberger, a psychologist now at Case Western
Reserve University, shows that while such people may
seem calm and imperturbable, they can sometimes
seethe with physiological upsets they are oblivious to.
During the sentence-completion test, volunteers were
also being monitored for their level of physiological
arousal. The repressors' veneer of calm was belied by the
agitation of their bodies: when faced with the sentence
about the violent roommate and others like it, they gave
all the signs of anxiety, such as a racing heart, sweating,
and climbing blood pressure. Yet when asked, they said
they felt perfectly calm.
This continual tuning-out of emotions such as anger
and anxiety is not uncommon: about one person in six
shows the pattern, according to Weinberger. In theory,
children might learn to become unflappable in any of
several ways. One might be as a strategy for surviving a
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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. Or the trait may simply be inherited tempera-
ment. While no one can say as yet just how such a pat-
tern begins in life, by the time repressors reach adult-
hood they are cool and collected under duress.
The question remains, of course, as to just how calm
and cool they actually are. Can they really be unaware of
the physical signs of distressing emotions, or are they
simply feigning calm? The answer to that has come from
clever research by Richard Davidson, a University of
Wisconsin psychologist and an early collaborator with
Weinberger. Davidson had people with the unflappable
pattern free-associate to a list of words, most neutral,
but several with hostile or sexual meanings that stir
anxiety in almost everyone. And, as their bodily reac-
tions revealed, they had all the physiological signs of
distress in response to the loaded words, even though
the words they associated to almost always showed an
attempt to sanitize the upsetting words by linking them
to an innocent one. If the first word was "hate," the re-
sponse might be "love."
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Davidson's study took advantage of the fact that (in

right-handed people) a key center for processing negat-
ive emotion is in the right half of the brain, while the
center for speaking is in the left. Once the right hemi-
sphere 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. Using an intricate ar-
rangement of lenses, Davidson was able to display a
word so that it was seen in only half of the visual field.
Because of the neural wiring of the visual system, if the
display was to the left half of the visual field, it was re-
cognized first by the right half of the brain, with its sens-
itivity to distress. If the display was to the right half of
the visual field, the signal went to the left side of the
brain without being assessed for upset.
When the words were presented to the right hemi-
sphere, there was a lag in the time it took the unflap-
pables to utter a response—but only if the word they
were responding to was one of the upsetting ones. They
had no time lag in the speed of their associations to
neutral words. The lag showed up only when the words
were presented to the right hemisphere, not to the left.
In short, their unflappableness seems due to a neural
mechanism that slows or interferes with the transfer of
upsetting information. The implication is that they are
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not faking their lack of awareness about how upset they

are; their brain is keeping that information from them.
More precisely, the layer of mellow feeling that covers
over such disturbing perceptions may well be due to the
workings of the left prefrontal lobe. To his surprise,
when Davidson measured activity levels in their pre-
frontal lobes, they had a decided predominance of activ-
ity on the left—the center for good feeling—and less on
the right, the center for negativity.
These people "present themselves in a positive light,
with an upbeat mood," Davidson told me. "They deny
that stress is upsetting them and show a pattern of left
frontal activation while just sitting at rest that is associ-
ated with positive feelings. This brain activity may be
the key to their positive claims, despite the underlying
physiological arousal that looks like distress."
Davidson's theory is that, in terms of brain activity, it is
energy-demanding work to experience distressing realit-
ies in a positive light. The increased physiological arous-
al may be due to the sustained attempt by the neural cir-
cuitry to maintain positive feelings or to suppress or in-
hibit any negative ones.
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
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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.
 6
The Master Aptitude
Just once in my life have I been paralyzed by fear.
The occasion was a calculus exam during my fresh-
man year in college for which I somehow had man-
aged not to study. I still remember the room I
marched to that spring morning with feelings of
doom and foreboding heavy in my heart. I had been
in that lecture hall for many classes. This morning,
though, I noticed nothing through the windows and
did not see the hall at all. My gaze shrank to the patch
of floor directly in front of me as I made my way to a
seat near the door. As I opened the blue cover of my
exam book, there was the thump in my ears of heart-
beat, there was the taste of anxiety in the pit of my
stomach.
I looked at the exam questions once, quickly. Hope-
less. For an hour I stared at that page, my mind ra-
cing over the consequences I would suffer. The same
thoughts repeated themselves over and over, a tape
loop of fear and trembling. I sat motionless, like an
animal frozen in mid-move by curare. What strikes
me most about that dreadful moment was how con-
stricted my mind became. I did not spend the hour in
a desperate attempt to patch together some
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semblance of answers to the test. I did not daydream.

I simply sat fixated on my terror, waiting for the or-
deal to finish.1

That narrative of an ordeal by terror is my own; it is to

this day for me the most convincing evidence of the dev-
astating 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.
The extent to which emotional upsets can interfere
with mental life is no news to teachers. Students who
are anxious, angry, or depressed don't learn; people who
are caught in these states do not take in information ef-
ficiently or deal with it well. As we saw in Chapter 5,
powerful negative emotions twist attention toward their
own preoccupations, interfering with the attempt to fo-
cus elsewhere. Indeed, one of the signs that feelings
have veered over the line into the pathological is that
they are so intrusive they overwhelm all other thought,
continually sabotaging attempts to pay attention to
whatever other task is at hand. For the person going
through an upsetting divorce—or the child whose par-
ents are—the mind does not stay long on the comparat-
ively trivial routines of the work or school day; for the
clinically depressed, thoughts of self-pity and despair,
hopelessness and helplessness, override all others.
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When emotions overwhelm concentration, what is be-

ing swamped is the mental capacity cognitive scientists
call "working memory," the ability to hold in mind all in-
formation relevant to the task at hand. What occupies
working memory can be as mundane as the digits that
compose a telephone number or as complicated as the
intricate plot lines a novelist is trying to weave together.
Working memory is an executive function par excellence
in mental life, making possible all other intellectual ef-
forts, from speaking a sentence to tackling a knotty lo-
gical proposition.2 The prefrontal cortex executes work-
ing memory—and, remember, is where feelings and
emotions meet.3 When the limbic circuitry that con-
verges on the prefrontal cortex is in the thrall of emo-
tional distress, one cost is in the effectiveness of working
memory: we can't think straight, as I discovered during
that dread calculus exam.
On the other hand, consider the role of positive motiv-
ation—the marshaling of feelings of enthusiasm, zeal,
and confidence—in achievement. Studies of Olympic
athletes, world-class musicians, and chess grand mas-
ters find their unifying trait is the ability to motivate
themselves to pursue relentless training routines.4 And,
with a steady rise in the degree of excellence required to
be a world-class performer, these rigorous training
routines now increasingly must begin in childhood. At
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the 1992 Olympics, twelve-year-old members of the

Chinese diving team had put in as many total lifetime
practice dives as had members of the American team in
their early twenties—the Chinese divers started their rig-
orous training at age four. Likewise, the best violin vir-
tuosos of the twentieth century began studying their in-
strument at around age five; international chess cham-
pions started on the game at an average age of seven,
while those who rose only to national prominence star-
ted at ten. Starting earlier offers a lifetime edge: the top
violin students at the best music academy in Berlin, all
in their early twenties, had put in ten thousand total
hours' lifetime practice, while the second-tier students
averaged around seventy-five hundred hours.
What seems to set apart those at the very top of com-
petitive pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is
the degree to which, beginning early in life, they can
pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years.
And that doggedness depends on emotional traits—en-
thusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks—above
all else.
The added payoff for life success from motivation,
apart from other innate abilities, can be seen in the re-
markable performance of Asian students in American
schools and professions. One thorough review of the
evidence suggests that Asian-American children may
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have an average IQ advantage over whites of just two or

three points.5 Yet on the basis of the professions, such as
law and medicine, that many Asian-Americans end up
in, as a group they behave as though their IQ were much
higher—the equivalent of an IQ of 110 for Japanese-
Americans and of 120 for Chinese-Americans. 6 The
reason seems to be that from the earliest years of school,
Asian children work harder than whites. Sanford Doren-
busch, a Stanford sociologist who studied more than ten
thousand high-school students, found that Asian-Amer-
icans spent 40 percent more time doing homework than
did other students. "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 persist-
ence—an emotional edge.
To the degree that our emotions get in the way of or
enhance our ability to think and plan, to pursue training
for a distant goal, to solve problems and the like, they
define the limits of our capacity to use our innate mental
abilities, and so determine how we do in life. And to the
degree to which we are motivated by feelings of
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enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do—or even by an

optimal degree of anxiety—they propel us to accom-
plishment. It is in this sense that emotional intelligence
is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects
all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with
them.

IMPULSE CONTROL: THE

MARSHMALLOW TEST
Just imagine you're four years old, and someone makes
the following proposal: If you'll wait until after he runs
an errand, you can have two marsh-mallows for a treat.
If you can't wait until then, you can have only one—but
you can have it right now. 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.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more funda-
mental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all
emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very
nature, lead to one or another impulse to act. The root
meaning of the word emotion, remember, is "to move."
The capacity to resist that impulse to act, to squelch the
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incipient movement, most likely translates at the level of

brain function into inhibition of limbic signals to the
motor cortex, though such an interpretation must re-
main speculative for now.
At any rate, a remarkable study in which the marsh-
mallow challenge was posed to four-year-olds shows just
how fundamental is the ability to restrain the emotions
and so delay impulse. Begun by psychologist Walter
Mischel during the 1960s at a preschool on the Stanford
University campus and involving mainly children of
Stanford faculty, graduate students, and other employ-
ees, the study tracked down the four-year-olds as they
were graduating from high school.7
Some four-year-olds were able to wait what must
surely have seemed an endless fifteen to twenty minutes
for the experimenter to return. To sustain themselves in
their struggle they covered their eyes so they wouldn't
have to stare at temptation, or rested their heads in their
arms, talked to themselves, sang, played games with
their hands and feet, even tried to go to sleep. These
plucky preschoolers got the two-marshmallow reward.
But others, more impulsive, grabbed the one marshmal-
low, almost always within seconds of the experimenter's
leaving the room on his "errand."
The diagnostic power of how this moment of impulse
was handled became clear some twelve to fourteen years
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later, when these same children were tracked down as

adolescents. The emotional and social difference
between the grab-the-marshmallow preschoolers and
their gratification-delaying peers was dramatic. Those
who had resisted temptation at four were now, as ad-
olescents, more socially competent: personally effective,
self-assertive, and better able to cope with the frustra-
tions of life. They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze,
or regress under stress, or become rattled and disorgan-
ized when pressured; they embraced challenges and
pursued them instead of giving up even in the face of
difficulties; they were self-reliant and confident, trust-
worthy 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.
The third or so who grabbed for the marshmallow,
however, tended to have fewer of these qualities, and
shared instead a relatively more troubled psychological
portrait. In adolescence they were more likely to be seen
as shying away from social contacts; to be stubborn and
indecisive; to be easily upset by frustrations; to think of
themselves as "bad" or unworthy; to regress or become
immobilized by stress; to be mistrustful and resentful
about not "getting enough"; to be prone to jealousy and
envy; to overreact to irritations with a sharp temper, so
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provoking arguments and fights. And, after all those

years, they still were unable to put off gratification.
What shows up in a small way early in life blossoms
into a wide range of social and emotional competences
as life goes on. The capacity to impose a delay on im-
pulse is at the root of a plethora of efforts, from staying
on a diet to pursuing a medical degree. Some children,
even at four, had mastered the basics: they were able to
read the social situation as one where delay was benefi-
cial, to pry their attention from focusing on the tempta-
tion at hand, and to distract themselves while maintain-
ing the necessary perseverance toward their goal—the
two marshmallows.
Even more surprising, when the tested children were
evaluated again as they were finishing high school, those
who had waited patiently at four were far superior as
students to those who had acted on whim. According to
their parents' evaluations, they were more academically
competent: better able to put their ideas into words, to
use and respond to reason, to concentrate, to make
plans and follow through on them, and more eager to
learn. Most astonishingly, they had dramatically higher
scores on their SAT tests. The third of children who at
four grabbed for the marshmallow most eagerly had an
average verbal score of 524 and quantitative (or "math")
score of 528; the third who waited longest had average
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scores of 610 and 652, respectively—a 210-point differ-

ence in total score.8
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of
gratification is twice as powerful a predictor of what
their SAT scores will be as is IQ at age four; IQ becomes
a stronger predictor of SAT only after children learn to
read.9 This suggests that the ability to delay gratification
contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite
apart from IQ itself. (Poor impulse control in childhood
is also a powerful predictor of later delinquency, again
more so than IQ.10 ) As we shall see in Part Five, while
some argue that IQ cannot be changed and so represents
an unbendable limitation on a child's life potential,
there is ample evidence that emotional skills such as im-
pulse control and accurately reading a social situation
can be learned.
What Walter Mischel, who did the study, describes
with the rather infelicitous phrase "goal-directed self-
imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of
emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in
the service of a goal, whether it be building a business,
solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley
Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intel-
ligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how
poorly people are able to use their other mental
capacities.
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FOUL MOODS, FOULED THINKING

I worry about my son. He just started playing on the
varsity football team, so he's bound to get an injury
sometime. It's so nerve-wracking to watch him play
that I've stopped going to his games. I'm sure my son
must be disappointed that I'm not watching him play,
but it's simply too much for me to take.

The speaker is in therapy for anxiety; she realizes that

her worry is interfering with leading the kind of life she
would like.11 But when it comes time to make a simple
decision, such as whether to watch her son play football,
her mind floods with thoughts of disaster. She is not free
to choose; her worries overwhelm her reason.
As we have seen, worry is the nub of anxiety's dam-
aging effect on mental performance of all kind. Worry,
of course, is in one sense a useful response gone
awry—an overly zealous mental preparation for an anti-
cipated threat. But such mental rehearsal is disastrous
cognitive static when it becomes trapped in a stale
routine that captures attention, intruding on all other
attempts to focus elsewhere.
Anxiety undermines the intellect. In a complex, intel-
lectually demanding, and high-pressure task such as
that of air traffic controllers, for example, having chron-
ically high anxiety is an almost sure predictor that a
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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.12 Anxiety
also sabotages academic performance of all kinds: 126
different studies of more than 36,000 people found that
the more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their
academic performance, no matter how meas-
ured—grades on tests, grade-point average, or achieve-
ment tests.13
When people who are prone to worry are asked to per-
form a cognitive task such as sorting ambiguous objects
into one of two categories, and narrate what is going
through their mind as they do so, it is the negative
thoughts—"I won't be able to do this," "I'm just no good
at this kind of test," and the like—that are found to most
directly disrupt their decision-making. Indeed, when a
comparison group of nonworriers was asked to worry on
purpose for fifteen minutes, their ability to do the same
task deteriorated sharply. And when the worriers were
given a fifteen-minute relaxation session—which re-
duced their level of worrying—before trying the task,
they had no problem with it.14
Test anxiety was first studied scientifically in the
1960s by Richard Alpert, who confessed to me that his
interest was piqued because as a student his nerves
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often made him do poorly on tests, while his colleague,

Ralph Haber, found that the pressure before an exam
actually helped him to do better.15 Their research,
among other studies, showed that there are two kinds of
anxious students: those whose anxiety undoes their aca-
demic performance, and those who are able to do well
despite the stress—or, perhaps, because of it.16 The irony
of test anxiety is that the very apprehension about doing
well on the test that, ideally, can motivate students like
Haber to study hard in preparation and so do well can
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.
The number of worries that people report while taking
a test directly predicts how poorly they will do on it.17
The mental resources expended on one cognitive
task—the worrying—simply detract from the resources
available for processing other information; if we are pre-
occupied 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 dis-
aster they predict.
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People who are adept at harnessing their emotions, on

the other hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an
upcoming speech or test, say—to motivate themselves to
prepare well for it, thereby doing well. The classical lit-
erature in psychology describes the relationship
between anxiety and performance, including mental
performance, in terms of an upside-down U. At the peak
of the inverted U is the optimal relationship between
anxiety and performance, with a modicum of nerves
propelling outstanding achievement. But too little anxi-
ety—the first side of the U—brings about apathy or too
little motivation to try hard enough to do well, while too
much anxiety—the other side of the U—sabotages any
attempt to do well.
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 in-
verted U. But let that euphoria get out of control to be-
come 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.
Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to
think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it
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easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual

or interpersonal. This suggests that one way to help
someone think through a problem is to tell them a joke.
Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more
broadly and associate more freely, noticing relationships
that might have eluded them otherwise—a mental skill
important not just in creativity, but in recognizing com-
plex relationships and foreseeing the consequences of a
given decision.
The intellectual benefits of a good laugh are most
striking when it comes to solving a problem that de-
mands a creative solution. One study found that people
who had just watched a video of television bloopers were
better at solving a puzzle long used by psychologists to
test creative thinking.18 In the test people are given a
candle, matches, and a box of tacks and asked to attach
the candle to a corkboard wall so it will burn without
dripping wax on the floor. Most people given this prob-
lem fall into "functional fixedness," thinking about using
the objects in the most conventional ways. But those
who had just watched the funny film, compared to oth-
ers who had watched a film on math or who exercised,
were more likely to see an alternative use for the box
holding the tacks, and so come up with the creative solu-
tion: tack the box to the wall and use it as a candle
holder.
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Even mild mood changes can sway thinking. In mak-

ing plans or decisions people in good moods have a per-
ceptual bias that leads them to be more expansive and
positive in their thinking. This is partly because memory
is state-specific, so that while in a good mood we re-
member more positive events; as we think over the pros
and cons of a course of action while feeling pleasant,
memory biases our weighing of evidence in a positive
direction, making us more likely to do something
slightly adventurous or risky, for example.
By the same token, being in a foul mood biases
memory in a negative direction, making us more likely
to contract into a fearful, overly cautious decision. Emo-
tions out of control impede the intellect. But, as we saw
in Chapter 5, we can bring out-of-control emotions back
into line; this emotional competence is the master
aptitude, facilitating all other kinds of intelligence. Con-
sider some cases in point: the benefits of hope and op-
timism, and those soaring moments when people outdo
themselves.
PANDORA'S BOX AND POLLYANNA: THE POWER OF
POSITIVE THINKING

College students were posed the following hypothetical

situation:
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Although you set your goal of getting a B, when your

first exam score, worth 30% of your final grade is re-
turned, you have received a D. It is now one week
after you have learned about the D grade. What do
you do?19

Hope made all the difference. The response by stu-

dents with high levels of hope was to work harder and
think of a range of things they might try that could bol-
ster 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, un-
derstandably, students with low levels of hope gave up
on both counts, demoralized.
The question is not just theoretical, however. When C.
R. Snyder, the University of Kansas psychologist who
did this study, compared the actual academic achieve-
ment of freshman students high and low on hope, he
discovered that hope was a better predictor of their first-
semester grades than were their scores on the SAT, a
test supposedly able to predict how students will fare in
college (and highly correlated with IQ). Again, given
roughly the same range of intellectual abilities, emotion-
al aptitudes make the critical difference.
Snyder's explanation: "Students with high hope set
themselves higher goals and know how to work hard to
attain them. When you compare students of equivalent
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intellectual aptitude on their academic achievements,

what sets them apart is hope."20
As the familiar legend has it, Pandora, a princess of
ancient Greece, was given a gift, a mysterious box, by
gods jealous of her beauty. She was told she must never
open the gift. But one day, overcome by curiosity and
temptation, Pandora lifted the lid to peek in, letting
loose in the world the grand afflictions—disease, mal-
aise, 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.
Hope, modern researchers are finding, does more
than offer a bit of solace amid affliction; it plays a sur-
prisingly potent role in life, offering an advantage in
realms as diverse as school achievement and bearing up
in onerous jobs. Hope, in a technical sense, is more than
the sunny view that everything will turn out all 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."
People tend to differ in the general degree to which
they have hope in this sense. Some typically think of
themselves as able to get out of a jam or find ways to
solve problems, while others simply do not see them-
selves as having the energy, ability, or means to accom-
plish their goals. People with high levels of hope, Snyder
 174/661

finds, share certain traits, among them being able to

motivate themselves, feeling resourceful enough to find
ways to accomplish their objectives, reassuring them-
selves when in a tight spot that things will get better, be-
ing flexible enough to find different ways to get to their
goals or to switch goals if one becomes impossible, and
having the sense to break down a formidable task into
smaller, manageable pieces.
From the perspective of emotional intelligence, having
hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming
anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of
difficult challenges or setbacks. Indeed, people who are
hopeful evidence less depression than others as they
maneuver through life in pursuit of their goals, are less
anxious in general, and have fewer emotional distresses.

OPTIMISM: THE GREAT MOTIVATOR

Americans who follow swimming had high hopes for
Matt Biondi, a member of the U.S. Olympic Team in
1988. Some sportswriters were touting Biondi as likely
to match Mark Spitz's 1972 feat of taking seven gold
medals. But Biondi finished a heartbreaking third in his
first event, the 200-meter freestyle. In his next event,
the 100-meter butterfly, Biondi was inched out for the
gold by another swimmer who made a greater effort in
the last meter.
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Sportscasters speculated that the defeats would dis-

pirit Biondi in his successive events. But Biondi reboun-
ded from defeat and took a gold medal in his next five
events. One viewer who was not surprised by Biondi's
comeback was Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the
University of Pennsylvania, who had tested Biondi for
optimism earlier that year. In an experiment done with
Seligman, the swimming coach told Biondi during a spe-
cial event meant to showcase Biondi's best performance
that he had a worse time than was actually the case.
Despite the downbeat feedback, when Biondi was asked
to rest and try again, his performance—actually already
very good—was even better. But when other team mem-
bers who were given a false bad time—and whose test
scores showed they were pessimistic—tried again, they
did even worse the second time.21
Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expecta-
tion 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-na-
ive optimism can be disastrous).22
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Seligman defines optimism in terms of how people ex-

plain to themselves their successes and failures. People
who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that
can be changed so that they can succeed next time
around, while pessimists take the blame for failure,
ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are help-
less to change. These differing explanations have pro-
found implications for how people respond to life. For
example, in reaction to a disappointment such as being
turned down for a job, optimists tend to respond act-
ively and hopefully, by formulating a plan of action, say,
or seeking out help and advice; they see the setback as
something that can be remedied. Pessimists, by con-
trast, react to such setbacks by assuming there is noth-
ing they can do to make things go better the next time,
and so do nothing about the problem; they see the set-
back as due to some personal deficit that will always
plague them.
As with hope, optimism predicts academic success. In
a study of five hundred members of the incoming fresh-
man class of 1984 at the University of Pennsylvania, the
students' scores on a test of optimism were a better pre-
dictor of their actual grades freshman year than were
their SAT scores or their high-school grades. Said Selig-
man, who studied them, "College entrance exams meas-
ure talent, while explanatory style tells you who gives
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up. It is the combination of reasonable talent and the

ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to
success. 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 achieve-
ment is a function not just of talent, but also of the capa-
city to stand defeat."23
One of the most telling demonstrations of the power
of optimism to motivate people is a study Seligman did
of insurance salesmen with the MetLife company. Being
able to take a rejection with grace is essential in sales of
all kinds, especially with a product like insurance, where
the ratio of noes to yeses can be so discouragingly high.
For this reason, about three quarters of insurance sales-
men quit in their first three years. Seligman found that
new salesmen who were by nature optimists sold 37 per-
cent more insurance in their first two years on the job
than did pessimists. And during the first year the pess-
imists quit at twice the rate of the optimists.
What's more, Seligman persuaded MetLife to hire a
special group of applicants who scored high on a test for
optimism but failed the normal screening tests (which
compared a range of their attitudes to a standard profile
based on answers from agents who have been
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successful). This special group outsold the pessimists by

21 percent in their first year, and 57 percent in the
second.
Just why optimism makes such a difference in sales
success speaks to the sense in which it is an emotionally
intelligent attitude. Each no a salesperson gets is a small
defeat. The emotional reaction to that defeat is crucial to
the ability to marshal enough motivation to continue. As
the noes mount up, morale can deteriorate, making it
harder and harder to pick up the phone for the next call.
Such rejection is especially hard to take for a pessimist,
who interprets it as meaning, "I'm a failure at this; I'll
never make a sale"—an interpretation that is sure to
trigger apathy and defeatism, if not depression. Optim-
ists, on the other hand, tell themselves, "I'm using the
wrong approach," or "That last person was just in a bad
mood." By seeing not themselves but something in the
situation as the reason for their failure, they can change
their approach in the next call. While the pessimist's
mental set leads to despair, the optimist's spawns hope.
One source of a positive or negative outlook may well
be inborn temperament; some people by nature tend
one way or the other. But as we shall also see in Chapter
14, temperament can be tempered by experience. Op-
timism and hope—like helplessness and despair—can be
learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call
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self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the

events of 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. And surmounting those challenges in turn
increases the sense of self-efficacy. This attitude makes
people more likely to make the best use of whatever
skills they may have—or to do what it takes to develop
them.
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done
much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well:
"People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound ef-
fect 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 fail-
ures; they approach things in terms of how to handle
them rather than worrying about what can go wrong."24

FLOW: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF

EXCELLENCE?
A composer describes those moments when his work is
at its best:

You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point

that you feel as though you almost don't exist. I've
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experienced this time and again. My hand seems

devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what
is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of
awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by itself.25

His description is remarkably similar to those of hun-

dreds of diverse men and women—rock climbers, chess
champions, surgeons, basketball players, engineers,
managers, even filing clerks—when they tell of a time
they outdid themselves in some favored activity. The
state they describe is called "flow" by Mihaly Csikszent-
mihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who has
collected such accounts of peak performance during two
decades of research.26 Athletes know this state of grace
as "the zone," where excellence becomes effortless,
crowd and competitors disappearing into a blissful,
steady absorption in the moment. Diane Roffe-Steinrot-
ter, who captured a gold medal in skiing at the 1994
Winter Olympics, said after she finished her turn at ski
racing that she remembered nothing about it but being
immersed in relaxation: "I felt like a waterfall."27
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
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the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. Yet

flow(or a milder microflow) is an experience almost
everyone enters from time to time, particularly when
performing at their peak or stretching beyond their
former limits. It is perhaps best captured by ecstatic
lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmoni-
ous one.
That experience is a glorious one: the hallmark of flow
is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because
flow feels so good, it is intrinsically rewarding. It is a
state in which people become utterly absorbed in what
they are doing, paying undivided attention to the task,
their awareness merged with their actions. Indeed, it in-
terrupts flow to reflect too much on what is happen-
ing—the very thought "I'm doing this wonderfully" can
break the feeling of flow. Attention becomes so focused
that people are aware only of the narrow range of per-
ception related to the immediate task, losing track of
time and space. A surgeon, for example, recalled a chal-
lenging operation during which he was in flow; when he
completed the surgery he noticed some rubble on the
floor of the operating room and asked what had
happened. He was amazed to hear that while he was so
intent on the surgery part of the ceiling had caved in—he
hadn't noticed at all.
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Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of ru-

mination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous
preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the
task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, drop-
ping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing
well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are
egoless. Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly
control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly
attuned to the changing demands of the task. And al-
though people perform at their peak while in flow, they
are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts
of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself
is what motivates them.
There are several ways to enter flow. One is to inten-
tionally focus a sharp attention on the task at hand; a
highly concentrated state is the essence of flow. There
seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone:
it can require considerable effort to get calm and fo-
cused enough to begin the task—this first step takes
some discipline. But once focus starts to lock in, it takes
on a force of its own, both offering relief from emotional
turbulence and making the task effortless.
Entry to this zone can also occur when people find a
task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that
slightly taxes their ability. As Csikszentmihalyi told me,
"People seem to concentrate best when the demands on
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them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to
give more than usual. If there is too little demand on
them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to
handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate
zone between boredom and anxiety."28
The spontaneous pleasure, grace, and effectiveness
that characterize flow are incompatible with emotional
hijackings, in which limbic surges capture the rest of the
brain. The quality of attention in flow is relaxed yet
highly focused. It is a concentration very different from
straining to pay attention when we are tired or bored, or
when our focus is under siege from intrusive feelings
such as anxiety or anger.
Flow is a state devoid of emotional static, save for a
compelling, highly motivating feeling of mild ecstasy.
That ecstasy seems to be a by-product of the attentional
focus that is a prerequisite of flow. Indeed, the classic
literature of contemplative traditions describes states of
absorption that are experienced as pure bliss: flow in-
duced by nothing more than intense concentration.
Watching someone in flow gives the impression that
the difficult is easy; peak performance appears natural
and ordinary. This impression parallels what is going on
within the brain, where a similar paradox is repeated:
the most challenging tasks are done with a minimum ex-
penditure of mental energy. In flow the brain is in a
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"cool" state, its arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry

attuned to the demand of the moment. When people are
engaged in activities that effortlessly capture and hold
their attention, their brain "quiets down" in the sense
that there is a lessening of cortical arousal.29 That dis-
covery is remarkable, given that flow allows people to
tackle the most challenging tasks in a given domain,
whether playing against a chess master or solving a
complex mathematical problem. The expectation would
be that such challenging tasks would require more cor-
tical activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs
only within reach of the summit of ability, where skills
are well-rehearsed and neural circuits are most efficient.
A strained concentration—a focus fueled by
worry—produces increased cortical activation. But the
zone of flow and optimal performance seems to be an
oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare minimum of
mental energy expended. That makes sense, perhaps, in
terms of the skilled practice that allows people to get in-
to flow: having mastered the moves of a task, whether a
physical one such as rock climbing or a mental one such
as computer programming, means that the brain can be
more efficient in performing them. Well-practiced
moves require much less brain effort than do ones just
being learned, or those that are still too hard. Likewise,
when the brain is working less efficiently because of
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fatigue or nervousness, as happens at the end of a long,

stressful day, there is a blurring of the precision of cor-
tical effort, with too many superfluous areas being activ-
ated—a neural state experienced as being highly distrac-
ted.30 The same happens in boredom. But when the
brain is operating at peak efficiency, as in flow, there is a
precise relation between the active areas and the de-
mands of the task. In this state even hard work can seem
refreshing or replenishing rather than draining.

LEARNING AND FLOW: A NEW

MODEL FOR EDUCATION
Because flow emerges in the zone in which an activity
challenges people to the fullest of their capacities, as
their skills increase it takes a heightened challenge to
get into flow. If a task is too simple, it is boring; if too
challenging, the result is anxiety rather than flow. It can
be argued that mastery in a craft or skill is spurred on by
the experience of flow—that the motivation to get better
and better at something, be it playing the violin, dan-
cing, or gene-splicing, is at least in part to stay in flow
while doing it. Indeed, in a study of two hundred artists
eighteen years after they left art school, Csikszentmi-
halyi found that it was those who in their student days
had savored the sheer joy of painting itself who had be-
come serious painters. Those who had been motivated
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in art school by dreams of fame and wealth for the most

part drifted away from art after graduating.
Csikszentmihalyi concludes: "Painters must want to
paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas
begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what
the critics will think of it, he won't be able to pursue ori-
ginal avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-
minded immersion."31
Just as flow is a prerequisite for mastery in a craft,
profession, or art, so too with learning. Students who get
into flow as they study do better, quite apart from their
potential as measured by achievement tests. Students in
a special Chicago high school for the sciences—all of
whom had scored in the top 5 percent on a test of math
proficiency—were rated by their math teachers as high
or low achievers. Then the way these students spent
their time was monitored, each student carrying a beep-
er that signaled them at random times during the day to
write down what they were doing and what their mood
was. Not surprisingly, the low achievers spent only
about fifteen hours a week studying at home, much less
than the twenty-seven hours a week of homework done
by their high-achieving peers. The low achievers spent
most of the hours during which they were not studying
in socializing, hanging out with friends and family.
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When their moods were analyzed, a telling finding

emerged. Both the high and low achievers spent a great
deal of time during the week being bored by activities,
such as TV watching, that posed no challenge to their
abilities. Such, after all, is the lot of teenagers. But the
key difference was in their experience of studying. For
the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, ab-
sorbing 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. The low achievers found pleasure and flow in
socializing, not in studying. In short, students who
achieve up to the level of their academic potential and
beyond are more often drawn to study because it puts
them in flow. Sadly, the low achievers, by failing to hone
the skills that would get them in flow, both forfeit the
enjoyment of study and run the risk of limiting the level
of intellectual tasks that will be enjoyable to them in the
future.32
Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who de-
veloped the theory of multiple intelligences, sees flow,
and the positive states that typify it, as part of the
healthiest way to teach children, motivating them from
inside rather than by threat or promise of reward. "We
should use kids' positive states to draw them into
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learning in the domains where they can develop compet-

encies," Gardner proposed to me. "Flow is an internal
state that signifies a kid is engaged in a task that's right.
You have to find something you like and stick to it. It's
when kids get bored in school that they fight and act up,
and when they're overwhelmed by a challenge that they
get anxious about their schoolwork. But you learn at
your best when you have something you care about and
you can get pleasure from being engaged in."
The strategy used in many of the schools that are put-
ting Gardner's model of multiple intelligences into prac-
tice revolves around identifying a child's profile of nat-
ural competencies and playing to the strengths as well
as trying to shore up the weaknesses. A child who is nat-
urally talented in music or movement, for example, will
enter flow more easily in that domain than in those
where she is less able. Knowing a child's profile can help
a teacher fine-tune the way a topic is presented to a
child and offer lessons at the level—from remedial to
highly advanced—that is most likely to provide an op-
timal challenge. Doing this makes learning more pleas-
urable, neither fearsome nor a bore. "The hope is that
when kids gain flow from learning, they will be em-
boldened to take on challenges in new areas," says Gard-
ner, adding that experience suggests this is the case.
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More generally, the flow model suggests that achiev-

ing mastery of any skill or body of knowledge should
ideally happen naturally, as the child is drawn to the
areas that spontaneously engage her—that, in essence,
she loves. That 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 mu-
sic—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 pos-
itive model of learning and education than most of us
encountered in school. Who does not recall school at
least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctu-
ated by moments of high anxiety? Pursuing flow
through learning is a more humane, natural, and very
likely more effective way to marshal emotions in the ser-
vice of education.
That speaks to the more general sense in which chan-
neling emotions toward a productive end is a master
aptitude. Whether it be in controlling impulse and put-
ting off gratification, regulating our moods so they facil-
itate rather than impede thinking, motivating ourselves
to persist and try, try again in the face of setbacks, or
finding ways to enter flow and so perform more
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effectively—all bespeak the power of emotion to guide

effective effort.
 7
The Roots of Empathy
Back to Gary, the brilliant but alexithymic surgeon who
so distressed his fiancée, Ellen, by being oblivious not
only to his own feelings but to hers as well. Like most
alexithymics, he lacked empathy as well as insight. If El-
len spoke of feeling down, Gary failed to sympathize; if
she spoke of love, he changed the subject. Gary would
make "helpful" critiques of things Ellen did, not realiz-
ing these criticisms made her feel attacked, not helped.
Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we
are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in
reading feelings. 1 Alexithymics like Gary, who have no
idea what they feel themselves, are at a complete loss
when it comes to knowing what anyone else around
them is feeling. They are emotionally tone-deaf. The
emotional notes and chords that weave through people's
words and actions—the telling tone of voice or shift in
posture, the eloquent silence or telltale tremble—go by
unnoted.
Confused about their own feelings, alexithymics are
equally bewildered when other people express their feel-
ings to them. This failure to register another's feelings is
a major deficit in emotional intelligence, and a tragic
failing in what it means to be human. For all rapport,
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the root of caring, stems from emotional attunement,

from the capacity for empathy.
That capacity—the ability to know how another
feels—comes into play in a vast array of life arenas, from
sales and management to romance and parenting, to
compassion and political action. The absence of em-
pathy is also telling. Its lack is seen in criminal psycho-
paths, rapists, and child molesters.
People's emotions are rarely put into words; far more
often they are expressed through other cues. The key to
intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read non-
verbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression,
and the like. Perhaps the largest body of research on
people's ability to read such nonverbal messages is by
Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and his stu-
dents. Rosenthal devised a test of empathy, the PONS
(Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity), a series of videotapes
of a young woman expressing feelings ranging from
loathing to motherly love.2 The scenes span the spec-
trum from a jealous rage to asking forgiveness, from a
show of gratitude to a seduction. The video has been ed-
ited so that in each portrayal one or more channels of
nonverbal communication are systematically blanked
out; in addition to having the words muffled, for ex-
ample, in some scenes all other cues but the facial ex-
pression are blocked. In others, only the body
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movements are shown, and so on, through the main

nonverbal channels of communication, so that viewers
have to detect emotion from one or another specific
nonverbal cue.
In tests with over seven thousand people in the United
States and eighteen other countries, the benefits of be-
ing able to read feelings from nonverbal cues included
being better adjusted emotionally, more popular, more
outgoing, and—perhaps not surprisingly—more sensit-
ive. In general, women are better than men at this kind
of empathy. And people whose performance improved
over the course of the forty-five-minute test—a sign that
they have a talent for picking up empathy skills—also
had better relationships with the opposite sex. Empathy,
it should be no surprise to learn, helps with romantic
life.
In keeping with findings about other elements of emo-
tional intelligence, there was only an incidental relation-
ship between scores on this measure of empathic acuity
and SAT or IQ scores or school achievement tests.
Empathy's independence from academic intelligence
has been found too in testing with a version of the PONS
designed for children. In tests with 1,011 children, those
who showed an aptitude for reading feelings non-
verbally were among the most popular in their schools,
the most emotionally stable.3 They also did better in
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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 smooths the way for classroom ef-
fectiveness (or simply makes teachers like them more).
Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the
mode of the emotions is nonverbal. Indeed, when a
person's words disagree with what is conveyed via his
tone of voice, gesture, or other nonverbal channel, the
emotional truth is in how he says something rather than
in what he says. One rule of thumb used in communica-
tions research is that 90 percent or more of an emotion-
al message is nonverbal. And such messages—anxiety in
someone's tone of voice, irritation in the quickness of a
gesture—are almost always taken in unconsciously,
without paying specific attention to the nature of the
message, but simply tacitly receiving it and responding.
The skills that allow us to do this well or poorly are also,
for the most part, learned tacitly.

HOW EMPATHY UNFOLDS

The moment Hope, just nine months old, saw another
baby fall, tears welled up in her own eyes and she
crawled off to be comforted by her mother, as though it
were she who had been hurt. And fifteen-month-old Mi-
chael went to get his own teddy bear for his crying
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friend Paul; when Paul kept crying, Michael retrieved

Paul's security blanket for him. Both these small acts of
sympathy and caring were observed by mothers trained
to record such incidents of empathy in action.4 The res-
ults of the study suggest that the roots of empathy can
be traced to infancy. Virtually from the day they are
born infants are upset when they hear another infant
crying—a response some see as the earliest precursor of
empathy.5
Developmental psychologists have found that infants
feel sympathetic distress even before they fully realize
that they exist apart from other people. Even a few
months after birth, infants react to a disturbance in
those around them as though it were their own, crying
when they see another child's tears. By one year or so,
they start to realize the misery is not their own but
someone else's, though they still seem confused over
what to do about it. In research by Martin L. Hoffman at
New York University, for example, a one-year-old
brought his own mother over to comfort a crying friend,
ignoring the friend's mother, who was also in the room.
This confusion is seen too when one-year-olds imitate
the distress of someone else, possibly to better compre-
hend what they are feeling; for example, if another baby
hurts her fingers, a one-year-old might put her own fin-
gers in her mouth to see if she hurts, too. On seeing his
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mother cry, one baby wiped his own eyes, though they
had no tears.
Such motor mimicry, as it is called, is the original
technical sense of the word empathy as it was first used
in the 1920s by E. B. Titchener, an American psycholo-
gist. This sense is slightly different from its original in-
troduction into English from the Greek empatheia,
"feeling into," a term used initially by theoreticians of
aesthetics for the ability to perceive the subjective ex-
perience of another person. Titchener's theory was that
empathy stemmed from a sort of physical imitation of
the distress of another, which then evokes the same feel-
ings in oneself. He sought a word that would be distinct
from sympathy, which can be felt for the general plight
of another with no sharing whatever of what that other
person is feeling.
Motor mimicry fades from toddlers' repertoire at
around two and a half years, at which point they realize
that someone else's pain is different from their own, and
are better able to comfort them. A typical incident, from
a mother's diary:

A neighbor's baby cries . . . and Jenny approaches

and tries to give him some cookies. She follows him
around and begins to whimper to herself. She then
tries to stroke his hair, but he pulls away. . . . He
calms down, but Jenny still looks worried. She
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continues to bring him toys and to pat his head and

shoulders.6

At this point in their development toddlers begin to

diverge from one another in their overall sensitivity to
other people's emotional upsets, with some, like Jenny,
keenly aware and others tuning out. A series of studies
by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at
the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a
large part of this difference in empathic concern had to
do with how parents disciplined their children. Chil-
dren, they found, were more empathic when the discip-
line 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 dis-
tressed; by imitating what they see, children develop a
repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping
other people who are distressed.

THE WELL-ATTUNED CHILD

Sarah was twenty-five when she gave birth to twin boys,
Mark and Fred. Mark, she felt, was more like herself;
Fred was more like his father. That perception may have
been the seed of a telling but subtle difference in how
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she treated each boy. When the boys were just three
months old, Sarah would often try to catch Fred's gaze,
and when he would avert his face, she would try to catch
his eye again; Fred would respond by turning away more
emphatically. Once she would look away, Fred would
look back at her, and the cycle of pursuit and aversion
would begin again—often leaving Fred in tears. But with
Mark, Sarah virtually never tried to impose eye contact
as she did with Fred. Instead Mark could break off eye
contact whenever he wanted, and she would not pursue.
A small act, but telling. A year later, Fred was notice-
ably more fearful and dependent than Mark; one way he
showed his fearfulness was by breaking off eye contact
with other people, as he had done with his mother at
three months, turning his face down and away. Mark, on
the other hand, looked people straight in the eye; when
he wanted to break off contact, he'd turn his head
slightly upward and to the side, with a winning smile.
The twins and their mother were observed so
minutely when they took part in research by Daniel
Stern, a psychiatrist then at Cornell University School of
Medicine.7 Stern is fascinated by the small, repeated ex-
changes that take place between parent and child; he be-
lieves that the most basic lessons of emotional life are
laid down in these intimate moments. Of all such mo-
ments, the most critical are those that let the child know
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her emotions are met with empathy, accepted, and re-

ciprocated, in a process Stern calls attunement. The
twins' mother was attuned with Mark, but out of emo-
tional synch with Fred. Stern contends that the count-
lessly repeated moments of attunement or misattune-
ment between parent and child shape the emotional ex-
pectations adults bring to their close relationships—per-
haps far more than the more dramatic events of
childhood.
Attunement occurs tacitly, as part of the rhythm of re-
lationship. Stern has studied it with microscopic preci-
sion through videotaping hours of mothers with their in-
fants. He finds that through attunement mothers let
their infants know they have a sense of what the infant
is feeling. A baby squeals with delight, for example, and
the mother affirms that delight by giving the baby a
gentle shake, cooing, or matching the pitch of her voice
to the baby's squeal. Or a baby shakes his rattle, and she
gives him a quick shimmy in response. In such an inter-
action the affirming message is in the mother more or
less matching the baby's level of excitement. Such small
attunements give an infant the reassuring feeling of be-
ing emotionally connected, a message that Stern finds
mothers send about once a minute when they interact
with their babies.
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Attunement is very different from simple imitation.

"If you just imitate a baby," Stern told me, "that only
shows you know what he did, not how he felt. To let him
know you sense how he feels, you have to play back his
inner feelings in another way. Then the baby knows he
is understood."
Making love is perhaps the closest approximation in
adult life to this intimate attunement between infant
and mother. Lovemaking, Stern writes, "involves the ex-
perience of sensing the other's subjective state: shared
desire, aligned intentions, and mutual states of simul-
taneously shifting arousal," with lovers responding to
each other in a synchrony that gives the tacit sense of
deep rapport.8 Lovemaking is, at its best, an act of mu-
tual empathy; at its worst it lacks any such emotional
mutuality.

THE COSTS OF MISATTUNEMENT

Stern holds that from repeated attunements an infant
begins to develop a sense that other people can and will
share in her feelings. This sense seems to emerge at
around eight months, when infants begin to realize they
are separate from others, and continues to be shaped by
intimate relationships throughout life. When parents
are misattuned to a child it is deeply upsetting. In one
experiment, Stern had mothers deliberately over-or
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underrespond to their infants, rather than matching

them in an attuned way; the infants responded with im-
mediate dismay and distress.
Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and
child takes a tremendous emotional toll on the child.
When a parent consistently fails to show any empathy
with a particular range of emotion in the child—joys,
tears, needing to cuddle—the child begins to avoid ex-
pressing, and perhaps even feeling, those same emo-
tions. In this way, presumably, entire ranges of emotion
can begin to be obliterated from the repertoire for in-
timate relations, especially if through childhood those
feelings continue to be covertly or overtly discouraged.
By the same token, children can come to favor an un-
fortunate range of emotion, depending on which moods
are reciprocated. Even infants "catch" moods: Three-
month-old babies of depressed mothers, for example,
mirrored their mothers' moods while playing with them,
displaying more feelings of anger and sadness, and
much less spontaneous curiosity and interest, compared
to infants whose mothers were not depressed.9
One mother in Stern's study consistently underre-
acted to her baby's level of activity; eventually her baby
learned to be passive. "An infant treated that way learns,
when I get excited I can't get my mother to be equally
excited, so I may as well not try at all," Stern contends.
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But there is hope in "reparative" relationships: "Rela-

tionships 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."
Indeed, several theories of psychoanalysis see the
therapeutic relationship as providing just such an emo-
tional corrective, a reparative experience of attunement.
Mirroring is the term used by some psychoanalytic
thinkers for the therapist's reflecting back to the client
an understanding of his inner state, just as an attuned
mother does with her infant. The emotional synchrony
is unstated and outside conscious awareness, though a
patient may bask in the sense of being deeply acknow-
ledged and understood.
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 sug-
gest emotional neglect and little opportunity for attune-
ment.10
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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 hyperalert to the emotions of those around
them, in what amounts to a post-traumatic vigilance to
cues that have signaled threat. Such an obsessive preoc-
cupation with the feelings of others is typical of psycho-
logically abused children who in adulthood suffer the
mercurial, intense emotional ups and downs that are
sometimes diagnosed as "borderline personality dis-
order." Many such people are gifted at sensing what oth-
ers around them are feeling, and it is quite common for
them to report having suffered emotional abuse in child-
hood.11

THE NEUROLOGY OF EMPATHY

As is so often the case in neurology, reports of quirky
and bizarre cases were among the early clues to the
brain basis of empathy. A 1975 report, for instance, re-
viewed several cases in which patients with certain le-
sions in the right area of the frontal lobes had a curious
deficit: they were unable to understand the emotional
message in people's tone of voice, though they were per-
fectly able to understand their words. A sarcastic
"Thanks," a grateful "Thanks," and an angry "Thanks"
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all had the same neutral meaning for them. By contrast,

a 1979 report spoke of patients with injuries in other
parts of the right hemisphere who had a very different
gap in their emotional perception. These patients were
unable to express their own emotions through their tone
of voice or by gesture. They knew what they felt, but
they simply could not convey it. All these cortical brain
regions, the various authors noted, had strong connec-
tions to the limbic system.
These studies were reviewed as background to a sem-
inal paper by Leslie Brothers, a psychiatrist at the Cali-
fornia Institute of Technology, on the biology of em-
pathy.12 Reviewing both neurological findings and com-
parative studies with animals, Brothers points to the
amygdala and its connections to the association area of
the visual cortex as part of the key brain circuitry under-
lying empathy.
Much of the relevant neurological research is from
work with animals, especially nonhuman primates. That
such primates display empathy—or "emotional commu-
nication," as Brothers prefers to say—is clear not just
from anecdotal accounts, but also from studies such as
the following: Rhesus monkeys were trained first to fear
a certain tone by hearing it while they received an elec-
tric shock. Then they learned to avoid the electric shock
by pushing a lever whenever they heard the tone. Next,
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pairs of these monkeys were put in separate cages, their

only communication being through closed-circuit TV,
which allowed them to see pictures of the face of the
other monkey. The first monkey, but not the second,
then heard the dreaded tone sound, which brought a
look of fear to its face. At that moment, the second mon-
key, seeing fear on the face of the first, pushed the lever
that prevented the shock—an act of empathy, if not of
altruism.
Having established that nonhuman primates do in-
deed read emotions from the faces of their peers, re-
searchers gently inserted long, fine-tipped electrodes in-
to the brains of monkeys. These electrodes allowed the
recording of activity in a single neuron. Electrodes tap-
ping neurons in the visual cortex and in the amygdala
showed that when one monkey saw the face of another,
that information led to a neuron firing first in the visual
cortex, then in the amygdala. This pathway, of course, is
a standard route for information that is emotionally
arousing. But what is surprising about results from such
studies is that they have also identified neurons in the
visual cortex that seem to fire only in response to specif-
ic facial expressions or gestures, such as a threatening
opening of the mouth, a fearful grimace, or a docile
crouch. These neurons are distinct from others in the
same region that recognize familiar faces. This would
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seem to mean that the brain is designed from the begin-

ning to respond to specific emotional expressions—that
is, empathy is a given of biology.
Another line of evidence for the key role of the
amygdala-cortical pathway in reading and responding to
emotions, Brothers suggests, is research in which mon-
keys in the wild had the connections to and from the
amygdala and cortex severed. When they were released
back to their troops, these monkeys were able to con-
tend with ordinary tasks such as feeding themselves and
climbing trees. 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.
The very regions of the cortex where the emotion-spe-
cific neurons concentrate are also, Brothers notes, those
with the heaviest connection to the amygdala; reading
emotion involves the amygdala-cortical circuitry, which
has a key role in orchestrating the appropriate re-
sponses. "The survival value of such a system is obvious"
for nonhuman primates, notes Brothers. "The percep-
tion of another individual's approach should give rise to
a specific pattern of [physiological response]—and very
quickly—tailored to whether the intent is to bite, to have
a quiet grooming session, or to copulate."13
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A similar physiological basis for empathy in us hu-

mans is suggested in research by Robert Levenson, a
University of California at Berkeley psychologist who
has studied married couples trying to guess what their
partner is feeling during a heated discussion. 14 His
method is simple: the couple is videotaped and their
physiological responses measured while talking over
some troubling issue in their marriage—how to discip-
line the kids, spending habits, and the like. Each partner
reviews the tape and narrates what he or she was feeling
from moment to moment. Then the partner reviews the
tape a second time, now trying to read the other's
feelings.
The most empathic accuracy occurred in those hus-
bands and wives whose own physiology tracked that of
the spouse they were watching. That is, when their part-
ner had an elevated sweat response, so did they; when
their partner had a drop in heart rate, their heart
slowed. In short, their body mimicked the subtle,
moment-to-moment physical reactions of their spouse.
If the viewer's physiological patterns simply repeated
their own during the original interaction, they were very
poor at surmising what their partner was feeling. Only
when their bodies were in synch was there empathy.
This suggests that when the emotional brain is driving
the body with a strong reaction—the heat of anger,
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say—there can be little or no empathy. Empathy re-

quires enough calm and receptivity so that the subtle
signals of feeling from another person can be received
and mimicked by one's own emotional brain.

EMPATHY AND ETHICS: THE ROOTS

OF ALTRUISM
"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for
thee" is one of the most famous lines in English literat-
ure. 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. In this sense,
the opposite of empathy is antipathy. The empathic at-
titude is engaged again and again in moral judgments,
for moral dilemmas involve potential victims: Should
you lie to keep from hurting a friend's feelings? Should
you keep a promise to visit a sick friend or accept a last-
minute invitation to a dinner party instead? When
should a life-support system be kept going for someone
who would otherwise die?
These moral questions are posed by the empathy re-
searcher Martin Hoffman, who argues that the roots of
morality are to be found in empathy, since it is empath-
izing with the potential victims—someone in pain,
danger, or deprivation, say—and so sharing their dis-
tress that moves people to act to help them.15 Beyond
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this immediate link between empathy and altruism in

personal encounters, Hoffman proposes that the same
capacity for empathic affect, for putting oneself in
another's place, leads people to follow certain moral
principles.
Hoffman sees a natural progression in empathy from
infancy onward. As we have seen, at one year of age a
child feels in distress herself when she sees another fall
and start to cry; her rapport is so strong and immediate
that she puts her thumb in her mouth and buries her
head in her mother's lap, as if she herself were hurt.
After the first year, when infants become more aware
that they are distinct from others, they actively try to
soothe another crying infant, offering them their teddy
bears, for example. As early as the age of two, children
begin to realize that someone else's feelings differ from
their own, and so they become more sensitive to cues re-
vealing what another actually feels; at this point they
might, for example, recognize that another child's pride
might mean that the best way to help them deal with
their tears is not to call undue attention to them.
By late childhood the most advanced level of empathy
emerges, as children are 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
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of an entire group, such as the poor, the oppressed, the

outcast. That understanding, in adolescence, can but-
tress moral convictions centered on wanting to alleviate
misfortune and injustice.
Empathy underlies many facets of moral judgment
and action. One is "empathic anger," which John Stuart
Mill described as "the natural feeling of retaliation .
rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to . . .
those hurts which wound us through wounding others";
Mill dubbed this the "guardian of justice." Another in-
stance in which empathy leads to moral action is when a
bystander is moved to intervene on behalf of a victim;
the research shows that the more empathy a bystander
feels for the victim, the more likely it is that she will in-
tervene. There is some evidence that the level of em-
pathy people feel shades their moral judgments as well.
For example, studies in Germany and the United States
found that the more empathic people are, the more they
favor the moral principle that resources should be alloc-
ated according to people's need.16

LIFE WITHOUT EMPATHY THE MIND

OF THE MOLESTER, THE MORALS OF
THE SOCIOPATH
Eric Eckardt was involved in an infamous crime: the
bodyguard of skater Tonya Harding, Eckardt had
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arranged to have thugs attack Nancy Kerrigan,

Harding's archrival for the 1994 women's Olympic fig-
ure skating gold medal. In the attack, Kerrigan's knee
was battered, sidelining her during crucial training
months. But when Eckardt saw the image of a sobbing
Kerrigan on television, he had a sudden rush of remorse,
and sought out a friend to bare his secret, beginning the
sequence that led to the arrest of the attackers. Such is
the power of empathy.
But it is typically, and tragically, lacking in those who
commit the most mean-spirited of crimes. A psycholo-
gical fault line is common to rapists, child molesters,
and many perpetrators of family violence alike: they are
incapable of empathy. This inability to feel their victims'
pain allows them to tell themselves lies that encourage
their crime. For rapists, the lies include "Women really
want to be raped" or "If she resists, she's just playing
hard to get"; for molesters, "I'm not hurting the child,
just showing love" or "This is just another form of affec-
tion"; for physically abusive parents, "This is just good
discipline." These 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.
The blotting out of empathy as these people inflict
damage on victims is almost always part of an emotional
 212/661

cycle that precipitates their cruel acts. Witness the emo-

tional sequence that typically leads to a sex crime such
as child molestation.17 The cycle begins with the mo-
lester feeling upset: angry, depressed, lonely. These sen-
timents might be triggered by, say, watching happy
couples on TV, and then feeling depressed about being
alone. The molester then seeks solace in a favored
fantasy, typically about a warm friendship with a child;
the fantasy becomes sexual and ends in masturbation.
Afterward, the molester feels a temporary relief from the
sadness, but the relief is short-lived; the depression and
loneliness return even more strongly. The molester be-
gins to think about acting out the fantasy, telling himself
justifications like "I'm not doing any real harm if the
child is not physically hurt" and "If a child really didn't
want to have sex with me, she could stop it."
At this point the molester is seeing the child through
the lens of the perverted fantasy, not with empathy for
what a real child would feel in the situation. That emo-
tional detachment characterizes everything that follows,
from the ensuing plan to get a child alone, to the careful
rehearsal of what will happen, and then the execution of
the plan. All of it is pursued as though the child involved
had no feelings of her own; instead the molester projects
on her the cooperative attitude of the child in his
fantasy. Her feelings—revulsion, fear, disgust—do not
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register. If they did, it would "ruin" things for the

molester.
This utter lack of empathy for their victims is one of
the main focuses of new treatments being devised for
child molesters and other such offenders. In one of the
most promising treatment programs, the offenders read
heart-wrenching accounts of crimes like their own, told
from the victim's perspective. They also watch video-
tapes of victims tearfully telling what it was like to be
molested. The offenders then write about their own of-
fense from the victim's point of view, imagining what
the victim felt. They read this account to a therapy
group, and try to answer questions about the assault
from the victim's perspective. Finally, the offender goes
through a simulated reenactment of the crime, this time
playing the role of the victim.
William Pithers, the Vermont prison psychologist who
developed this perspective-taking therapy, told me,
"Empathy with the victim shifts perception so that the
denial of pain, even in one's fantasies, is difficult" and so
strengthens the men's motivation to fight their perverse
sexual urges. Sex offenders who have been through the
program in prison had only half the rate of subsequent
offenses after release compared to those who had no
such treatment. Without this initial empathy-inspired
motivation, none of the rest of treatment will work.
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While there may be some small hope for instilling a

sense of empathy in offenders such as child molesters,
there is much less for another criminal type, the psycho-
path (more recently called the sociopath as a psychiatric
diagnosis). Psychopaths are notorious for being both
charming and completely without remorse for even the
most cruel and heartless acts. Psychopathy, the incapa-
city to feel empathy or compassion of any sort, or the
least twinge of conscience, is one of the more perplexing
of emotional defects. The heart of the psychopath's cold-
ness seems to lie in an inability to make anything more
than the shallowest of emotional connections. The
cruelest of criminals, such as sadistic serial killers who
delight in the suffering of their victims before they die,
are the epitome of psychopathy.18
Psychopaths are also glib liars, willing to say anything
to get what they want, and they manipulate their vic-
tims' emotions with the same cynicism. Consider the
performance of Faro, a seventeen-year-old member of a
Los Angeles gang who crippled a mother and her baby in
a drive-by shooting, which he described with more pride
than remorse. Driving in a car with Leon Bing, who was
writing a book about the Los Angeles gangs the Crips
and the Bloods, Faro wants to show off. Faro tells Bing
he's "gonna look crazy" at the "two dudes" in the next
car. As Bing recounts the exchange:
 215/661

The driver, sensing that someone is looking at him,

glances over at my car. His eyes connect with
Faro's, widen for an instant. Then he breaks the
contact, looks down, looks away. And there is no
mistaking what I saw there in his eyes: It was fear.

Faro demonstrates the look he flashed at the next

car for Bing:

He looks straight at me and everything about his

face shifts and changes, as if by some trick of time-
lapse photography. It becomes a nightmare face,
and it is a scary thing to see. It tells you that if you
return his stare, if you challenge this kid, you'd bet-
ter be able to stand your ground. His look tells you
that he doesn't care about anything, not your life
and not his.19

Of course, in behavior as complex as crime, there are

many plausible explanations that do not evoke a biolo-
gical basis. One might be that a perverse kind of emo-
tional skill—intimidating other people—has survival
value in violent neighborhoods, as might turning to
crime; in these cases too much empathy might be coun-
terproductive. Indeed, an opportunistic lack of empathy
may be a "virtue" in many roles in life, from "bad cop"
police interrogator to corporate raider. Men who have
 216/661

been torturers for terrorist states, for example, describe

how they learned to dissociate from the feelings of their
victims in order to do their "job." There are many routes
to manipulativeness.
One of the more ominous ways this absence of em-
pathy may display itself was discovered by accident in a
study of the most vicious of wife batterers. The research
revealed a physiological anomaly among many of the
most violent husbands, who regularly beat up their
wives or threaten them with knives or guns: the hus-
bands do so in a cold, calculating state rather than while
being carried away by the heat of fury.20 As their anger
mounts, the anomaly emerges: their heart rate drops,
instead of climbing higher, as is ordinarily the case with
mounting fury. This means they are growing physiolo-
gically calmer, even as they get more belligerent and ab-
usive. Their violence appears to be a calculated act of
terrorism, a method for controlling their wives by in-
stilling fear.
These coolly brutal husbands are a breed apart from
most other men who batter their wives. For one, they
are far more likely to be violent outside the marriage as
well, getting into bar fights and battling with coworkers
and other family members. And while most men who
become violent with their wives do so impulsively, out of
rage after feeling rejected or jealous, or out of fear of
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abandonment, these calculating batterers will strike out

at their wives seemingly for no reason at all—and once
they start, nothing she does, including trying to leave,
seems to restrain their violence.
Some researchers who study criminal psychopaths
suspect their cold manipulativeness, such absence of
empathy or caring, can sometimes stem from a neural
defect.* A possible physiological basis of heartless psy-
chopathy has been shown in two ways, both of which
suggest the involvement of neural pathways to the
limbic brain. In one, people's brain waves are measured
as they try to decipher words that have been scrambled.
The words are flashed very quickly, for just a tenth of a
second or so. Most people react differently to emotional
words such as kill than to neutral words such as chair:
they can decide more quickly if the emotional word was
scrambled, and their brains show a distinctive wave pat-
tern in response to the emotional words, but not the
neutral ones. But psychopaths have neither of these re-
sponses: their brains do not show the distinctive pattern
in response to the emotional words, and they do not re-
spond more quickly to them, suggesting a disruption in
circuits between the verbal cortex, which recognizes the
word, and the limbic brain, which attaches feeling to it.
Robert Hare, the University of British Columbia psy-
chologist who has done this research, interprets these
 218/661

results as meaning that psychopaths have a shallow un-

derstanding of emotional words, a reflection of their
more general shallowness in the affective realm. The
callousness of psychopaths, Hare believes, is based in
part on another physiological pattern he discovered in
earlier research, one that also suggests an irregularity in
the workings of the amygdala and related circuits: psy-
chopaths about to receive an electrical shock show no
sign of the fear response that is normal in people about
to experience pain.21 Because the prospect of pain does
not trigger a surge of anxiety, Hare contends that psy-
chopaths lack concern about future punishment for
what they do. And because they themselves do not feel
fear, they have no empathy—or compassion—for the fear
and pain of their victims.
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* A note of caution: If there are biological patterns at

play in some kinds of criminality—such as a neural de-
fect in empathy—that does not argue that all criminals
are biologically flawed, or that there is some biological
marker for crime. A controversy has raged on this issue,
and the best consensus is that there is no such biological
marker, and certainly no "criminal gene." Even if there
is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases,
that does not mean all who have it will drift to crime;
most will not. A lack of empathy should be factored in
with all the other psychological, economic, and social
forces that contribute to a vector toward criminality.
 8
The Social Arts
As so often happens to five-year-olds with younger sib-
lings, Len has lost all patience with Jay, his two-and-a-
half-year-old brother, who is making a mess of the Lego
blocks they've been playing with. Carried away by a
wave of rage, Len bites Jay, who breaks into tears. Their
mother, hearing Jay's pained yelp, bustles over and
scolds Len, ordering him to put away those objects of
contention, the Lego blocks. At this—what surely must
seem a gross miscarriage of justice—Len bursts out cry-
ing. Still peeved, his mother refuses to console him.
But Len is proffered comfort from an unlikely source:
Jay, who, although the original injured party, is now so
concerned by his older brother's tears that he under-
takes a campaign to calm Len down. The exchange goes
something like this:1
"Len, don't," Jay implores. "Stop crying, mate. Stop it
crying."
But Len still cries. His direct plea a failure, Jay be-
seeches their mother on Len's behalf: "Len crying,
Mummy! Len crying. Look. Me show you. Len crying."
And then, turning to Len, Jay adopts a mothering
mode, patting his weeping brother as he reassures him
in soothing tones, "Look, Len. No go on crying."
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Len's sobs continue, despite the comforting. So Jay

turns to another tactic, lending a helping hand in put-
ting away the Lego blocks in their bag, with a friendly,
“Ah, Leb, Len. I put it back for Lennie, hey?”
Even so, the tears continue. The ever-ingenious Jay
tries yet another strategy, distraction. Showing his
brother a toy car, Jay tries to draw his attention away
from the minor tragedy that has just befallen him.
"There's this man in here. What's this, Len? What's this,
Len?"
Len takes no interest. He's inconsolable; his tears
know no end. Losing her patience with him, his mother
resorts to that classic parental threat, "Do you want me
to smack you?" to which Len responds with a wavering,
"No."
"Then just stop it, please," says his mother firmly, if a
bit exasperatedly.
Through his sobs, Len manages a pathetic, gasping,
"I'm trying to."
Which prompts Jay's final stratagem: borrowing his
mother's firmness and voice of authority, he threatens,
"Stop crying, Len. Smack your bottom!"
This microdrama reveals the remarkable emotional
sophistication that a toddler of just thirty months can
bring to bear in trying to manage someone else's emo-
tions. In his urgent attempts to soothe his brother, Jay is
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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 com-
mands. No doubt Jay relies on an arsenal that has been
tried with him in his own moments of distress. No mat-
ter. What counts is that he can readily put them to use in
a pinch even at this very young age.
Of course, as every parent of young children knows,
Jay's display of empathy and soothing is by no means
universal. It is perhaps as likely that a child his age will
see a sibling's upset as a chance for vengeance, and so
do whatever it takes to make the upset even worse. The
same skills can be used to tease or torment a sibling. But
even that mean-spiritedness bespeaks the emergence of
a crucial emotional aptitude: the ability to know
another's feelings and to act in a way that further shapes
those feelings. Being able to manage emotions in
someone else is the core of the art of handling
relationships.
To manifest such interpersonal power, toddlers must
first reach a benchmark of self-control, the beginnings
of the capacity to damp down their own anger and dis-
tress, their impulses and excitement—even if that ability
usually falters. Attunement to others demands a modic-
um of calm in oneself. Tentative signs of this ability to
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manage their own emotions emerge around this same

period: toddlers begin to be able to wait without wailing,
to argue or cajole to get their way rather than using
brute force—even if they don't always choose to use this
ability. Patience emerges as an alternative to tantrums,
at least occasionally. And signs of empathy emerge by
age two; it was Jay's empathy, the root of compassion,
that drove him to try so hard to cheer up his sobbing
brother, Len. Thus handling emotions in someone
else—the fine art of relationships—requires the ripeness
of two other emotional skills, self-management and
empathy.
With this base, the "people skills" ripen. These are the
social competences that make for effectiveness in deal-
ings 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 relation-
ships, 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 rela-
tionships, to persuade and influence, to put others at
ease.

SHOW SOME EMOTION

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One key social competence is how well or poorly people

express their own feelings. Paul Ekman uses the term
display rules for the social consensus about which feel-
ings can be properly shown when. Cultures sometimes
vary tremendously in this regard. For example, Ekman
and colleagues in Japan studied the facial reactions of
students to a horrific film about ritual circumcisions of
teenage Aborigines. When the Japanese students
watched the film with an authority figure present, their
faces showed only the slightest hints of reaction. But
when they thought they were alone (though they were
being taped by a secret camera) their faces twisted into
vivid mixes of anguished distress, dread, and disgust.
There are several basic kinds of display rules.2 One is
minimizing the show of emotion—this is the Japanese
norm for feelings of distress in the presence of someone
in authority, which the students were following when
they masked their upset with a poker face. Another is
exaggerating what one feels by magnifying the emo-
tional expression; this is the ploy used by the six-year-
old who dramatically twists her face into a pathetic
frown, lips quivering, as she runs to complain to her
mother about being teased by her older brother. A third
is substituting one feeling for another; this comes into
play in some Asian cultures where it is impolite to say
no, and positive (but false) assurances are given instead.
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How well one employs these strategies, and knows when

to do so, is one factor in emotional intelligence.
We learn these display rules very early, partly by ex-
plicit instruction. An education in display rules is impar-
ted when we instruct a child not to seem disappointed,
but to smile and say thank you instead, when Grandpa
has given a dreadful but well-meant birthday present.
This education in display rules, though, is more often
through modeling: children learn to do what they see
done. In educating the sentiments, emotions are both
the medium and the message. If a child is told to "smile
and say thank you" by a parent who is, at that moment,
harsh, demanding, and cold—who hisses the message
instead of warmly whispering it—the child is more likely
to learn a very different lesson, and in fact respond to
Grandpa with a frown and a curt, flat "Thank you." The
effect on Grandpa is very different: in the first case he's
happy (though misled); in the second he's hurt by the
mixed message.
Emotional displays, of course, have immediate con-
sequences in the impact they make on the person who
receives them. The rule being learned by the child is
something like, "Mask your real feelings when they will
hurt someone you love; substitute a phony, but less
hurtful feeling instead." Such rules for expressing emo-
tions are more than part of the lexicon of social
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propriety; they dictate how our own feelings impact on

everyone else. To follow these rules well is to have op-
timal impact; to do so poorly is to foment emotional
havoc.
Actors, of course, are artists of the emotional display;
their expressiveness is what evokes response in their
audience. And, no doubt, some of us come into life as
natural actors. But partly because the lessons we learn
about display rules vary according to the models we've
had, people differ greatly in their adeptness.

EXPRESSIVNESS AND EMOTIONAL

CONTAGION
It was early in the Vietnam War, and an American pla-
toon was hunkered down in some rice paddies, in the
heat of a firefight with the Vietcong. Suddenly a line of
six monks started walking along the elevated berms that
separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and poised,
the monks walked directly toward the line of fire.
"They didn't look right, they didn't look left. They
walked straight through," recalls David Busch, one of
the American soldiers. "It was really strange, because
nobody shot at 'em. And after they walked over the
berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn't
feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that
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day. It must have been that way for everybody, because

everybody quit. We just stopped fighting."3
The power of the monks' quietly courageous calm to
pacify soldiers in the heat of battle illustrates a basic
principle of social life: Emotions are contagious. To be
sure, this tale marks an extreme. Most emotional conta-
gion is far more subtle, part of a tacit exchange that hap-
pens in every encounter. We transmit and catch moods
from each other in what amounts to a subterranean eco-
nomy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic,
some nourishing. This emotional exchange is typically at
a subtle, almost imperceptible level; the way a salesper-
son says thank you can leave us feeling ignored, resen-
ted, or genuinely welcomed and appreciated. We catch
feelings from one another as though they were some
kind of social virus.
We send emotional signals in every encounter, and
those signals affect those we are with. The more adroit
we are socially, the better we control the signals we
send; the reserve of polite society is, after all, simply a
means to ensure that no disturbing emotional leakage
will unsettle the encounter (a social rule that, when
brought into the domain of intimate relationships, is
stifling). Emotional intelligence includes managing this
exchange; "popular" and "charming" are terms we use
for people whom we like to be with because their
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emotional skills make us feel good. People who are able

to help others soothe their feelings have an especially
valued social commodity; they are the souls others turn
to when in greatest emotional need. We are all part of
each other's tool kit for emotional change, for better or
for worse.
Consider a remarkable demonstration of the subtlety
with which emotions pass from one person to another.
In a simple experiment two volunteers filled out a
checklist about their moods at the moment, then simply
sat facing each other quietly while waiting for an experi-
menter to return to the room. Two minutes later she
came back and asked them to fill out a mood checklist
again. The pairs were purposely composed of one part-
ner who was highly expressive of emotion and one who
was deadpan. Invariably the mood of the one who was
more expressive of emotions had been transferred to the
more passive partner.4
How does this magical transmission occur? The most
likely answer is that we unconsciously imitate the emo-
tions we see displayed by someone else, through an out-
of-awareness motor mimicry of their facial expression,
gestures, tone of voice, and other nonverbal markers of
emotion. Through this imitation people re-create in
themselves the mood of the other person—a low-key
version of the Stanislavsky method, in which actors
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recall gestures, movements, and other expressions of an

emotion they have felt strongly in the past in order to
evoke those feelings once again.
The day-to-day imitation of feeling is ordinarily quite
subtle. Ulf Dimberg, a Swedish researcher at the
University of Uppsala, found that when people view a
smiling or angry face, their own faces show evidence of
that same mood through slight changes in the facial
muscles. The changes are evident through electronic
sensors but are typically not visible to the naked eye.
When two people interact, the direction of mood
transfer is from the one who is more forceful in express-
ing feelings to the one who is more passive. But some
people are particularly susceptible to emotional conta-
gion; their innate sensitivity makes their autonomic
nervous system (a marker of emotional activity) more
easily triggered. This ability seems to make them more
impressionable; sentimental commercials can move
them to tears, while a quick chat with someone who is
feeling cheerful can buoy them (it also may make them
more empathic, since they are more readily moved by
someone else's feelings).
John Cacioppo, the social psychophysiologist at Ohio
State University who has studied this subtle emotional
exchange, observes, "Just seeing someone express an
emotion can evoke that mood, whether you realize you
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mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us

all the time—there's a dance, a synchrony, a transmis-
sion of emotions. This mood synchrony determines
whether you feel an interaction went well or not."
The degree of emotional rapport people feel in an en-
counter is mirrored by how tightly orchestrated their
physical movements are as they talk—an index of close-
ness that is typically out of awareness. One person nods
just as the other makes a point, or both shift in their
chairs at the same moment, or one leans forward as the
other moves back. The orchestration can be as subtle as
both people rocking in swivel chairs at the same rhythm.
Just as Daniel Stern found in watching the synchrony
between attuned mothers and their infants, the same re-
ciprocity links the movements of people who feel emo-
tional rapport.
This synchrony seems to facilitate the sending and re-
ceiving of moods, even if the moods are negative. For
example, in one study of physical synchrony, women
who were depressed came to a laboratory with their ro-
mantic partners, and discussed a problem in their rela-
tionship. The more synchrony between the partners at
the nonverbal level, the worse the depressed women's
partners felt after the discussion—they had caught their
girlfriends' bad moods.5 In short, whether people feel
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upbeat or down, the more physically attuned their en-

counter, the more similar their moods will become.
The synchrony between teachers and students indic-
ates 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. Frank Bemieri, the Oregon State University psy-
chologist who did these studies, told me, "How awkward
or comfortable you feel with someone is at some level
physical. You need to have compatible timing, to co-
ordinate your movements, to feel comfortable. Syn-
chrony reflects the depth of engagement between the
partners; if you're highly engaged, your moods begin to
mesh, whether positive or negative."
In short, coordination of moods is the essence of rap-
port, the adult version of the attunement a mother has
with her infant. One determinant of interpersonal ef-
fectiveness, Cacioppo proposes, is how deftly people
carry out this emotional synchrony. If they are adept at
attuning to people's moods, or can easily bring others
under the sway of their own, then their interactions will
go more smoothly at the emotional level. The mark of a
powerful leader or performer is being able to move an
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audience of thousands in this way. By the same token,

Cacioppo points out that people who are poor at receiv-
ing and sending emotions are prone to problems in their
relationships, since people often feel uncomfortable
with them, even if they can't articulate just why this is
so.
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.
This power to determine emotion is akin to what is
called in biology a zeitgeber (literally, "time-grabber"), a
process (such as the day-night cycle or the monthly
phases of the moon) that entrains biological rhythms.
For a couple dancing, the music is a bodily zeitgeber.
When it comes to personal encounters, the person who
has the more forceful expressivity—or the most
power—is typically the one whose emotions entrain the
other. Dominant partners talk more, while the subor-
dinate partner watches the other's face more—a setup
for the transmission of affect. By the same token, the
forcefulness of a good speaker—a politician or an evan-
gelist, say—works to entrain the emotions of the audi-
ence.6 That is what we mean by, "He had them in the
palm of his hand." Emotional entrainment is the heart
of influence.
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THE RUDIMENTS OF SOCIAL

INTELLIGENCE
It's recess at a preschool, and a band of boys is running
across the grass. Reggie trips, hurts his knee, and starts
crying, but the other boys keep right on running—save
for Roger, who stops. As Reggie's sobs subside Roger
reaches down and rubs his own knee, calling out, "I hurt
my knee, too!"
Roger is cited as having exemplary interpersonal in-
telligence by Thomas Hatch, a colleague of Howard
Gardner at Spectrum, the school based on the concept of
multiple intelligences.7 Roger, it seems, is unusually ad-
ept at recognizing the feelings of his playmates and
making rapid, smooth connections with them. It was
only Roger who noticed Reggie's plight and pain, and
only Roger who tried to provide some solace, even if all
he could offer was rubbing his own knee. This small ges-
ture bespeaks a talent for rapport, an emotional skill es-
sential for the preservation of close relationships,
whether in a marriage, a friendship, or a business part-
nership. Such skills in preschoolers are the buds of tal-
ents that ripen through life.
Roger's talent represents one of four separate abilities
that Hatch and Gardner identify as components of inter-
personal intelligence:
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• Organizing groups —the essential skill of the leader,

this involves initiating and coordinating the efforts of a
network of people. This is the talent seen in theater dir-
ectors or producers, in military officers, and in effective
heads of organizations and units of all kinds. On the
playground, this is the child who takes the lead in decid-
ing what everyone will play, or becomes team captain.
• Negotiating solutions —the talent of the mediator,
preventing conflicts or resolving those that flare up.
People who have this ability excel in deal-making, in ar-
bitrating or mediating disputes; they might have a ca-
reer in diplomacy, in arbitration or law, or as middle-
men or managers of takeovers. These are the kids who
settle arguments on the playing field.
• Personal connection —Roger's talent, that of em-
pathy and connecting. This makes it easy to enter into
an encounter or to recognize and respond fittingly to
people's feelings and concerns—the art of relationship.
Such people make good "team players," dependable
spouses, good friends or business partners; in the busi-
ness world they do well as salespeople or managers, or
can be excellent teachers. Children like Roger get along
well with virtually everyone else, easily enter into play-
ing with them, and are happy doing so. These children
tend to be best at reading emotions from facial expres-
sions and are most liked by their classmates.
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• Social analysis —being able to detect and have in-

sights 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 therapist or counselor—or, if
combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or
dramatist.

Taken together, these skills are the stuff of interper-

sonal polish, the necessary ingredients for charm, social
success, even charisma. Those who are adept in social
intelligence can connect with people quite smoothly, be
astute in reading their reactions and feelings, lead and
organize, and handle the disputes that are bound to flare
up in any human activity. They are the natural leaders,
the people who can express the unspoken collective sen-
timent and articulate it so as to guide a group toward its
goals. They are the kind of people others like to be with
because they are emotionally nourishing—they leave
other people in a good mood, and evoke the comment,
"What a pleasure to be around someone like that."
These interpersonal abilities build on other emotional
intelligences. People who make an excellent social im-
pression, for example, are adept at monitoring their own
expression of emotion, are keenly attuned to the ways
others are reacting, and so are able to continually fine-
tune their social performance, adjusting it to make sure
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they are having the desired effect. In that sense, they are
like skilled actors.
However, if these interpersonal abilities are not bal-
anced by an astute sense of one's own needs and feelings
and how to fulfill them, they can lead to a hollow social
success—a popularity won at the cost of one's true satis-
faction. Such is the argument of Mark Snyder, a
University of Minnesota psychologist who has studied
people whose social skills make them first-rate social
chameleons, champions at making a good impression.8
Their psychological 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 pat-
tern, of course, is to balance being true to oneself with
social skills, using them with integrity.
Social chameleons, though, don't mind in the least
saying one thing and doing another, if that will win
them social approval. They simply live with the
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discrepancy between their public face and their private

reality. Helena Deutsch, a psychoanalyst, called such
people the "as-if personality," shifting personas with re-
markable plasticity as they pick up signals from those
around them. "For some people," Snyder told me, "the
public and private person meshes well, while for others
there seems to be only a kaleidoscope of changing ap-
pearances. They are like Woody Allen's character Zelig,
madly trying to fit in with whomever they are with."
Such people try to scan someone for a hint as to what
is wanted from them before they make a response,
rather than simply saying what they truly feel. To get
along and be liked, they are willing to make people they
dislike think they are friendly with them. And they use
their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate
social situations demand, so that they may act like very
different people depending on whom they are with,
swinging from bubbly sociability, say, to reserved with-
drawal. To be sure, to the extent that these traits lead to
effective impression management, they are highly prized
in certain professions, notably acting, trial law, sales,
diplomacy, and politics.
Another, perhaps more crucial kind of self-monitoring
seems to make the difference between those who end up
as anchorless social chameleons, trying to impress
everyone, and those who can use their social polish
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more in keeping with their true feelings. That is the ca-

pacity to be true, as the saying has it, "to thine own self,"
which allows acting in accord with one's deepest feelings
and values no matter what the social consequences.
Such emotional integrity could well lead to, say, deliber-
ately provoking a confrontation in order to cut through
duplicity or denial—a clearing of the air that a social
chameleon would never attempt.

THE MAKING OF A SOCIAL

INCOMPETENT
There was no doubt Cecil was bright; he was a college-
trained expert in foreign languages, superb at translat-
ing. But there were crucial ways in which he was com-
pletely inept. Cecil seemed to lack the simplest social
skills. He would muff a casual conversation over coffee,
and fumble when having to pass the time of day; in
short, he seemed incapable of the most routine social
exchange. Because his lack of social grace was most pro-
found when he was around women, Cecil came to ther-
apy wondering if perhaps he had "homosexual tenden-
cies of an underlying nature," as he put it, though he had
no such fantasies.
The real problem, Cecil confided to his therapist, was
that he feared that nothing he could say would be of any
interest to anybody. This underlying fear only
 239/661

compounded a profound paucity of social graces. His

nervousness during encounters led him to snicker and
laugh at the most awkward moments, even though he
failed to laugh when someone said something genuinely
funny. Cecil's awkwardness, he confided to his therapist,
went back to childhood; 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.
The tale is told by Lakin Phillips, a psychologist at Ge-
orge Washington University, who proposes that Cecil's
plight stems from a failure to learn in childhood the
most elementary lessons of social interaction:

What could Cecil have been taught earlier? To

speak directly to others when spoken to; to initiate
social contact, not always wait for others; to carry
on a conversation, not simply fall back on yes or no
or other one-word replies; to express gratitude to-
ward others, to let another person walk before one
in passing through a door; to wait until one is
served something . . . to thank others, to say
"please," to share, and all the other elementary in-
teractions we begin to teach children from age 2 on-
ward.9
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Whether Cecil's deficiency was due to another's failure

to teach him such rudiments of social civility or to his
own inability to learn is unclear. But whatever its roots,
Cecil's story is instructive because it points up the cru-
cial nature of the countless lessons children get in inter-
action synchrony and the unspoken rules of social har-
mony. The net effect of failing to follow these rules is to
create waves, to make those around us uncomfortable.
The function of these rules, of course, is to keep every-
one involved in a social exchange at ease; awkwardness
spawns anxiety. People who lack these skills are inept
not just at social niceties, but at handling the emotions
of those they encounter; they inevitably leave disturb-
ance in their wake.
We all have known Cecils, people with an annoying
lack of social graces—people who don't seem to know
when to end a conversation or phone call and who keep
on talking, oblivious to all cues and hints to say good-
bye; people whose conversation centers on 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.
Psychologists have coined the term dyssemia (from
the Greek dys- for "difficulty" and semes for "signal") for
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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.10 The problem can be in
a poor sense of personal space, so that a child stands too
close while talking or spreads their belongings into oth-
er people's territory; in interpreting or using body lan-
guage poorly; in misinterpreting or misusing facial ex-
pressions by, say, failing to make eye contact; or in a
poor sense of prosody, the emotional quality of speech,
so that they talk too shrilly or flatly.
Much research has focused on spotting children who
show signs of social deficiency, children whose awk-
wardness makes them neglected or rejected by their
playmates. Apart from children who are spurned be-
cause they are bullies, those whom other children avoid
are invariably deficient in the rudiments of face-to-face
interaction, particularly the unspoken rules that govern
encounters. If children do poorly in language, people as-
sume they are not very bright or poorly educated; but
when they do poorly in the nonverbal rules of interac-
tion, 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 ca-
maraderie—in short, who are "off." They are children
who have failed to master the silent language of
 242/661

emotion, and who unwittingly send messages that create

uneasiness.
As Stephen Nowicki, an Emory University psycholo-
gist who studies children's nonverbal abilities, put it,
"Children who can't read or express emotions well con-
stantly feel frustrated. In essence, they don't understand
what's going on. This kind of communication is a con-
stant subtext of everything you do; you can't stop show-
ing your facial expression or posture, or hide your tone
of voice. If you make mistakes in what emotional mes-
sages you send, you constantly experience that people
react to you in funny ways—you get rebuffed and don't
know why. If you're thinking you're acting happy but ac-
tually seem too hyper or angry, you find other kids get-
ting angry at you in turn, and you don't realize why.
Such kids end up feeling no sense of control over how
other people treat them, that their actions have no im-
pact on what happens to them. It leaves them feeling
powerless, depressed, and apathetic."
Apart from becoming social isolates, such children
also suffer academically. The classroom, of course, is as
much a social situation as an academic one; the socially
awkward child is as likely to misread and misrespond to
a teacher as to another child. The resulting anxiety and
bewilderment can themselves interfere with their ability
to learn effectively. Indeed, as tests of children's
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nonverbal sensitivity have shown, those who misread

emotional cues tend to do poorly in school compared to
their academic potential as reflected in IQ tests.11

"WE HATE YOU": AT THE THRESHOLD

Social ineptitude is perhaps most painful and explicit
when it comes to one of the more perilous moments in
the life of a young child: being on the edge of a group at
play you want to join. It is a moment of peril, one when
being liked or hated, belonging or not, is made all too
public. For that reason that crucial moment has been
the subject of intense scrutiny by students of child de-
velopment, revealing a stark contrast in approach
strategies used by popular children and by social out-
casts. The findings highlight just how crucial it is for so-
cial competence to notice, interpret, and respond to
emotional and interpersonal cues. While it is poignant
to see a child hover on the edge of others at play, want-
ing to join in but being left out, it is a universal predica-
ment. Even the most popular children are sometimes re-
jected—a study of second and third graders found that
26 percent of the time the most well liked children were
rebuffed when they tried to enter a group already at
play.
Young children are brutally candid about the emo-
tional judgment implicit in such rejections. Witness the
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following dialogue from four-year-olds in a preschool.12

Linda wants to join Barbara, Nancy, and Bill, who are
playing with toy animals and building blocks. She
watches for a minute, then makes her approach, sitting
next to Barbara and starting to play with the animals.
Barbara turns to her and says, "You can't play!"
"Yes, I can," Linda counters. "I can have some anim-
als, too."
"No, you can't," Barbara says bluntly. "We don't like
you today."
When Bill protests on Linda's behalf, Nancy joins the
attack: "We hate her today."
Because of the danger of being told, either explicitly or
implicitly, "We hate you," all children are understand-
ably cautious on the threshold of approaching a group.
That anxiety, of course, is probably not much different
from that felt by a grown-up at a cocktail party with
strangers who hangs back from a happily chatting group
who seem to be intimate friends. Because this moment
at the threshold of a group is so momentous for a child,
it is also, as one researcher put it, "highly diagnostic. . .
quickly revealing differences in social skillfulness."13
Typically, newcomers simply watch for a time, then
join in very tentatively at first, being more assertive only
in very cautious steps. What matters most for whether a
child is accepted or not is how well he or she is able to
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enter into the group's frame of reference, sensing what

kind of play is in flow, what out of place.
The two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejec-
tion 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 dis-
agreeing with the others right away—all apparent at-
tempts to draw attention to themselves. Paradoxically,
this results in their being ignored or rejected. By con-
trast, popular children spend time observing the group
to understand what's going on before entering in, and
then do something that shows they accept it; they wait
to have their status in the group confirmed before taking
initiative in suggesting what the group should do.
Let's return to Roger, the four-year-old whom Thomas
Hatch spotted exhibiting a high level of interpersonal in-
telligence. 14 Roger's tactic for entering a group was first
to observe, then to imitate what another child was do-
ing, and finally to talk to the child and fully join the
activity—a winning strategy. Roger's skill was shown, for
instance, when he and Warren were playing at putting
"bombs" (actually pebbles) in their socks. Warren asks
Roger if he wants to be in a helicopter or an airplane.
 246/661

Roger asks, before committing himself, "Are you in a

helicopter?"15
This seemingly innocuous moment reveals sensitivity
to others' concerns, and the ability to act on that know-
ledge in a way that maintains the connection. Hatch
comments about Roger, "He 'checks in' with his play-
mate 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 figurat-
ively, fly away from each other."

EMOTIONAL BRILLIANCE: A CASE

REPORT
If the test of social skill is the ability to calm distressing
emotions in others, then handling someone at the peak
of rage is perhaps the ultimate measure of mastery. The
data on self-regulation of anger and emotional conta-
gion suggest that one effective strategy might be to dis-
tract the angry person, empathize with his feelings and
perspective, and then draw him into an alternative fo-
cus, one that attunes him with a more positive range of
feeling—a kind of emotional judo.
Such refined skill in the fine art of emotional influence
is perhaps best exemplified by a story told by an old
friend, the late Terry Dobson, who in the 1950s was one
of the first Americans ever to study the martial art
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aikido in Japan. One afternoon he was riding home on a

suburban Tokyo train when a huge, bellicose, and very
drunk and begrimed laborer got on. The man, stagger-
ing, began terrorizing the passengers: screaming curses,
he took a swing at a woman holding a baby, sending her
sprawling in the laps of an elderly couple, who then
jumped up and joined a stampede to the other end of
the car. The drunk, taking a few other swings (and, in
his rage, missing), grabbed the metal pole in the middle
of the car with a roar and tried to tear it out of its socket.
At that point Terry, who was in peak physical condi-
tion from daily eight-hour aikido workouts, felt called
upon to intervene, lest someone get seriously hurt. But
he recalled the words of his teacher: "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."
Indeed, Terry had agreed upon beginning lessons with
his teacher never to pick a fight, and to use his martial-
arts skills only in defense. Now, at last, he saw his
chance to test his aikido abilities in real life, in what was
clearly a legitimate opportunity. So, as all the other pas-
sengers sat frozen in their seats, Terry stood up, slowly
and with deliberation.
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Seeing him, the drunk roared, "Aha! A foreigner! You

need a lesson in Japanese manners!" and began gather-
ing himself to take on Terry.
But just as the drunk was on the verge of making his
move, someone gave an earsplitting, oddly joyous shout:
"Hey!"
The shout had the cheery tone of someone who has
suddenly come upon a fond friend. The drunk, sur-
prised, spun around to see a tiny Japanese man, prob-
ably in his seventies, sitting there in a kimono. The old
man beamed with delight at the drunk, and beckoned
him over with a light wave of his hand and a lilting
"C'mere."
The drunk strode over with a belligerent, "Why the
hell should I talk to you?" Meanwhile, Terry was ready
to fell the drunk in a moment if he made the least viol-
ent move.
"What'cha been drinking?" the old man asked, his
eyes beaming at the drunken laborer.
"I been drinking sake, and it's none of your business,"
the drunk bellowed.
"Oh, that's wonderful, absolutely wonderful," the old
man replied in a warm tone. "You see, I love sake, too.
Every night, me and my wife (she's seventy-six, you
know), we warm up a little bottle of sake and take it out
into the garden, and we sit on an old wooden bench . . . "
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He continued on about the persimmon tree in his back-

yard, the fortunes of his garden, enjoying sake in the
evening.
The drunk's face began to soften as he listened to the
old man; his fists unclenched. "Yeah . . . I love persim-
mons, too. . . , " he said, his voice trailing off.
"Yes," the old man replied in a sprightly voice, "and
I'm sure you have a wonderful wife."
"No," said the laborer. "My wife died. . . ." Sobbing, he
launched into a sad tale of losing his wife, his home, his
job, of being ashamed of himself.
Just then the train came to Terry's stop, and as he was
getting off he turned to hear the old man invite the
drunk to join him and tell him all about it, and to see the
drunk sprawl along the seat, his head in the old man's
lap.
That is emotional brilliance.
 PART THREE
EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE APPLIED
 9
Intimate Enemies
To love and to work, Sigmund Freud once remarked to
his disciple Erik Erikson, are the twin capacities that
mark full maturity. If that is the case, then maturity may
be an endangered way station in life—and current
trends in marriage and divorce make emotional intelli-
gence more crucial than ever.
Consider divorce rates. The rate per year of divorces
has more or less leveled off. But there is another way of
calculating divorce rates, one that suggests a perilous
climb: looking at the odds that a given newly married
couple will have their marriage eventually end in di-
vorce. Although the overall rate of divorce has stopped
climbing, the risk of divorce has been shifting to
newlyweds.
The shift gets clearer in comparing divorce rates for
couples wed in a given year. For American marriages
that began in 1890, about 10 percent ended in divorce.
For those wed in 1920, the rate was about 18 percent;
for couples married in 1950, 30 percent. Couples that
were newly wed in 1970 had a fifty-fifty chance of split-
ting up or staying together. And for married couples
starting out in 1990, the likelihood that the marriage
would end in divorce was projected to be close to a
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1
staggering 67 percent! If the estimate holds, just three
in ten of recent newlyweds can count on staying married
to their new partner.
It can be argued that much of this rise is due not so
much to a decline in emotional intelligence as to the
steady erosion of social pressures—the stigma surround-
ing divorce, or the economic dependence of wives on
their husbands—that used to keep couples together in
even the most miserable of matches. But if social pres-
sures are no longer the glue that holds a marriage to-
gether, then the emotional forces between wife and hus-
band are that much more crucial if their union is to
survive.
These ties between husband and wife—and the emo-
tional fault lines that can break them apart—have been
assayed in recent years with a precision never seen be-
fore. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in understand-
ing what holds a marriage together or tears it apart has
come from the use of sophisticated physiological meas-
ures that allow the moment-to-moment tracking of the
emotional nuances of a couple's encounter. Scientists
are now able to detect a husband's otherwise invisible
adrenaline surges and jumps in blood pressure, and to
observe fleeting but telling microemotions as they flit
across a wife's face. These physiological measures reveal
a hidden biological subtext to a couple's difficulties, a
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critical level of emotional reality that is typically imper-

ceptible to or disregarded by the couple themselves.
These measures lay bare the emotional forces that hold
a relationship together or destroy it. The fault lines have
their earliest beginnings in the differences between the
emotional worlds of girls and boys.

HIS MARRIAGE AND HERS:

CHILDHOOD ROOTS
As I was entering a restaurant on a recent evening, a
young man stalked out the door, his face set in an ex-
pression both stony and sullen. Close on his heels a
young woman came running, her fists desperately pum-
meling his back while she yelled, "Goddamn you! Come
back here and be nice to me!" That poignant, impossibly
self-contradictory plea aimed at a retreating back epi-
tomizes the pattern most commonly seen in couples
whose relationship is distressed: She seeks to engage, he
withdraws. Marital therapists have long noted that by
the time a couple finds their way to the therapy office
they are in this pattern of engage-withdraw, with his
complaint about her "unreasonable" demands and out-
bursts, and her lamenting his indifference to what she is
saying.
This marital endgame reflects the fact that there are,
in effect, two emotional realities in a couple, his and
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hers. The roots of these emotional differences, while

they may be partly biological, also can be traced back to
childhood, and to the separate emotional worlds boys
and girls inhabit while growing up. There is a vast
amount of research on these separate worlds, their bar-
riers reinforced not just by the different games boys and
girls prefer, but by young children's fear of being teased
for having a "girlfriend" or "boyfriend."2 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 oppos-
ite sex.3 These separate social universes intersect little
until teenagers start dating.
Meanwhile, boys and girls are taught very different
lessons about handling emotions. Parents, in general,
discuss emotions—with the exception of anger—more
with their daughters than their sons.4 Girls are exposed
to more information about emotions than are boys:
when parents make up stories to tell their preschool
children, they use more emotion words when talking to
daughters than to sons; when mothers play with their
infants, they display a wider range of emotions to
daughters than to sons; when mothers talk to daughters
about feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional
state itself than they do with their sons—though with the
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sons they go into more detail about the causes and con-
sequences of emotions like anger (probably as a caution-
ary tale).
Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, who have summarized
the research on differences in emotions between the
sexes, propose that 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 verb-
alization of affects is de-emphasized, may become
largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in
themselves and in others."5
At age ten, roughly the same percent of girls as boys
are overtly aggressive, given to open confrontation when
angered. But by age thirteen, a telling difference
between the sexes emerges: Girls become more adept
than boys at artful aggressive tactics like ostracism, vi-
cious gossip, and indirect vendettas. Boys, by and large,
simply continue being confrontational when angered,
oblivious to these more covert strategies.6 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.
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When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate

groups, with an emphasis on minimizing hostility and
maximizing cooperation, while boys' games are in larger
groups, with an emphasis on competition. One key dif-
ference can be seen in what happens when games boys
or girls are playing get disrupted by someone getting
hurt. If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is ex-
pected to get out of the way and stop crying so the game
can go on. If the same happens among a group of girls
who are playing, the game stops while everyone gathers
around to help the girl who is crying. This difference
between boys and girls at play epitomizes what
Harvard's Carol Gilligan points to as a key disparity
between the sexes: boys take pride in a lone, tough-
minded independence and autonomy, while girls see
themselves as part of a web of connectedness. Thus boys
are threatened by anything that might challenge their
independence, while girls are more threatened by a rup-
ture in their relationships. And, as Deborah Tannen has
pointed out in her book You just Don't Understand,
these differing perspectives mean that men and women
want and expect very different things out of a conversa-
tion, with men content to talk about "things," while wo-
men seek emotional connection.
In short, these contrasts in schooling in the emotions
foster very different skills, with girls becoming "adept at
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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".7 Evidence for
these different stances is very strong in the scientific lit-
erature. Hundreds of studies have found, for example,
that on average women are more empathic than men, at
least as measured by the ability to read someone else's
unstated feelings from facial expression, tone of voice,
and other nonverbal cues. Likewise, it is generally easier
to read feelings from a woman's face than a man's; while
there is no difference in facial expressiveness among
very young boys and girls, as they go through the
elementary-school grades boys become less expressive,
girls more so. This may partly reflect another key differ-
ence: women, on average, experience the entire range of
emotions with greater intensity and more volatility than
men—in this sense, women are more "emotional" than
men.8
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 im-
portance of this task for helping a relationship survive.
Indeed, the most important element for women—but
not for men—in satisfaction with their relationship re-
ported in a study of 264 couples was the sense that the
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9
couple has "good communication." Ted Huston, a psy-
chologist at the University of Texas who has studied
couples in depth, observes, "For the wives, intimacy
means talking things over, especially talking about the
relationship itself. The men, by and large, don't under-
stand what the wives want from them. They say, 'I want
to do things with her, and all she wants to do is talk.' "
During courtship, Huston found, men were much more
willing to spend time talking in ways that suited the
wish for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once married,
as time went on the men—especially in more traditional
couples—spent less and less time talking in this way
with their wives, finding a sense of closeness simply in
doing things like gardening together rather than talking
things over.
This growing silence on the part of husbands may be
partly due to the fact that, if anything, men are a bit Pol-
lyannaish about the state of their marriage, while their
wives are attuned to the trouble spots: in one study of
marriages, men had a rosier view than their wives of just
about everything in their relationship—lovemaking, fin-
ances, ties with in-laws, how well they listened to each
other, how much their flaws mattered.10 Wives, in gen-
eral, are more vocal about their complaints than are
their husbands, particularly among unhappy couples.
Combine men's rosy view of marriage with their
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aversion to emotional confrontations, and it is clear why

wives so often complain that their husbands try to
wiggle out of discussing the troubling things about their
relationship. (Of course this gender difference is a gen-
eralization, and is not true in every case; a psychiatrist
friend complained that in his marriage his wife is reluct-
ant to discuss emotional matters between them, and he
is the one who is left to bring them up.)
The slowness of men to bring up problems in a rela-
tionship is no doubt compounded by their relative lack
of skill when it comes to reading facial expressions of
emotions. Women, for example, are more sensitive to a
sad expression on a man's face than are men in detect-
ing sadness from a woman's expression.11 Thus a woman
has to be all the sadder for a man to notice her feelings
in the first place, let alone for him to raise the question
of what is making her so sad.
Consider the implications of this emotional gender
gap for how couples handle the grievances and disagree-
ments that any intimate relationship inevitably spawns.
In fact, specific issues such as how often a couple has
sex, how to discipline the children, or how much debt
and savings a couple feels comfortable with are not what
make or break a marriage. Rather, it is how a couple dis-
cusses such sore points that matters more for the fate of
their marriage. Simply having reached an agreement
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about how to disagree is key to marital survival; men

and women have to overcome the innate gender differ-
ences 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 part-
ners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence.

MARITAL FAULT LINES

Fred: Did you pick up my dry cleaning?
Ingrid: (In a mocking tone) "Did you pick up my dry
cleaning." Pick up your own damn dry cleaning.
What am I, your maid?
Fred: Hardly. If you were a maid, at least you'd
know how to clean.

If this were dialogue from a sitcom, it might be amus-

ing. But this painfully caustic interchange was between a
couple who (perhaps not surprisingly) divorced within
the next few years.12 Their encounter took place in a
laboratory run by John Gottman, a University of Wash-
ington psychologist who has done perhaps the most de-
tailed analysis ever of the emotional glue that binds
couples together and the corrosive feelings that can des-
troy marriages.13 In his laboratory, couples' conversa-
tions are videotaped and then subjected to hours of
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microanalysis designed to reveal the subterranean emo-

tional currents at play. This mapping of the fault lines
that may lead a couple to divorce makes a convincing
case for the crucial role of emotional intelligence in the
survival of a marriage.
During the last two decades Gottman has tracked the
ups and downs of more than two hundred couples, some
just newlyweds, others married for decades. Gottman
has charted the emotional ecology of marriage with such
precision that, in one study, he was able to predict which
couples seen in his lab (like Fred and Ingrid, whose dis-
cussion of getting the dry cleaning was so acrimonious)
would divorce within three years with 94 percent accur-
acy, a precision unheard of in marital studies!
The power of Gottman's analysis comes from his
painstaking method and the thoroughness of his probes.
While the couples talk, sensors record the slightest flux
in their physiology; a second-by-second analysis of their
facial expressions (using the system for reading emo-
tions developed by Paul Ekman) detects the most fleet-
ing and subtle nuance of feeling. After their session,
each partner comes separately to the lab and watches a
videotape of the conversation, and narrates his or her
secret thoughts during the heated moments of the ex-
change. The result is akin to an emotional X-ray of the
marriage.
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An early warning signal that a marriage is in danger,

Gottman finds, is harsh criticism. In a healthy marriage
husband and wife feel free to voice a complaint. But too
often in the heat of anger complaints are expressed in a
destructive fashion, as an attack on the spouse's charac-
ter. For example, Pamela and her daughter went shoe
shopping while her husband, Tom, went to a bookstore.
They agreed to meet in front of the post office in an
hour, and then go to a matinee. Pamela was prompt, but
there was no sign of Tom. "Where is he? The movie
starts in ten minutes," Pamela complained to her daugh-
ter. "If there's a way for your father to screw something
up, he will."
When Tom showed up ten minutes later, happy about
having run into a friend and apologizing for being late,
Pamela lashed out with sarcasm: "That's okay—it gave
us a chance to discuss your amazing ability to screw up
every single plan we make. You're so thoughtless and
self-centered!"
Pamela's complaint is more than that: it is a character
assassination, a critique of the person, not the deed. In
fact, Tom had apologized. But for this lapse Pamela
brands him as "thoughtless and self-centered." Most
couples have moments like this from time to time,
where a complaint about something a partner has done
is voiced as an attack against the person rather than the
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deed. But these harsh personal criticisms have a far

more corrosive emotional impact than do more
reasoned complaints. And such attacks, perhaps under-
standably, become more likely the more a husband or
wife feels their complaints go unheard or ignored.
The differences between complaints and personal cri-
ticisms are simple. In a complaint, a wife states specific-
ally 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. But in a personal criticism she
uses the specific grievance to launch a global attack on
her husband: "You're always so selfish and uncaring. It
just proves I can't trust you to do anything right." This
kind of criticism leaves the person on the receiving end
feeling ashamed, disliked, blamed, and defective—all of
which are more likely to lead to a defensive response
than to steps to improve things.
All the more so when the criticism comes laden with
contempt, a particularly destructive emotion. Contempt
comes easily with anger; it is usually expressed not just
in the words used, but also in a tone of voice and an
angry expression. Its most obvious form, of course, is
mockery or insult—"jerk," "bitch," "wimp." But just as
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hurtful is the body language that conveys contempt, par-

ticularly the sneer or curled lip that are the universal fa-
cial signals for disgust, or a rolling of the eyes, as if to
say, "Oh, brother!"
Contempt's facial signature is a contraction of the
"dimpler," the muscle that pulls the corners of the
mouth to the side (usually the left) while the eyes roll
upward. When one spouse flashes this expression, the
other, in a tacit emotional exchange, registers a jump in
heart rate of two or three beats per minute. This hidden
conversation takes its toll; if a husband shows contempt
regularly, Gottman found, his wife will be more prone to
a range of health problems, from frequent colds and flus
to bladder and yeast infections, as well as gastrointestin-
al symptoms. And when a wife's face shows disgust, a
near cousin of contempt, four or more times within a
fifteen-minute conversation, it is a silent sign that the
couple is likely to separate within four years.
Of course, an occasional show of contempt or disgust
will not undo a marriage. Rather, such emotional volleys
are akin to smoking and high cholesterol as risk factors
for heart disease—the more intense and prolonged, the
greater the danger. On the road to divorce, one of these
factors predicts the next, in an escalating scale of
misery. Habitual criticism and contempt or disgust are
danger signs because they indicate that a husband or
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wife has made a silent judgment for the worse about

their partner. In his or her thoughts, the spouse is the
subject of constant condemnation. Such negative and
hostile thinking leads naturally to attacks that make the
partner on the receiving end defensive—or ready to
counterattack in return.
The two arms of the fight-or-flight response each rep-
resent ways a spouse can respond to an attack. The most
obvious is to fight back, lashing out in anger. That route
typically ends in a fruitless shouting match. But the al-
ternative response, fleeing, can be more pernicious, par-
ticularly when the "flight" is a retreat into stony silence.
Stonewalling is the ultimate defense. The stone waller
just goes blank, in effect withdrawing from the conver-
sation by responding with a stony expression and si-
lence. Stonewalling sends a powerful, unnerving mes-
sage, something like a combination of icy distance, su-
periority, and distaste. Stonewalling showed up mainly
in marriages that were heading for trouble; in 85 per-
cent of these cases it was the husband who stonewalled
in response to a wife who attacked with criticism and
contempt.14 As a habitual response stonewalling is dev-
astating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all pos-
sibility of working out disagreements.

TOXIC THOUGHTS
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The children are being rambunctious, and Martin, their

father, is getting annoyed. He turns to his wife, Melanie,
and says in a sharp tone, "Dear, don't you think the kids
could quiet down?"
His actual thought: "She's too easy on the kids."
Melanie, responding to his ire, feels a surge of anger.
Her face grows taut, her brows knit in a frown, and she
replies, "The kids are having a good time. Anyhow,
they'll be going up to bed soon."
Her thought: "There he goes again, complaining all
the time."
Martin now is visibly enraged. He leans forward men-
acingly, his fists clenched, as he says in an annoyed
tone, "Should I put them to bed now?"
His thought: "She opposes me in everything. I'd better
take over."
Melanie, suddenly frightened by Martin's wrath, says
meekly, "No, I'll put them to bed right away."
Her thought: "He's getting out of control—he could
hurt the kids. I'd better give in."
These parallel conversations—the spoken and the si-
lent—are reported by Aaron Beck, the founder of cognit-
ive therapy, as an example of the kinds of thinking that
can poison a marriage.15 The real emotional exchange
between Melanie and Martin is shaped by their
thoughts, and those thoughts, in turn, are determined
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by another, deeper layer, which Beck calls "automatic

thoughts"—fleeting, background assumptions about
oneself and the people in one's life that reflect our deep-
est 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 inno-
cent victim in their marriage, and Martin feels righteous
indignation at what he feels is unjust treatment.
Thoughts of being an innocent victim or of righteous
indignation are typical of partners in troubled mar-
riages, continually fueling anger and hurt.16 Once dis-
tressing thoughts such as righteous indignation become
automatic, they are self-confirming: the partner who
feels victimized is constantly scanning everything his
partner does that might confirm the view that she is vic-
timizing him, ignoring or discounting any acts of kind-
ness on her part that would question or disconfirm that
view.
These thoughts are powerful; they trip the neural
alarm system. Once the husband's thought of being vic-
timized triggers an emotional hijacking, he will for the
time being easily call to mind and ruminate on a list of
grievances that remind him of the ways she victimizes
him, while not recalling anything she may have done in
their entire relationship that would disconfirm the view
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that he is an innocent victim. It puts his spouse in a no-

win situation: even things she does that are intentionally
kind can be reinterpreted when viewed through such a
negative lens and dismissed as feeble attempts to deny
she is a victimizes
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. The general template for thoughts that
maintain or alleviate distress follows the pattern out-
lined in Chapter 6 by psychologist Martin Seligman for
pessimistic and optimistic outlooks. The pessimistic
view is that the partner is inherently flawed in a way
that cannot change and that guarantees misery: "He's
selfish and self-absorbed; that's the way he was brought
up and that's the way he will always be; he expects me to
wait on him hand and foot and he couldn't care less
about how I feel." The contrasting optimistic view would
be something like: "He's being demanding now, but he's
been thoughtful in the past; maybe he's in a bad
mood—I wonder if something's bothering him about his
work." This is a view that does not write off the husband
(or the marriage) as irredeemably damaged and hope-
less. Instead it sees a bad moment as due to
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circumstances that can change. The first attitude brings

continual distress; the second soothes.
Partners who take the pessimistic stance are ex-
tremely 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.
Perhaps the most virulent of such toxic thoughts are
found in husbands who are physically violent to their
wives. A study of violent husbands by psychologists at
Indiana University found that these men think like
schoolyard bullies: they read hostile intent into even
neutral actions by their wives, and use this misreading
to justify to themselves their own violence (men who are
sexually aggressive with dates do something similar,
viewing the women with suspicion and so disregarding
their objections).17 As we saw in Chapter 7, such men are
particularly threatened by perceived slights, rejection, or
public embarrassment by their wives. A typical scenario
that triggers thoughts "justifying" violence in wife-bat-
terers: "You are at a social gathering and you notice that
for the past half hour your wife has been talking and
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laughing with the same attractive man. He seems to be

flirting with her." When these men perceive their wives
as doing something suggesting rejection or abandon-
ment, their reactions run to indignation and outrage.
Presumably, automatic thoughts like "She's going to
leave me" are triggers for an emotional hijacking in
which battering husbands respond impulsively, as the
researchers put it, with "incompetent behavioral re-
sponses"—they become violent.18

FLOODING: THE SWAMPING OF A

MARRIAGE
The net effect of these distressing attitudes is to create
incessant crisis, since they trigger emotional hijackings
more often and make it harder to recover from the res-
ulting hurt and rage. Gottman uses the apt term flood-
ing for this susceptibility to frequent emotional distress;
flooded husbands or wives are so overwhelmed by their
partner's negativity and their own reaction to it that
they are swamped by dreadful, out-of-control feelings.
People who are flooded cannot hear without distortion
or respond with clear-headedness; they find it hard to
organize their thinking, and they tall back on primitive
reactions. They just want things to stop, or want to run
or, sometimes, to strike back. Flooding is a self-perpetu-
ating emotional hijacking.
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Some people have high thresholds for flooding, easily

enduring anger and contempt, while others may be
triggered the moment their spouse makes a mild criti-
cism. The technical description of flooding is in terms of
heart rate rise from calm levels.19 At rest, women's heart
rates are about 82 beats per minute, men's about 72 (the
specific heart rate varies mainly according to a person's
body size). Flooding begins at about 10 beats per minute
above a person's resting rate; if the heart rate reaches
100 beats per minute (as it easily can do during mo-
ments of rage or tears), then the body is pumping adren-
aline and other hormones that keep the distress high for
some time. The moment of emotional hijacking is ap-
parent from the heart rate: it can jump 10, 20, or even as
many as 30 beats per minute within the space of a single
heartbeat. Muscles tense; it can seem hard to breathe.
There is a swamp of toxic feelings, an unpleasant wash
of fear and anger that seems inescapable and, subject-
ively, takes "forever" to get over. At this point—full hi-
jacking—a person's emotions are so intense, their per-
spective so narrow, and their thinking so confused that
there is no hope of taking the other's viewpoint or set-
tling things in a reasonable way.
Of course, most husbands and wives have such in-
tense moments from time to time when they fight—it's
only natural. The problem for a marriage begins when
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one or another spouse feels flooded almost continually.

Then the partner feels overwhelmed by the other part-
ner, is always on guard for an emotional assault or in-
justice, becomes hypervigilant for any sign of attack, in-
sult, or grievance, and is sure to overreact to even the
least sign. If a husband is in such a state, his wife saying,
"Honey, we've got to talk," can elicit the reactive
thought, "She's picking a fight again," and so trigger
flooding. It becomes harder and harder to recover from
the physiological arousal, which in turn makes it easier
for innocuous exchanges to be seen in a sinister light,
triggering flooding all over again.
This is perhaps the most dangerous turning point for
marriage, a catastrophic shift in the relationship. The
flooded partner has come to think the worst of the
spouse virtually all the time, reading everything she
does in a negative light. Small issues become major
battles; feelings are hurt continually. With time, the
partner who is being flooded starts to see any and all
problems in the marriage as severe and impossible to
fix, since the flooding itself sabotages any attempt to
work things out. As this continues it begins to seem use-
less to talk things over, and the partners try to soothe
their troubled feelings on their own. They start leading
parallel lives, essentially living in isolation from each
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other, and feel alone within the marriage. All too often,
Gottman finds, the next step is divorce.
In this trajectory toward divorce the tragic con-
sequences of deficits in emotional competences are self-
evident. As a couple gets caught in the reverberating
cycle of criticism and contempt, defensiveness and
stonewalling, distressing thoughts and emotional flood-
ing, the cycle itself reflects a disintegration of emotional
self-awareness and self-control, of empathy and the
abilities to soothe each other and oneself.

MEN: THE VULNERABLE SEX

Back to gender differences in emotional life, which
prove to be a hidden spur to marital meltdowns. Con-
sider this finding: Even after thirty-five or more years of
marriage, there is a basic distinction between husbands
and wives in how they regard emotional encounters.
Women, on average, do not mind plunging into the un-
pleasantness of a marital squabble nearly so much as do
the men in their lives. That conclusion, reached in a
study by Robert Levenson at the University of California
at Berkeley, is based on the testimony of 151 couples, all
in long-lasting marriages. Levenson found that hus-
bands uniformly found it unpleasant, even aversive, to
become upset during a marital disagreement, while their
wives did not mind it much.20
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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
bloodstream, and the adrenaline flow is triggered by
lower levels of negativity on their wife's part; it takes
husbands longer to recover physiologically from flood-
ing.21 This suggests the possibility that the stoic, Clint
Eastwood type of male imperturbability may represent a
defense against feeling emotionally overwhelmed.
The reason men are so likely to stonewall, Gottman
proposes, is to protect themselves from flooding; his re-
search showed that once they began stonewalling, their
heart rates dropped by about ten beats per minute,
bringing a subjective sense of relief. But—and here's a
paradox—once the men started stonewalling, it was the
wives whose heart rate shot up to levels signaling high
distress. This limbic tango, with each sex seeking com-
fort in opposing gambits, leads to a very different stance
toward emotional confrontations: men want to avoid
them as fervently as their wives feel compelled to seek
them.
Just as men are far more likely to be stonewallers, so
the women are more likely to criticize their husbands.22
This asymmetry arises as a result of wives pursuing their
role as emotional managers. As they try to bring up and
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resolve disagreements and grievances, their husbands

are more reluctant to engage in what are bound to be
heated discussions. As the wife sees her husband with-
draw from engagement, she ups the volume and intens-
ity of her complaint, starting to criticize him. As he be-
comes defensive or stonewalls in return, she feels frus-
trated and angry, and so adds contempt to underscore
the strength of her frustration. As her husband finds
himself the object of his wife's criticism and contempt,
he begins to fall into the innocent-victim or righteous-
indignation thoughts that more and more easily trigger
flooding. To protect himself from flooding, he becomes
more and more defensive or simply stonewalls altogeth-
er. But when husbands stonewall, remember, it triggers
flooding in their wives, who feel completely stymied.
And as the cycle of marital fights escalates it all too eas-
ily can spin out of control.

HIS AND HERS: MARITAL ADVICE

Given the grim potential outcome of the differences in
how men and women deal with distressing feelings in
their relationship, what can couples do to protect the
love and affection they feel for each other—in short,
what protects a marriage? On the basis of watching in-
teraction in the couples whose marriages have contin-
ued to thrive over the years, marital researchers offer
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specific advice for men and for women, and some gener-
al words for both.
Men and women, in general, need different emotional
fine-tuning. For men, the advice is not to sidestep con-
flict, but to realize that when their wife brings up some
grievance or disagreement, she may be doing it as an act
of love, trying to keep the relationship healthy and on
course (although there may well be other motives for a
wife's hostility). When grievances simmer, they build
and build in intensity until there's an explosion; when
they are aired and worked out, it takes the pressure off.
But husbands need to realize that anger or discontent is
not synonymous with personal attack—their wives' emo-
tions are often simply underliners, emphasizing the
strength of her feelings about the matter.
Men also need to be on guard against short-circuiting
the discussion by offering a practical solution too early
on—it's typically more important to a wife that she feel
her husband hears her complaint and empathizes with
her feelings about the matter (though he need not agree
with her). She may hear his offering advice as a way of
dismissing her feelings as inconsequential. Husbands
who are able to stay with their wives through the heat of
anger, rather than dismissing their complaints as petty,
help their wives feel heard and respected. Most espe-
cially, wives want to have their feelings acknowledged
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and respected as valid, even if their husbands disagree.

More often than not, when a wife feels her view is heard
and her feelings registered, she calms down.
As for women, the advice is quite parallel. Since a ma-
jor problem for men is that their wives are too intense in
voicing complaints, wives need to make a purposeful ef-
fort to be careful not to attack their husbands—to com-
plain about what they did, but not criticize them as a
person or express contempt. Complaints are not attacks
on character, but rather a clear statement that a particu-
lar action is distressing. An angry personal attack will al-
most certainly lead to a husband's getting defensive or
stonewalling, which will be all the more frustrating, and
only escalate the fight. It helps, too, if a wife's com-
plaints are put in the larger context of reassuring her
husband of her love for him.

THE GOOD FIGHT

The morning paper offers an object lesson in how not to
resolve differences in a marriage. Marlene Lenick had a
dispute with her husband, Michael: he wanted to watch
the Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game, she
wanted to watch the news. As he settled down to watch
the game, Mrs. Lenick told him that she had "had
enough of that football," went into the bedroom to fetch
a .38 caliber handgun, and shot him twice as he sat
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watching the game in the den. Mrs. Lenick was charged

with aggravated assault and freed on a $50,000 bond;
Mr. Lenick was listed in good condition, recovering from
the bullets that grazed his abdomen and tunneled
through his left shoulder blade and neck.23
While few marital fights are that violent—or that
costiy—they offer a prime chance to bring emotional in-
telligence to marriage. For example, couples in mar-
riages that last tend to stick to one topic, and to give
each partner the chance to state their point of view at
the outset.24 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.
Most notably missing in couples who eventually di-
vorce are attempts by either partner in an argument to
de-escalate the tension. The presence or absence of ways
to repair a rift is a crucial difference between the fights
of couples who have a healthy marriage and those of
couples who eventually end up divorcing.25 The repair
mechanisms that keep an argument from escalating into
a dire explosion are simple moves such as keeping the
discussion on track, empathizing, and tension reduc-
tion. These basic moves are like an emotional thermo-
stat, preventing the feelings being expressed from
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boiling over and overwhelming the partners' ability to

focus on the issue at hand.
One overall strategy for making a marriage work is
not to concentrate on the specific issues—childrearing,
sex, money, housework—that couples fight about, but
rather to cultivate a couple's shared emotional intelli-
gence, thereby improving the chances of working things
out. 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 pos-
sible healthy disagreements, the "good fights" that allow
a marriage to flourish and which overcome the negativ-
ities that, if left to grow, can destroy a marriage.26
Of course, none of these emotional habits changes
overnight; it takes persistence and vigilance at the very
least. Couples will be able to make the key changes in
direct proportion to how motivated they are to try.
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 shut-
ting down at the first sign of a confrontation—even
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though we may have sworn that we would not act like

our parents.

Calming Down
Every strong emotion has at its root an impulse to ac-
tion; managing those impulses is basic to emotional in-
telligence. This can be particularly difficult, though, in
love relationships, where we have so much at stake. The
reactions triggered here touch on some of our deepest
needs—to be loved and feel respected, fears of abandon-
ment or of being emotionally deprived. Small wonder
we can act in a marital fight as though our very survival
were at stake.
Even so, nothing gets resolved positively when hus-
band or wife is in the midst of an emotional hijacking.
One key marital competence is for partners to learn to
soothe their own distressed feelings. Essentially, this
means mastering the ability to recover quickly from the
flooding caused by an emotional hijacking. Because the
ability to hear, think, and speak with clarity dissolves
during such an emotional peak, calming down is an im-
mensely constructive step, without which there can be
no further progress in settling what's at issue.
Ambitious couples can learn to monitor their pulse
rates every five minutes or so during a troubling en-
counter, feeling the pulse at the carotid artery a few
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inches below the earlobe and jaw (people who do aer-

obic workouts learn to do this easily). 27 Counting the
pulse for fifteen seconds and multiplying by four gives
the pulse rate in beats per minute. Doing so while feel-
ing calm gives a baseline; if the pulse rate rises more
than, say, ten beats per minute above that level, it sig-
nals the beginning of flooding. If the pulse climbs this
much, a couple needs a twenty-minute break from each
other to cool down before resuming the discussion. Al-
though a five-minute break may feel long enough, the
actual physiological recovery time is more gradual. As
we saw in Chapter 5, residual anger triggers more anger;
the longer wait gives the body more time to recover from
the earlier arousal.
For couples who, understandably, find it awkward to
monitor heart rate during a fight, it is simpler to have a
prestated agreement that allows one or another partner
to call the time-out at the first signs of flooding in either
partner. During that time-out period, cooling down can
be helped along by engaging in a relaxation technique or
aerobic exercise (or any of the other methods we ex-
plored in Chapter 5) that might help the partners recov-
er from the emotional hijacking.

Detoxifying Self-talk
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Because flooding is triggered by negative thoughts about

the partner, it helps if a husband or wife who is being
upset by such harsh judgments tackles them head-on.
Sentiments like "I'm not going to take this anymore" or
"I don't deserve this kind of treatment" are innocent-vic-
tim or righteous-indignation slogans. As cognitive ther-
apist Aaron Beck points out, by catching these thoughts
and challenging them—rather than simply being en-
raged or hurt by them—a husband or wife can begin to
become free of their hold.28
This requires monitoring such thoughts, realizing that
one does not have to believe them, and making the in-
tentional effort to bring to mind evidence or perspect-
ives that put them in question. For example, a wife who
feels in the heat of the moment that "he doesn't care
about my needs—he's always so selfish" might challenge
the thought by reminding herself of a number of things
her husband has done that are, in fact, thoughtful. This
allows her to reframe the thought as: "Well, he does
show he cares about me sometimes, even though what
he just did was thoughtless and upsetting to me." The
latter formulation opens the possibility of change and a
positive resolution; the former only foments anger and
hurt.

Nondefensive Listening and Speaking

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He: "You're shouting!"

She: "Of course I'm shouting—you haven't heard a
word I'm saying. You just don't listen!"
Listening is a skill that keeps couples together. Even
in the heat of an argument, when both are seized by
emotional hijackings, one or the other, and sometimes
both, can manage to listen past the anger, and hear and
respond to a partner's reparative gesture. Couples
headed for divorce, though, get absorbed in the anger
and fixated on the specifics of the issue at hand, not
managing to hear—let alone return—any peace offerings
that might be implicit in what their partner is saying.
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 any-
thing other than an attack.
Even in the worst case, it's possible for a couple to
purposely edit what they hear, ignoring the hostile and
negative parts of the exchange—the nasty tone, the in-
sult, the contemptuous criticism—to hear the main mes-
sage. For this feat it helps if partners can remember to
see each other's negativity as an implicit statement of
how important the issue is to them—a demand for
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attention to be paid. Then if she yells, "Will you stop in-

terrupting me, for crissake!" he might be more able to
say, without reacting overtly to her hostility, "Okay, go
ahead and finish."
The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of
course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind
what is being said. As we saw in Chapter 7, for one part-
ner in a couple to truly empathize with the other de-
mands that his own emotional reactions calm down to
the point where he is receptive enough for his own
physiology to be able to mirror the feelings of his part-
ner. Without this physiological attunement, a partner's
sense of what the other is feeling is likely to be entirely
off base. Empathy deteriorates when one's own feelings
are so strong that they allow no physiological harmoniz-
ing, but simply override everything else.
One method for effective emotional listening, called
"mirroring," is commonly used in marital therapy.
When one partner makes a complaint, the other repeats
it back in her own words, trying to capture not just the
thought, but also the feelings that go with it. The partner
mirroring checks with the other to be sure the restate-
ment is on target, and if not, tries again until it is
right—something that seems simple, but is surprisingly
tricky in execution.29 The effect of being mirrored accur-
ately is not just feeling understood, but having the
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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.
The art of nondefensive speaking for couples centers
around keeping what is said to a specific complaint
rather than escalating to a personal attack. Psychologist
Haim Ginott, the grandfather of effective-communica-
tion programs, recommended that 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. In
short, open communication has no bullying, threats, or
insults. Nor does it allow for any of the innumerable
forms of defensiveness—excuses, denying responsibility,
counterattacking with a criticism, and the like. Here
again empathy is a potent tool.
Finally, respect and love disarm hostility in marriage,
as elsewhere in life. One powerful way to de-escalate a
fight is to let your partner know that you can see things
from the other perspective, and that this point of view
may have validity, even if you do not agree with it
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yourself. Another is to take responsibility or even apolo-

gize if you see you are in the wrong. At a minimum, val-
idation means at least conveying that you are listening,
and can acknowledge the emotions being expressed,
even if you can't go along with the argument: "I see
you're upset." And at other times, when there is no fight
going on, validation takes the form of compliments,
finding something you genuinely appreciate and voicing
some praise. Validation, of course, is a way to help
soothe your spouse, or to build up emotional capital in
the form of positive feelings.

Practicing
Because these maneuvers are to be called upon during
the heat of confrontation, when emotional arousal is
sure to be high, they have to be overlearned if they are to
be accessible when needed most. This is because the
emotional brain engages those response routines that
were learned earliest in life during repeated moments of
anger and hurt, and so become dominant. Memory and
response being emotion-specific, in such moments reac-
tions associated with calmer times are less easy to re-
member and act on. If a more productive emotional re-
sponse is unfamiliar or not well practiced, it is extremely
difficult to try it while upset. But if a response is prac-
ticed so that it has become automatic, it has a better
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chance of finding expression during emotional crisis.

For these reasons, the above strategies need to be tried
out and rehearsed during encounters that are not stress-
ful, as well as in the heat of battle, if they are to have a
chance to become an acquired first response (or at least
a not-too-belated second response) in the repertoire of
the emotional circuitry. In essence, these antidotes to
marital disintegration are a small remedial education in
emotional intelligence.
 10
Managing with Heart
Melburn McBroom was a domineering boss, with a tem-
per that intimidated those who worked with him. That
fact might have passed unremarked had McBroom
worked in an office or factory. But McBroom was an air-
line pilot.
One day in 1978 McBroom's plane was approaching
Portland, Oregon, when he noticed a problem with the
landing gear. So McBroom went into a holding pattern,
circling the field at a high altitude while he fiddled with
the mechanism.
As McBroom obsessed about the landing gear, the
plane's fuel gauges steadily approached the empty level.
But his copilots were so fearful of McBroom's wrath that
they said nothing, even as disaster loomed. The plane
crashed, killing ten people.
Today the story of that crash is told as a cautionary
tale in the safety training of airline pilots.1 In 80 percent
of airline crashes, pilots make mistakes that could have
been prevented, particularly if the crew worked together
more harmoniously. Teamwork, open lines of commu-
nication, cooperation, listening, and speaking one's
mind—rudiments of social intelligence—are now
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emphasized in training pilots, along with technical

prowess.
The cockpit is a microcosm of any working organiza-
tion. But lacking the dramatic reality check of an air-
plane crash, 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 out-
side the immediate scene. But the costs can be read in
signs such as decreased productivity, an increase in
missed deadlines, mistakes and mishaps, and an exodus
of employees to more congenial settings. There is, inev-
itably, a cost to the bottom line from low levels of emo-
tional intelligence on the job. When it is rampant, com-
panies can crash and burn.
The cost-effectiveness of emotional intelligence is a
relatively new idea for business, one some managers
may find hard to accept. A study of 250 executives found
that most felt their work demanded "their heads but not
their hearts." Many said they feared that feeling em-
pathy or compassion for those they worked with would
put them in conflict with their organizational goals. One
felt the idea of sensing the feelings of those who worked
for him was absurd—it would, he said, "be impossible to
deal with people." Others protested that if they were not
emotionally aloof they would be unable to make the
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"hard" decisions that business requires—although the

likelihood is that they would deliver those decisions
more humanely.2
That study was done in the 1970s, when the business
environment was very different. My argument is that
such attitudes are outmoded, a luxury of a former day; 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 ma-
nagerial 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 informa-
tion technology. The jungle fighter symbolizes where the
corporation has been; the virtuoso in interpersonal
skills is the corporate future."3
Some of the reasons are patently obvious—imagine
the consequences for a working group when someone is
unable to keep from exploding in anger or has no sensit-
ivity about what the people around him are feeling. All
the deleterious effects of agitation on thinking reviewed
in Chapter 6 operate in the workplace too: When
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emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend,

learn, or make decisions clearly. As one management
consultant put it, "Stress makes people stupid."
On the positive side, imagine the benefits for work of
being skilled in the basic emotional competences—being
attuned to the feelings of those we deal with, being able
to handle disagreements so they do not escalate, having
the ability to get into flow states while doing our work.
Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading
people to work toward a common goal. And, in terms of
managing our own career, there may be nothing more
essential than recognizing our deepest feelings about
what we do—and what changes might make us more
truly satisfied with our work.
Some of the less obvious reasons emotional aptitudes
are moving to the forefront of business skills reflect
sweeping changes in the workplace. Let me make my
point by tracking the difference three applications of
emotional intelligence make: being able to air griev-
ances as helpful critiques, creating an atmosphere in
which diversity is valued rather than a source of friction,
and networking effectively.

CRITICISM IS JOB ONE

He was a seasoned engineer, heading a software de-
velopment project, presenting the result of months
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of work by his team to the company's vice president

for product development. The men and women who
had worked long days week after week were there
with him, proud to present the fruit of their hard
labor. But as the engineer finished his presentation,
the vice president turned to him and asked sar-
castically, "How long have you been out of graduate
school? These specifications are ridiculous. They
have no chance of getting past my desk."
The engineer, utterly embarrassed and deflated,
sat glumly through the rest of the meeting, reduced
to silence. The men and women on his team made a
few desultory—and some hostile—remarks in de-
fense of their effort. The vice president was then
called away and the meeting broke up abruptly,
leaving a residue of bitterness and anger.
For the next two weeks the engineer was obsessed
by the vice president's remarks. Dispirited and de-
pressed, he was convinced he would never get an-
other assignment of importance at the company,
and was thinking of leaving, even though he en-
joyed his work there.
Finally the engineer went to see the vice presid-
ent, reminding him of the meeting, his critical re-
marks, and their demoralizing effect. Then he made
a carefully worded inquiry: "I'm a little confused by
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what you were trying to accomplish. I assume you

were not just trying to embarrass me—did you have
some other goal in mind?"
The vice president was astonished—he had no
idea that his remark, which he meant as a
throwaway line, had been so devastating. In fact, he
thought the software plan was promising, but
needed more work—he hadn't meant to dismiss it
as utterly worthless at all. He simply had not real-
ized, he said, how poorly he had put his reaction,
nor that he had hurt anyone's feelings. And, be-
latedly, he apologized.4

It's a question of feedback, really, of people getting the

information essential to keep their efforts on track. In
its original sense in systems theory, feedback meant the
exchange of data about how one part of a system is
working, with the understanding that one part affects all
others in the system, so that any part heading off course
could be changed for the better. In a company everyone
is part of the system, and so feedback is the lifeblood of
the organization—the exchange of information that lets
people know if the job they are doing is going well or
needs to be fine-tuned, upgraded, or redirected entirely.
Without feedback people are in the dark; they have no
idea how they stand with their boss, with their peers, or
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in terms of what is expected of them, and any problems

will only get worse as time passes.
In a sense, criticism is one of the most important tasks
a manager has. Yet it's also one of the most dreaded and
put off. And, like the sarcastic vice president, too many
managers have poorly mastered the crucial art of feed-
back. This deficiency has a great cost: just as the emo-
tional health of a couple depends on how well they air
their grievances, so do the effectiveness, satisfaction,
and productivity of people at work depend on how they
are told about nagging problems. Indeed, how criticisms
are given and received goes a long way in determining
how satisfied people are with their work, with those they
work with, and with those to whom they are responsible.

The Worst Way to Motivate Someone

The emotional vicissitudes at work in marriage also op-
erate in the workplace, where they take similar forms.
Criticisms are voiced as personal attacks rather than
complaints that can be acted upon; there are ad hom-
inem charges with dollops of disgust, sarcasm, and con-
tempt; both give rise to defensiveness and dodging of re-
sponsibility and, finally, to stonewalling or the em-
bittered passive resistance that comes from feeling un-
fairly treated. Indeed, one of the more common forms of
destructive criticism in the workplace, says one business
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consultant, is a blanket, generalized statement like

"You're screwing up," delivered in a harsh, sarcastic,
angry tone, providing neither a chance to respond nor
any suggestion of how to do things better. It leaves the
person receiving it feeling helpless and angry. From the
vantage point of emotional intelligence, such criticism
displays an ignorance of the feelings it will trigger in
those who receive it, and the devastating effect those
feelings will have on their motivation, energy, and con-
fidence in doing their work.
This destructive dynamic showed up in a survey of
managers who were asked to think back to times they
blew up at employees and, in the heat of the moment,
made a personal attack.5 The angry attacks had effects
much like they would in a married couple: the employ-
ees who received them reacted most often by becoming
defensive, making excuses, or evading responsibility. Or
they stonewalled—that is, tried to avoid all contact with
the manager who blew up at them. If they had been sub-
jected to the same emotional microscope that John
Gottman used with married couples, these embittered
employees would no doubt have been shown to be
thinking the thoughts of innocent victimhood or right-
eous indignation typical of husbands or wives who feel
unfairly attacked. If their physiology were measured,
they would probably also display the flooding that
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reinforces such thoughts. 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.
Indeed, in a study of 108 managers and white-collar
workers, inept criticism was ahead of mistrust, person-
ality struggles, and disputes over power and pay as a
reason for conflict on the job.6 An experiment done at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows just how dam-
aging to working relationships a cutting criticism can be.
In a simulation, volunteers were given the task of creat-
ing an ad for a new shampoo. Another volunteer (a con-
federate) supposedly judged the proposed ads; volun-
teers actually received one of two prearranged criti-
cisms. One critique was considerate and specific. But the
other included threats and blamed the person's innate
deficiencies, with remarks like, "Didn't even try; can't
seem to do anything right" and "Maybe it's just lack of
talent. I'd try to get someone else to do it."
Understandably, those who were attacked became
tense and angry and antagonistic, saying they would re-
fuse to collaborate or cooperate on future projects with
the person who gave the criticism. Many indicated they
would want to avoid contact altogether—in other words,
they felt like stonewalling. The harsh criticism made
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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 per-
sonal attack was devastating to their morale.
Many managers are too willing to criticize, but frugal
with praise, leaving their employees feeling that they
only hear about how they're doing when they make a
mistake. This propensity to criticism is compounded by
managers who delay giving any feedback at all for long
periods. "Most problems in an employee's performance
are not sudden; they develop slowly over time," J. R.
Larson, a University of Illinois at Urbana psychologist,
notes. "When the boss fails to let his feelings be known
promptly, it leads to his frustration building up slowly.
Then, one day, he blows up about it. If the criticism had
been given earlier on, the employee would have been
able to correct the problem. Too often people criticize
only when things boil over, when they get too angry to
contain themselves. And that's when they give the criti-
cism in the worst way, in a tone of biting sarcasm, call-
ing to mind a long list of grievances they had kept to
themselves, or making threats. Such attacks backfire.
They are received as an affront, so the recipient becomes
angry in return. It's the worst way to motivate
someone."

The Artful Critique

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Consider the alternative.

An artful critique can be one of the most helpful mes-
sages a manager can send. For example, what the con-
temptuous vice president could have told the software
engineer—but did not—was something like: "The main
difficulty at this stage is that your plan will take too long
and so escalate costs. I'd like you to think more about
your proposal, especially the design specifications for
software development, to see if you can figure out a way
to do the same job more quickly." Such a message has
the opposite impact of destructive criticism: instead of
creating helplessness, anger, and rebellion, it holds out
the hope of doing better and suggests the beginning of a
plan for doing so.
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. As Larson observes, "A character at-
tack—calling someone stupid or incompetent—misses
the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so
that he's no longer receptive to what you have to tell him
about how to do things better." That advice, of course, is
precisely the same as for married couples airing their
grievances.
And, in terms of motivation, when people believe that
their failures are due to some unchangeable deficit in
themselves, they lose hope and stop trying. The basic
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belief that leads to optimism, remember, is that setbacks

or failures are due to circumstances that we can do
something about to change them for the better.
Harry Levinson, a psychoanalyst turned corporate
consultant, gives the following advice on the art of the
critique, which is intricately entwined with the art of
praise:

• Be specific. Pick a significant incident, an event that

illustrates a key problem that needs changing or a pat-
tern of deficiency, such as the inability to do certain
parts of a job well. It demoralizes people just to hear
that they are doing "something" wrong without knowing
what the specifics are so they can change. 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 to
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.
"Specificity," Levinson points out, "is just as import-
ant for praise as for criticism. I won't say that vague
praise has no effect at all, but it doesn't have much, and
you can't learn from it."7
• Offer a solution. The critique, like all useful feed-
back, should point to a way to fix the problem.
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Otherwise it leaves the recipient frustrated, demoral-

ized, or demotivated. The critique may open the door to
possibilities and alternatives that the person did not
realize were there, or simply sensitize her to deficiencies
that need attention—but should include suggestions
about how to take care of these problems.
• Be present. Critiques, like praise, are most effective
face to face and in private. People who are uncomfort-
able giving a criticism—or offering praise—are likely to
ease the burden on themselves by doing it at a distance,
such as in a memo. But this makes the communication
too impersonal, and robs the person receiving it of an
opportunity for a response or clarification.
• Be sensitive. This is a call for empathy, for being at-
tuned 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, bitter-
ness, defensiveness, and distance.

Levinson also offers some emotional counsel for those

at the receiving end of criticism. One is to see the criti-
cism as valuable information about how to do better, not
as a personal attack. Another is to watch for the impulse
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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. Finally, he advises people to see criti-
cism as an opportunity to work together with the critic
to solve the problem, not as an adversarial situation. All
this sage advice, of course, directly echoes suggestions
for married couples trying to handle their complaints
without doing permanent damage to their relationship.
As with marriage, so with work.

DEALING WITH DIVERSITY

Sylvia Skeeter, a former army captain in her thirties,
was a shift manager at a Denny's restaurant in
Columbia, South Carolina. One slow afternoon a group
of black customers—a minister, an assistant pastor, and
two visiting gospel singers—came in for a meal, and sat
and sat while the waitresses ignored them. The wait-
resses, recalls Skeeter, "would kind of glare, with their
hands on their hips, and then they'd go back to talking
among themselves, like a black person standing five feet
away didn't exist."
Skeeter, indignant, confronted the waitresses, and
complained to the manager, who shrugged off their ac-
tions, saying, "That's how they were raised, and there's
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nothing I can do about it." Skeeter quit on the spot; she

is black.
If that had been an isolated incident, this moment of
blatant prejudice might have passed unnoted. But Sylvia
Skeeter was one of hundreds of people who came for-
ward to testify to a widespread pattern of antiblack pre-
judice throughout the Denny's restaurant chain, a pat-
tern that resulted in a $54 million settlement of a class-
action suit on behalf of thousands of black customers
who had suffered such indignities.
The plaintiffs included a detail of seven African-Amer-
ican Secret Service agents who sat waiting for an hour
for their breakfast while their white colleagues at the
next table were served promptly—as they were all on
their way to provide security for a visit by President
Clinton to the United States Naval Academy at Annapol-
is. They also included a black girl with paralyzed legs in
Tampa, Florida, who sat in her wheelchair for two hours
waiting for her food late one night after a prom. The pat-
tern of discrimination, the class-action suit held, was
due to the widespread assumption throughout the
Denny's chain—particularly at the level of district and
branch manager—that black customers were bad for
business. Today, largely as a result of the suit and publi-
city surrounding it, the Denny's chain is making amends
to the black community. And every employee, especially
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managers, must attend sessions on the advantages of a

multiracial clientele.
Such seminars have become a staple of in-house train-
ing in companies throughout America, with the growing
realization by managers that even if people bring preju-
dices to work with them, they must learn to act as
though they have none. The reasons, over and above hu-
man decency, are pragmatic. One is the shifting face of
the workforce, as white males, who used to be the dom-
inant group, are becoming a minority. A survey of sever-
al hundred American companies found that more than
three quarters of new employees were nonwhite—a
demographic shift that is also reflected to a large extent
in the changing pool of customers.8 Another reason is
the increasing need for international companies to have
employees who not only put any bias aside to appreciate
people from diverse cultures (and markets) but also turn
that appreciation to competitive advantage. A third mo-
tivation is the potential fruit of diversity, in terms of
heightened collective creativity and entrepreneurial
energy.
All this means the culture of an organization must
change to foster tolerance, even if individual biases re-
main. But how can a company do this? The sad fact is
that the panoply of one-day, one-video, or single-week-
end "diversity training" courses do not really seem to
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budge the biases of those employees who come to them

with deep prejudice against one or another group,
whether it be whites biased against blacks, blacks
against Asians, or Asians resenting Hispanics. Indeed,
the net effect of inept diversity courses—those that raise
false expectations by promising too much, or simply cre-
ate an atmosphere of confrontation instead of under-
standing—can be to heighten the tensions that divide
groups in the workplace, calling even greater attention
to these differences. To understand what can be done, it
helps to first understand the nature of prejudice itself.

The Roots of Prejudice

Dr. Vamik Volkan is a psychiatrist at the University of
Virginia now, but he remembers what it was like grow-
ing up in a Turkish family on the island of Cyprus, then
bitterly contested between Turks and Greeks. As a boy
Volkan heard rumors that the local Greek priest's cinc-
ture had a knot for each Turkish child he had strangled,
and remembers the tone of dismay in which he was told
how his Greek neighbors ate pigs, whose meat was con-
sidered too filthy to eat in his own Turkish culture. Now,
as a student of ethnic conflict, Volkan points to such
childhood memories to show how hatreds between
groups are kept alive over the years, as each new genera-
tion is steeped in hostile biases like these.9 The
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psychological price of loyalty to one's own group can be

antipathy toward another, especially when there is a
long history of enmity between the groups.
Prejudices are a kind of emotional learning that oc-
curs 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 so-
cial psychologist at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, who has studied prejudice for decades. "Later in
life you may want to change your prejudice, but it is far
easier to change your intellectual beliefs than your deep
feelings. Many Southerners have confessed to me, for
instance, that even though in their minds they no longer
feel prejudice against blacks, they feel squeamish when
they shake hands with a black. The feelings are left over
from what they learned in their families as children."10
The power of the stereotypes that buttress prejudice
comes in part from a more neutral dynamic in the mind
that makes stereotypes of all kinds self-confirming.11
People remember more readily instances that support
the stereotype while tending to discount instances that
challenge it. On meeting at a party an emotionally open
and warm Englishman who disconfirms the stereotype
of the cold, reserved Briton, for example, people can tell
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themselves that he's just unusual, or "he's been

drinking."
The tenacity of subtle biases may explain why, while
over the last forty years or so racial attitudes of Americ-
an whites toward blacks have become increasingly more
tolerant, more subtle forms of bias persist: people dis-
avow racist attitudes while still acting with covert bias.12
When asked, such people say they feel no bigotry, but in
ambiguous situations still act in a biased way—though
they give a rationale other than prejudice. Such bias can
take the form, say, of a white senior manager—who be-
lieves he has no prejudices—rejecting a black job applic-
ant, ostensibly not because of his race but because his
education and experience "are not quite right" for the
job, while hiring a white applicant with about the same
background. Or it might take the form of giving a brief-
ing and helpful tips to a white salesman about to make a
call, but somehow neglecting to do the same for a black
or Hispanic salesman.

Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

If people's long-held biases cannot be so easily weeded
out, what can be changed is what they do about them. At
Denny's, for example, waitresses or branch managers
who took it upon themselves to discriminate against
blacks were seldom, if ever, challenged. Instead, some
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managers seem to have encouraged them, at least ta-

citly, to discriminate, even suggesting policies such as
demanding payment for meals in advance from black
customers only, denying blacks widely advertised free
birthday meals, or locking the doors and claiming to be
closed if a group of black customers was coming. As
John P. Relman, an attorney who sued Denny's on be-
half of the black Secret Service agents, put it, "Denny's
management closed their eyes to what the field staff was
doing. There must have been some message . . . which
freed up the inhibitions of local managers to act on their
racist impulses."13
But everything we know about the roots of prejudice
and how to fight it effectively suggests that precisely this
attitude—turning a blind eye to acts of bias—allows dis-
crimination to thrive. To do nothing, in this context, is
an act of consequence in itself, letting the virus of preju-
dice spread unopposed. More to the point than diversity
training courses—or perhaps essential to their having
much effect—is that the norms of a group be decisively
changed by taking an active stance against any acts of
discrimination, from the top echelons of management
on down. Biases may not budge, but acts of prejudice
can be quashed, if the climate is changed. As an IBM ex-
ecutive put it, "We don't tolerate slights or insults in any
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way; respect for the individual is central to IBM's cul-

ture."14
If research on prejudice has any lesson for making a
corporate culture more tolerant, it is to encourage
people to speak out against even low-key acts of dis-
crimination or harassment—offensive jokes, say, or the
posting of girlie calendars demeaning to women
coworkers. One study found that when people in a group
heard someone make ethnic slurs, it led others to do the
same. The simple act of naming bias as such or objecting
to it on the spot establishes a social atmosphere that dis-
courages it; saying nothing serves to condone it.15 In this
endeavor, those in positions of authority play a pivotal
role: their failure to condemn acts of bias sends the tacit
message that such acts are okay. Following through with
action such as a reprimand sends a powerful message
that bias is not trivial, but has real—and negat-
ive—consequences.
Here too the skills of emotional intelligence are an ad-
vantage, especially in having the social knack to know
not just when but how to speak up productively against
bias. Such feedback should be couched with all the fin-
esse of an effective criticism, so it can be heard without
defensiveness. If managers and coworkers do this natur-
ally, or learn to do so, bias incidents are more likely to
fall away.
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The more effective diversity training courses set a

new, organization wide, explicit ground rule that makes
bias in any form out-of-bounds, and so encourages
people who have been silent witnesses and bystanders to
voice their discomforts and objections. Another active
ingredient in diversity courses is perspective-taking, a
stance that encourages empathy and tolerance. To the
degree that people come to understand the pain of those
who feel discriminated against, they are more likely to
speak out against it.
In short, it is more practical to try to suppress the ex-
pression of bias rather than trying to eliminate the atti-
tude itself; stereotypes change very slowly, if at all. Sim-
ply putting people of different groups together does little
or nothing to lower intolerance, as witness cases of
school desegregation in which intergroup hostility rose
rather than decreased. For the plethora of diversity
training programs that are sweeping through the cor-
porate world, this means a realistic goal is to change the
norms of a group for showing prejudice or harassing;
such programs can do much to raise into the collective
awareness the idea that bigotry or harassment are not
acceptable and will not be tolerated. But to expect that
such a program will uproot deeply held prejudices is
unrealistic.
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Still, since prejudices are a variety of emotional learn-

ing, relearning is possible—though it takes time and
should not be expected as the outcome of a one-time di-
versity training workshop. What can make a difference,
though, is sustained camaraderie and daily efforts to-
ward a common goal by people of different back-
grounds. The lesson here is from school desegregation:
when groups fail to mix socially, instead forming hostile
cliques, the negative stereotypes intensify. But when
students have worked together as equals to attain a
common goal, as on sports teams or in bands, their ste-
reotypes break down—as can happen naturally in the
workplace, when people work together as peers over the
years.16
But to stop at battling prejudice in the workplace is to
miss a greater opportunity: taking advantage of the cre-
ative and entrepreneurial possibilities that a diverse
workforce can offer. As we shall see, a working group of
varied strengths and perspectives, if it can operate in
harmony, is likely to come to better, more creative, and
more effective solutions than those same people work-
ing in isolation.

ORGANIZATION SAVVY AND THE

GROUP IQ
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By the end of the century, a third of the American work-

force will be "knowledge workers," people whose pro-
ductivity is marked by adding value to informa-
tion—whether as market analysts, writers, or computer
programmers. Peter Drucker, the eminent business
maven who coined the term "knowledge worker," points
out that such workers' expertise is highly specialized,
and that their productivity depends on their efforts be-
ing coordinated as part of an organizational team:
writers are not publishers; computer programmers are
not software distributors. While people have always
worked in tandem, notes Drucker, with knowledge
work, "teams become the work unit rather than the indi-
vidual himself."17 And that suggests why emotional in-
telligence, the skills that help people harmonize, should
become increasingly valued as a workplace asset in the
years to come.
Perhaps the most rudimentary form of organizational
teamwork is the meeting, that inescapable part of an
executive's lot—in a boardroom, on a conference call, in
someone's office. Meetings—bodies in the same
room—are but the most obvious, and a somewhat anti-
quated, example of the sense in which work is shared.
Electronic networks, e-mail, teleconferences, work
teams, informal networks, and the like are emerging as
new functional entities in organizations. To the degree
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that the explicit hierarchy as mapped on an organiza-

tional chart is the skeleton of an organization, these hu-
man touch points are its central nervous system.
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 har-
mony. It is this ability to harmonize that, all other things
being equal, will make one group especially talented,
productive, and successful, and another—with members
whose talent and skill are equal in other regards—do
poorly.
The idea that there is a group intelligence at all comes
from Robert Sternberg, the Yale psychologist, and
Wendy Williams, a graduate student, who were seeking
to understand why some groups are far more effective
than others.18 After all, when people come together to
work as a group, each brings certain talents—say, a high
verbal fluency, creativity, empathy, or technical expert-
ise. While a group can be no "smarter" than the sum
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total of all these specific strengths, it can be much

dumber if its internal workings don't allow people to
share their talents. This maxim became evident when
Sternberg and Williams recruited people to take part in
groups that were given the creative challenge of coming
up with an effective advertising campaign for a fictitious
sweetener that showed promise as a sugar substitute.
One surprise was that people who were too eager to
take part were a drag on the group, lowering its overall
performance; these eager beavers were too controlling
or domineering. Such people seemed to lack a basic ele-
ment of social intelligence, the ability to recognize what
is apt and what inappropriate in give-and-take. Another
negative was having dead weight, members who did not
participate.
The single most important factor in maximizing the
excellence of a group's product was the degree to which
the members were able to create a state of internal har-
mony, which lets them take advantage of the full talent
of their members. The overall performance of harmoni-
ous groups was helped by having a member who was
particularly talented; groups with more friction were far
less able to capitalize on having members of great abil-
ity. In groups where there are high levels of emotional
and social static—whether it be from fear or anger, from
rivalries or resentments—people cannot offer their best.
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But harmony allows a group to take maximum advant-

age of its most creative and talented members' abilities.
While the moral of this tale is quite clear for, say,
work teams, it has a more general implication for any-
one who works within an organization. Many things
people do at work depend on their ability to call on a
loose network of fellow workers; different tasks can
mean calling on different members of the network. In
effect, this creates the chance for ad hoc groups, each
with a membership tailored to offer an optimal array of
talents, expertise, and placement. Just how well people
can "work" a network—in effect, make it into a tempor-
ary, ad hoc team—is a crucial factor in on-the-job
success.
Consider, for example, a study of star performers at
Bell Labs, the world-famous scientific think tank near
Princeton. The labs are peopled by engineers and scient-
ists who are all at the top on academic IQ tests. But
within this pool of talent, some emerge as stars, while
others are only average in their output. What makes the
difference between stars and the others is not their aca-
demic IQ, but their emotional IQ. They are better able to
motivate themselves, and better able to work their in-
formal networks into ad hoc teams.
The "stars" were studied in one division at the labs, a
unit that creates and designs the electronic switches that
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control telephone systems—a highly sophisticated and

demanding piece of electronic engineering.19 Because
the work is beyond the capacity of any one person to
tackle, it is done in teams that can range from just 5 or
so engineers to 150. No single engineer knows enough to
do the job alone; getting things done demands tapping
other people's expertise. To find out what made the dif-
ference between those who were highly productive and
those who were only average, Robert Kelley and Janet
Caplan had managers and peers nominate the 10 to 15
percent of engineers who stood out as stars.
When they compared the stars with everyone else, the
most dramatic finding, at first, was the paucity of differ-
ences between the two groups. "Based on a wide range
of cognitive and social measures, from standard tests for
IQ to personality inventories, there's little meaningful
difference in innate abilities," Kelley and Caplan wrote
in the Harvard Business Review. "As it develops, aca-
demic talent was not a good predictor of on-the-job pro-
ductivity," nor was IQ.
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 im-
portant turned out to be a rapport with a network of key
people. Things go more smoothly for the standouts be-
cause they put time into cultivating good relationships
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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. "A middle performer at Bell Labs talked
about being stumped by a technical problem," Kelley
and Caplan observed. "He painstakingly called various
technical gurus and then waited, wasting valuable time
while calls went unreturned and e-mail messages un-
answered. Star performers, however, rarely face such
situations because they do the work of building reliable
networks before they actually need them. When they call
someone for advice, stars almost always get a faster
answer."
Informal networks are especially critical for handling
unanticipated problems. "The formal organization is set
up to handle easily anticipated problems," one study of
these networks observes. "But when unexpected prob-
lems arise, the informal organization kicks in. Its com-
plex web of social ties form every time colleagues com-
municate, and solidify over time into surprisingly stable
networks. Highly adaptive, informal networks move di-
agonally and elliptically, skipping entire functions to get
things done."20
The analysis of informal networks shows that just be-
cause people work together day to day they will not ne-
cessarily trust each other with sensitive information
(such as a desire to change jobs, or resentment about
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how a manager or peer behaves), nor turn to them in

crisis. 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 ad-
vice; and trust networks. Being a main node in the ex-
pertise network means someone will have a reputation
for technical excellence, which often leads to a promo-
tion. But there is virtually no relationship between being
an expert and being seen as someone people can trust
with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty
office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise,
but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their
ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from in-
formal networks. The stars of an organization are often
those who have thick connections on all networks,
whether communications, expertise, or trust.
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 dis-
played another kind of knack: taking initiative—being
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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 commit-
ments well. All such skills, of course, are aspects of emo-
tional intelligence.
There are strong signs that what is true at Bell Labs
augurs for the future of all corporate life, a tomorrow
where the basic skills of emotional intelligence will be
ever more important, in teamwork, in cooperation, in
helping people learn together how to work more effect-
ively. As knowledge-based services and intellectual cap-
ital become more central to corporations, improving the
way people work together will be a major way to lever-
age intellectual capital, making a critical competitive
difference. To thrive, if not survive, corporations would
do well to boost their collective emotional intelligence.
 11
Mind and Medicine
"Who taught you all this, Doctor?"
The reply came promptly:
"Suffering."
—ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

A vague ache in my groin sent me to my doctor. Nothing

seemed unusual until he looked at the results of a urine
test. I had traces of blood in my urine.
"I want you to go to the hospital and get some tests . . .
kidney function, cytology . . . ," he said in a businesslike
tone.
I don't know what he said next. My mind seemed to
freeze at the word cytology. Cancer.
I have a foggy memory of his explaining to me when
and where to go for diagnostic tests. It was the simplest
instruction, but I had to ask him to repeat it three or
four times. Cytology —my mind would not leave the
word. That one word made me feel as though I had just
been mugged at my own front door.
Why should I have reacted so strongly? My doctor was
just being thorough and competent, checking the limbs
in a diagnostic decision tree. There was a tiny likelihood
that cancer was the problem. But this rational analysis
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was irrelevant at that moment. 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 in-
vulnerability. Sickness—especially a severe ill-
ness—bursts that illusion, attacking the premise that our
private world is safe and secure. Suddenly we feel weak,
helpless, and vulnerable.
The problem is when medical personnel ignore how
patients are reacting emotionally, even while attending
to their physical condition. This inattention to the emo-
tional reality of illness neglects a growing body of evid-
ence showing that people's emotional states can play a
sometimes significant role in their vulnerability to dis-
ease and in the course of their recovery. Modern medical
care too often lacks emotional intelligence.
For the patient, any encounter with a nurse or physi-
cian can be a chance for reassuring information, com-
fort, and solace—or, if handled unfortunately, an invita-
tion to despair. But too often medical caregivers are
rushed or indifferent to patients' distress. To be sure,
there are compassionate nurses and physicians who take
the time to reassure and inform as well as administer
medically. But the trend is toward a professional uni-
verse in which institutional imperatives can leave med-
ical staff oblivious to the vulnerabilities of patients, or
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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.
Beyond the humanitarian argument for physicians to
offer care along with cure, there are other compelling
reasons to consider the psychological and social reality
of patients as being within the medical realm rather
than separate from it. By now a scientific case can be
made that there is a margin of medical effectiveness,
both in prevention and treatment, that can be gained by
treating people's emotional state along with their medic-
al condition. Not in every case or every condition, of
course. But looking at data from hundreds and hun-
dreds of cases, there is on average enough increment of
medical benefit to suggest that an emotional interven-
tion should be a standard part of medical care for the
range of serious disease.
Historically, medicine in modern society has defined
its mission in terms of curing disease —the medical dis-
order—while overlooking illness —the patient's experi-
ence 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 prob-
lems—or to dismiss those reactions as irrelevant to the
course of the problem itself. That attitude is reinforced
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by a medical model that dismisses entirely the idea that

mind influences body in any consequential way.
Yet there is an equally unproductive ideology in the
other direction: the notion that people can cure them-
selves of even the most pernicious disease simply by
making themselves happy or thinking positive thoughts,
or that they are somehow to blame for having gotten
sick in the first place. The result of this attitude-will-
cure-all rhetoric has been to create widespread confu-
sion and misunderstanding about the extent to which
illness can be affected by the mind, and, perhaps worse,
sometimes to make people feel guilty for having a dis-
ease, as though it were a sign of some moral lapse or
spiritual unworthiness.
The truth lies somewhere between these extremes. By
sorting through the scientific data, my aim is to clarify
the contradictions and replace the nonsense with a
clearer understanding of the degree to which our emo-
tions—and emotional intelligence—play a part in health
and disease.

THE BODY'S MIND: HOW EMOTIONS

MATTER FOR HEALTH
In 1974 a finding in a laboratory at the School of Medi-
cine and Dentistry, University of Rochester, rewrote
biology's map of the body: Robert Ader, a psychologist,
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discovered that the immune system, like the brain,

could learn. His result was a shock; the prevailing wis-
dom in medicine had been that only the brain and cent-
ral nervous system could respond to experience by
changing how they behaved. Ader's finding led to the in-
vestigation of what are turning out to be myriad ways
the central nervous system and the immune system
communicate—biological pathways that make the mind,
the emotions, and the body not separate, but intimately
entwined.
In his experiment white rats had been given a medica-
tion that artificially suppressed the quantity of disease-
fighting T cells circulating in their blood. Each time they
received the medication, they ate it along with
saccharin-laced water. But Ader discovered that giving
the rats the saccharin-flavored water alone, without the
suppressive medication, still resulted in a lowering of
the T-cell count—to the point that some of the rats were
getting sick and dying. Their immune system had
learned to suppress T cells in response to the flavored
water. That just should not have happened, according to
the best scientific understanding at the time.
The immune system is the "body's brain," as neuros-
cientist 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.1 Immune cells
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travel in the bloodstream throughout the entire body,

contacting virtually every other cell. Those cells they re-
cognize, 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. Until the day Ader
made his serendipitous discovery, every anatomist,
every physician, and every biologist believed that the
brain (along with its extensions throughout the body via
the central nervous system) and the immune system
were separate entities, neither able to influence the op-
eration of the other. There was no pathway that could
connect the brain centers monitoring what the rat tasted
with the areas of bone marrow that manufacture T cells.
Or so it had been thought for a century.
Over the years since then, Ader's modest discovery
has forced a new look at the links between the immune
system and the central nervous system. The field that
studies this, psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI, is now a
leading-edge medical science. Its very name acknow-
ledges the links: psycho, or "mind"; neuro, for the neur-
oendocrine system (which subsumes the nervous system
and hormone systems); and immunology, for the im-
mune system.
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A network of researchers is finding that the chemical

messengers that operate most extensively in both brain
and immune system are those that are most dense in
neural areas that regulate emotion.2 Some of the
strongest evidence for a direct physical pathway allow-
ing emotions to impact the immune system has come
from David Felten, a colleague of Ader's. Felten began
by noting that emotions have a powerful effect on the
autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything
from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure
levels. Felten, working with his wife, Suzanne, and other
colleagues, then detected a meeting point where the
autonomic nervous system directly talks to lymphocytes
and macrophages, cells of the immune system.3
In electron-microscope studies, they found synapse
like contacts where the nerve terminals of the autonom-
ic system have endings that directly abut these immune
cells. This physical contact point allows the nerve cells
to release neurotransmitters to regulate the immune
cells; indeed, they signal back and forth. The finding is
revolutionary. No one had suspected that immune cells
could be targets of messages from the nerves.
To test how important these nerve endings were in the
workings of the immune system, Felten went a step fur-
ther. In experiments with animals he removed some
nerves from lymph nodes and spleen—where immune
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cells are stored or made—and then used viruses to chal-

lenge the immune system. The result: a huge drop in im-
mune response to the virus. His conclusion is that
without those nerve endings the immune system simply
does not respond as it should to the challenge of an in-
vading virus or bacterium. In short, the nervous system
not only connects to the immune system, but is essential
for proper immune function.
Another key pathway linking emotions and the im-
mune system is via the influence of the hormones re-
leased under stress. The catecholamines (epinephrine
and norepinephrine—otherwise known as adrenaline
and nor-adrenaline), cortisol and prolactin, and the nat-
ural opiates beta-endorphin and enkephalin are all re-
leased during stress arousal. Each has a strong impact
on immune cells. While the relationships are complex,
the main influence is that while these hormones surge
through the body, the immune cells are hampered in
their function: stress suppresses immune resistance, at
least temporarily, presumably in a conservation of en-
ergy that puts a priority on the more immediate emer-
gency, which is more pressing for survival. But if stress
is constant and intense, that suppression may become
long-lasting.4
Microbiologists and other scientists are finding more
and more such connections between the brain and the
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cardiovascular and immune systems—having first had to

accept the once-radical notion that they exist at all.5

TOXIC EMOTIONS: THE CLINICAL

DATA
Despite such evidence, many or most physicians are still
skeptical that emotions matter clinically. One reason is
that while many studies have found stress and negative
emotions to weaken the effectiveness of various immune
cells, it is not always clear that the range of these
changes is great enough to make a medical difference.
Even so, an increasing number of physicians acknow-
ledge the place of emotions in medicine. For instance,
Dr. Camran Nezhat, an eminent gynecological laparo-
scopic surgeon at Stanford University, says, "If someone
scheduled for surgery tells me she's panicked that day
and does not want to go through with it, I cancel the
surgery." Nezhat explains, "Every surgeon knows that
people who are extremely scared do terribly in surgery.
They bleed too much, they have more infections and
complications. They have a harder time recovering. It's
much better if they are calm."
The reason is straightforward: panic and anxiety hike
blood pressure, and veins distended by pressure bleed
more profusely when cut by the surgeon's knife. Excess
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bleeding is one of the most troublesome surgical com-

plications, one that can sometimes lead to death.
Beyond such medical anecdotes, evidence for the clin-
ical importance of emotions has been mounting stead-
ily. Perhaps the most compelling data on the medical
significance of emotion come from a mass analysis com-
bining results from 101 smaller studies into a single lar-
ger one of several thousand men and women. The study
confirms that perturbing emotions are bad for
health—to a degree.6 People who experienced chronic
anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unre-
mitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cyn-
icism 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 mag-
nitude makes distressing emotions as toxic a risk factor
as, say, smoking or high cholesterol are for heart dis-
ease—in other words, a major threat to health.
To be sure, this is a broad statistical link, and by no
means indicates that everyone who has such chronic
feelings will thus more easily fall prey to a disease. But
the evidence for a potent role for emotion in disease is
far more extensive than this one study of studies indic-
ates. Taking a more detailed look at the data for specific
emotions, especially the big three—anger, anxiety, and
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depression—makes clearer some specific ways that feel-

ings have medical significance, even if the biological
mechanisms by which such emotions have their effect
are yet to be fully understood.7

When Anger Is Suicidal

A while back, the man said, a bump on the side of
his car led to a fruitless and frustrating journey.
After endless insurance company red tape and auto
body shops that did more damage, he still owed
$800. And it wasn't even his fault. He was so fed up
that whenever he got into the car he was overcome
with disgust. He finally sold the car in frustration.
Years later the memories still made the man livid
with outrage.

This bitter memory was brought to mind purposely, as

part of a study of anger in heart patients at Stanford
University Medical School. All the patients in the study
had, like this embittered man, suffered a first heart at-
tack, 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 in-
cidents that made them mad, the pumping efficiency of
their hearts dropped by five percentage points.8 Some of
the patients showed a drop in pumping efficiency of 7
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percent or greater—a range that cardiologists regard as a

sign of a myocardial ischemia, a dangerous drop in
blood flow to the heart itself.
The drop in pumping efficiency was not seen with oth-
er distressing feelings, such as anxiety, nor during phys-
ical exertion; anger seems to be the one emotion that
does most harm to the heart. While recalling the upset-
ting incident, the patients said they were only about half
as mad as they had been while it was happening, sug-
gesting that their hearts would have been even more
greatly hampered during an actual angry encounter.
This finding is part of a larger network of evidence
emerging from dozens of studies pointing to the power
of anger to damage the heart.9 The old idea has not held
up that a hurried, high-pressure Type-A personality is at
great risk from heart disease, but from that failed theory
has emerged a new finding: it is hostility that puts
people at risk.
Much of the data on hostility has come from research
by Dr. Redford Williams at Duke University.10 For ex-
ample, Williams found that those physicians who had
had the highest scores on a test of hostility while still in
medical school were seven times as likely to have died
by the age of fifty as were those with low hostility
scores—being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of
dying young than were other risk factors such as
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smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. And

findings by a colleague, Dr. John Barefoot at the
University of North Carolina, show that in heart patients
undergoing angiography, in which a tube is inserted into
the coronary artery to measure lesions, scores on a test
of hostility correlate with the extent and severity of
coronary artery disease.
Of course, no one is saying that anger alone causes
coronary artery disease; it is one of several interacting
factors. As Peter Kaufman, acting chief of the Behavioral
Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and
Blood Institute, explained to me, "We can't yet sort out
whether anger and hostility play a causal role in the
early development of coronary artery disease, or wheth-
er it intensifies the problem once heart disease has be-
gun, or both. But take a twenty-year-old who repeatedly
gets angry. Each episode of anger adds an additional
stress to the heart by increasing his heart rate and blood
pressure. When that is repeated over and over again, it
can do damage," especially because the turbulence of
blood flowing through the coronary artery with each
heartbeat "can cause microtears in the vessel, where
plaque develops. If your heart rate is faster and blood
pressure is higher because you're habitually angry, then
over thirty years that may lead to a faster buildup of
plaque, and so lead to coronary artery disease."11
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Once heart disease develops, the mechanisms

triggered by anger affect the very efficiency of the heart
as a pump, as was shown in the study of angry memories
in heart patients. The net effect is to make anger partic-
ularly lethal in those who already have heart disease.
For instance, a Stanford University Medical School
study of 1,012 men and women who suffered from a first
heart attack and then were followed for up to eight years
showed that those men who were most aggressive and
hostile at the outset suffered the highest rate of second
heart attacks.12 There were similar results in a Yale
School of Medicine study of 929 men who had survived
heart attacks and were tracked for up to ten years.13
Those who had been rated as easily roused to anger
were three times more likely to die of cardiac arrest than
those who were more even-tempered. If they also had
high cholesterol levels, the added risk from anger was
five times higher.
The Yale researchers point out that it may not be an-
ger alone that heightens the risk of death from heart dis-
ease, but rather intense negative emotionality of any
kind that regularly sends surges of stress hormones
through the body. But overall, the strongest scientific
links between emotions and heart disease are to anger: a
Harvard Medical School study asked more than fifteen
hundred men and women who had suffered heart
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attacks to describe their emotional state in the hours be-

fore the attack. Being angry more than doubled the risk
of cardiac arrest in people who already had heart dis-
ease; the heightened risk lasted for about two hours
after the anger was aroused.14
These findings do not mean that people should try to
suppress anger when it is appropriate. Indeed, there is
evidence that trying to completely suppress such feel-
ings in the heat of the moment actually results in magni-
fying the body's agitation and may raise blood pres-
sure.15 On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 5, the
net effect of ventilating anger every time it is felt is
simply to feed it, making it a more likely response to any
annoying situation. Williams resolves this paradox by
concluding that whether anger is expressed or not is less
important than whether it is chronic. An occasional dis-
play of hostility is not dangerous to health; the problem
arises when hostility becomes so constant as to define
an 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 obvi-
ous bouts of temper and rage.16
The hopeful news is that chronic anger need not be a
death sentence: hostility is a habit that can change. One
group of heart-attack patients at Stanford University
Medical School was enrolled in a program designed to
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help them soften the attitudes that gave them a short

temper. This anger-control training resulted in a
second-heart-attack rate 44 percent lower than for those
who had not tried to change their hostility.17 A program
designed by Williams has had similar beneficial res-
ults.18 Like the Stanford program, it teaches basic ele-
ments of emotional intelligence, particularly mindful-
ness of anger as it begins to stir, the ability to regulate it
once it has begun, and empathy. Patients are asked to
jot down cynical or hostile thoughts as they notice them.
If the thoughts persist, they try to short-circuit them by
saying (or thinking), "Stop!" And they are encouraged to
purposely substitute reasonable thoughts for cynical,
mistrustful ones during trying situations—for instance,
if an elevator is delayed, to search for a benign reason
rather than harbor anger against some imagined
thoughtless person who may be responsible for the
delay. For frustrating encounters, they learn the ability
to see things from the other person's perspective—em-
pathy is a balm for anger.
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."
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Stress: Anxiety Out of Proportion and Out of

Place
I just feel anxious and tense all the time. It all star-
ted in high school. I was a straight-A student, and
I worried constantly about my grades, whether the
other kids and the teachers liked me, being
prompt for classes—things like that. There was a
lot of pressure from my parents to do well in
school and to be a good role model. . . . I guess I
just caved in to all that pressure, because my
stomach problems began in my sophomore year of
high school. Since that time, I've had to be really
careful about drinking caffeine and eating spicy
meals. I notice that when I'm feeling worried or
tense my stomach will flare up, and since I'm usu-
ally worried about something, I'm always naus-
eous.19

Anxiety—the distress evoked by life's pressures—is

perhaps the emotion with the greatest weight of scientif-
ic evidence connecting it to the onset of sickness and
course of recovery. When anxiety helps us prepare 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 live with or
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that are conjured by the mind, not real dangers we need

to confront. Repeated bouts of anxiety signal high levels
of stress. The woman whose constant worrying primes
her gastrointestinal trouble is a textbook example of
how anxiety and stress exacerbate medical problems.
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
that it can speed the metastasis of cancer; increasing
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.20 Stress
can also lead to ulceration of the gastrointestinal tract,
triggering symptoms in ulcerative colitis and in inflam-
matory bowel disease. The brain itself is susceptible to
the long-term effects of sustained stress, including dam-
age to the hippocampus, and so to memory. In general,
says McEwen, "evidence is mounting that the nervous
system is subject to 'wear and tear' as a result of stress-
ful experiences."21
Particularly compelling evidence for the medical im-
pact from distress has come from studies with infectious
diseases such as colds, the flu, and herpes. We are
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continually exposed to such viruses, but ordinarily our

immune system fights them off—except that under emo-
tional stress those defenses more often fail. In experi-
ments in which the robustness of the immune system
has been assayed directly, stress and anxiety have been
found to weaken it, but in most such results it is unclear
whether the range of immune weakening is of clinical
significance—that is, great enough to open the way to
disease.22 For that reason stronger scientific links of
stress and anxiety to medical vulnerability come from
prospective studies: those that start with healthy people
and monitor first a heightening of distress followed by a
weakening of the immune system and the onset of
illness.
In one of the most scientifically compelling studies,
Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon
University, working with scientists at a specialized colds
research unit in Sheffield, England, carefully assessed
how much stress people were feeling in their lives, and
then systematically exposed them to a cold virus. Not
everyone so exposed actually comes down with a cold; a
robust immune system can—and constantly does—resist
the cold virus. Cohen found that the more stress in their
lives, the more likely people were to catch cold. Among
those with little stress, 27 percent came down with a
cold after being exposed to the virus; among those with
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the most stressful lives, 47 percent got the cold—direct

evidence that stress itself weakens the immune sys-
tem.23 (While this may be one of those scientific results
that confirms what everyone has observed or suspected
all along, it is considered a landmark finding because of
its scientific rigor.)
Likewise, married couples who for three months kept
daily checklists of hassles and upsetting events such as
marital fights showed a strong pattern: three or four
days after an especially intense batch of upsets, they
came down with a cold or upper-respiratory infection.
That lag period is precisely the incubation time for many
common cold viruses, suggesting that being exposed
while they were most worried and upset made them es-
pecially vulnerable.24
The same stress-infection pattern holds for the herpes
virus—both the type that causes cold sores on the lip
and the type that causes genital lesions. Once people
have been exposed to the herpes virus, it stays latent in
the body, flaring up from time to time. The activity of
the herpes virus can be tracked by levels of antibodies to
it in the blood. Using this measure, reactivation of the
herpes virus has been found in medical students
undergoing year-end exams, in recently separated wo-
men, and among people under constant pressure from
caring for a family member with Alzheimer's disease.25
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The toll of anxiety is not just that it lowers the im-

mune response; other research is showing adverse ef-
fects on the cardiovascular system. While chronic hostil-
ity 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. In research at Stan-
ford University School of Medicine with more than a
thousand men and women who had suffered a first heart
attack, those women who went on to suffer a second
heart attack were marked by high levels of fearfulness
and anxiety. In many cases the fearfulness took the form
of crippling phobias: after their first heart attack the pa-
tients stopped driving, quit their jobs, or avoided going
out.26
The insidious physical effects of mental stress and
anxiety—the kind produced by high-pressure jobs, or
high-pressure lives such as that of a single mother jug-
gling day care and a job—are being pinpointed at an
anatomically fine-grained level. For example, Stephen
Manuck, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, put
thirty volunteers through a rigorous, anxiety-riddled or-
deal in a laboratory while he monitored the men's blood,
assaying a substance secreted by blood platelets called
adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which can trigger
blood-vessel changes that may lead to heart attacks and
strokes. While the volunteers were under the intense
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stress, their ATP levels rose sharply, as did their heart

rate and blood pressure.
Understandably, health risks seem greatest for those
whose jobs are high in "strain": having high-pressure
performance demands while having little or no control
over how to get the job done (a predicament that gives
bus drivers, for instance, a high rate of hypertension).
For example, in a study of 569 patients with colorectal
cancer and a matched comparison group, those who
said that in the previous ten years they had experienced
severe on-the-job aggravation were five and a half times
more likely to have developed the cancer compared to
those with no such stress in their lives.27
Because the medical toll of distress is so broad, relaxa-
tion techniques—which directly counter the physiologic-
al arousal of stress—are being used clinically to ease the
symptoms of a wide variety of chronic illnesses. These
include cardiovascular disease, some types of diabetes,
arthritis, asthma, gastrointestinal disorders, and chronic
pain, to name a few. To the degree any symptoms are
worsened by stress and emotional distress, helping pa-
tients become more relaxed and able to handle their tur-
bulent feelings can often offer some reprieve.28

The Medical Costs of Depression

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She had been diagnosed with metastatic breast can-

cer, a return and spread of the malignancy several
years after what she had thought was successful
surgery for the disease. Her doctor could no longer
talk of a cure, and the chemotherapy, at best, might
offer just a few more months of life. Understand-
ably, she was depressed—so much so that whenever
she went to her oncologist, she found herself at
some point bursting out into tears. Her oncologist's
response each time: asking her to leave the office
immediately.

Apart from the hurtfulness of the oncologist's cold-

ness, did it matter medically that he would not deal with
his patient's constant sadness? By the time a disease has
become so virulent, it would be unlikely that any emo-
tion would have an appreciable effect on its progress.
While the woman's depression most certainly dimmed
the quality of her final months, the medical evidence
that melancholy might affect the course of cancer is as
yet mixed.29 But cancer aside, a smattering of studies
suggest a role for depression in many other medical con-
ditions, especially in worsening a sickness once it has
begun. The evidence is mounting that for patients with
serious disease who are depressed, it would pay medic-
ally to treat their depression too.
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One complication in treating depression in medical

patients is that its symptoms, including loss of appetite
and lethargy, are easily mistaken for signs of other dis-
eases, particularly by physicians with little training in
psychiatric diagnosis. That inability to diagnose depres-
sion may itself add to the problem, since it means that a
patient's depression—like that of the weepy breast-can-
cer patient—goes unnoticed and untreated. And that
failure to diagnose and treat may add to the risk of death
in severe disease.
For instance, of 100 patients who received bone mar-
row transplants, 12 of the 13 who had been depressed
died within the first year of the transplant, while 34 of
the remaining 87 were still alive two years later.30 And
in patients with chronic kidney failure who were receiv-
ing dialysis, those who were diagnosed with major de-
pression were most likely to die within the following two
years; depression was a stronger predictor of death than
any medical sign.31 Here the route connecting emotion
to medical status was not biological but attitudinal: The
depressed patients were much worse about complying
with their medical regimens—cheating on their diets, for
example, which put them at higher risk.
Heart disease too seems to be exacerbated by depres-
sion. In a study of 2,832 middle-aged men and women
tracked for twelve years, those who felt a sense of
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nagging despair and hopelessness had a heightened rate

of death from heart disease.32 And for the 3 percent or
so who were most severely depressed, the death rate
from heart disease, compared to the rate for those with
no feelings of depression, was four times greater.
Depression seems to pose a particularly grave medical
risk for heart attack survivors.33 In a study of patients in
a Montreal hospital who were discharged after being
treated for a first heart attack, depressed patients had a
sharply higher risk of dying within the following six
months. Among the one in eight patients who were seri-
ously depressed, the death rate was five times higher
than for others with comparable disease—an effect as
great as that of major medical risks for cardiac death,
such as left ventricular dysfunction or a history of previ-
ous heart attacks. Among the possible mechanisms that
might explain why depression so greatly increases the
odds of a later heart attack are its effects on heart rate
variability, increasing the risk of fatal arrhythmias.
Depression has also been found to complicate recov-
ery from hip fracture. In a study of elderly women with
hip fracture, several thousand were given psychiatric
evaluations on their admission to the hospital. Those
who were depressed on admission stayed an average of
eight days longer than those with comparable injury but
no depression, and were only a third as likely ever to
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walk again. But depressed women who had psychiatric

help for their depression along with other medical care
needed less physical therapy to walk again and had few-
er rehospitalizations over the three months after their
return home from the hospital.
Likewise, in a study of patients whose condition was
so dire that they were among the top 10 percent of those
using medical services—often because of having mul-
tiple illnesses, such as both heart disease and dia-
betes—about one in six had serious depression. When
these patients were treated for the problem, the number
of days per year that they were disabled dropped from
79 to 51 for those who had major depression, and from
62 days per year to just 18 in those who had been
treated for mild depression.34

THE MEDICAL BENEFITS OF POSITIVE

FEELINGS
The cumulative evidence for adverse medical effects
from anger, anxiety, and depression, then, is compel-
ling. Both anger and anxiety, when chronic, can make
people more susceptible to a range of disease. And while
depression may not make people more vulnerable to be-
coming ill, it does seem to impede medical recovery and
heighten the risk of death, especially with more frail pa-
tients with severe conditions.
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But if chronic emotional distress in its many forms is

toxic, the opposite range of emotion can be tonic—to a
degree. This by no means says that positive emotion is
curative, or that laughter or happiness alone will turn
the course of a serious disease. The edge positive emo-
tions offer seems subtle, but, by using studies with large
numbers of people, can be teased out of the mass of
complex variables that affect the course of disease.

The Price of Pessimism—and Advantages of

Optimism
As with depression, there are medical costs to pessim-
ism—and corresponding benefits from optimism. For
example, 122 men who had their first heart attack were
evaluated on their degree of optimism or pessimism.
Eight years later, of the 25 most pessimistic men, 21 had
died; of the 25 most optimistic, just 6 had died. Their
mental outlook proved 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. And in other re-
search, patients going into artery bypass surgery who
were more optimistic had a much faster recovery and
fewer medical complications during and after surgery
than did more pessimistic patients.35
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Like its near cousin optimism, hope has healing

power. People who have a great deal of hopefulness are,
understandably, better able to bear up under trying cir-
cumstances, including medical difficulties. In a study of
people paralyzed from spinal injuries, those who had
more hope were able to gain greater levels of physical
mobility compared to other patients with similar de-
grees of injury, but who felt less hopeful. Hope is espe-
cially telling in paralysis from spinal injury, since this
medical tragedy typically involves a man who is para-
lyzed in his twenties by an accident and will remain so
for the rest of his life. How he reacts emotionally will
have broad consequences for the degree to which he will
make the efforts that might bring him greater physical
and social functioning.36
Just why an optimistic or pessimistic outlook should
have health consequences is open to any of several ex-
planations. One theory proposes that pessimism leads to
depression, which in turn interferes with the resistance
of the immune system to tumors and infection—an un-
proven speculation at present. Or it may be that pessim-
ists neglect themselves—some studies have found that
pessimists smoke and drink more, and exercise less,
than optimists, and are generally much more careless
about their health habits. Or it may one day turn out
that the physiology of hopefulness is itself somehow
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helpful biologically to the body's fight against disease.

With a Little Help From My Friends:

The Medical Value of Relationships

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 isol-
ation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you
can share your private feelings or have close con-
tact—doubles the chances of sickness or death. 37 Isola-
tion itself, a 1987 report in Science concluded, "is as sig-
nificant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pres-
sure, high cholesterol, obesity, and lack of physical exer-
cise." Indeed, smoking increases mortality risk by a
factor of just 1.6, while social isolation does so by a
factor of 2.0, making it a greater health risk.38
Isolation is harder on men than on women. Isolated
men were two to three times more likely to die as were
men with close social ties; for isolated women, the risk
was one and a half times greater than for more socially
connected women. The difference between men and wo-
men in the impact of isolation may be because women's
relationships tend to be emotionally closer than men's; a
few strands of such social ties for a woman may be more
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comforting than the same small number of friendships

for a man.
Of course, solitude is not the same as isolation; many
people who live on their own or see few friends are con-
tent and healthy. Rather, it is the subjective sense of be-
ing 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, and suggests an added
value to self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous
as surrogate communities.
The power of isolation as a mortality risk factor—and
the healing power of close ties—can be seen in the study
of one hundred bone marrow transplant patients.39
Among patients who felt they had strong emotional sup-
port from their spouse, family, or friends, 54 percent
survived the transplants after two years, versus just 20
percent among those who reported little such support.
Similarly, elderly people who suffer heart attacks, but
have two or more people in their lives they can rely on
for emotional support, are more than twice as likely to
survive longer than a year after an attack than are those
people with no such support.40
Perhaps the most telling testimony to the healing po-
tency of emotional ties is a Swedish study published in
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41
1993. All the men living in the Swedish city of Gote-
borg who were born in 1933 were offered a free medical
exam; seven years later the 752 men who had come for
the exam were contacted again. Of these, 41 had died in
the intervening years.
Men who had originally reported being under intense
emotional stress had a death rate three times greater
than those who said their lives were calm and placid.
The emotional distress was due to events such as serious
financial trouble, feeling insecure at work or being
forced out of a job, being the object of a legal action, or
going through a divorce. Having had three or more of
these troubles within the year before the exam was a
stronger predictor of dying within the ensuing seven
years than were medical indicators such as high blood
pressure, high concentrations of blood triglycerides, or
high serum cholesterol levels.
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 sugges-
tions, protected them from the deadly impact of life's
rigors and trauma.
The quality of relationships as well as their sheer
number seems key to buffering stress. Negative
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relationships take their own toll. Marital arguments, for

example, have a negative impact on the immune sys-
tem.42 One study of college roommates found that the
more they disliked each other, the more susceptible they
were to colds and the flu, and the more frequently they
went to doctors. John Cacioppo, the Ohio State
University psychologist who did the roommate study,
told me, "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."43

The Healing Power of Emotional Support

In The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Robin advises
a young follower: "Tell us thy troubles and speak freely.
A flow of words doth ever ease the heart of sorrows; it is
like opening the waste where the mill dam is overfull."
This bit of folk wisdom has great merit; unburdening a
troubled heart appears to be good medicine. The sci-
entific corroboration of Robin's advice comes from
James Pennebaker, a Southern Methodist University
psychologist, who has shown in a series of experiments
that getting people to talk about the thoughts that
trouble them most has a beneficial medical effect.44 His
method is remarkably simple: he asks people to write,
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for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over five or so days,

about, for example, "the most traumatic experience of
your entire life," or some pressing worry of the moment.
What people write can be kept entirely to themselves if
they like.
The net effect of this confessional is striking: en-
hanced immune function, significant drops in health-
center visits in the following six months, fewer days
missed from work, and even improved liver enzyme
function. Moreover, those whose writing showed most
evidence of turbulent feelings had the greatest improve-
ments in their immune function. A specific pattern
emerged as the "healthiest" way to ventilate troubling
feelings: at first expressing a high level of sadness, anxi-
ety, anger—whatever troubling feelings the topic
brought up; then, over the course of the next several
days weaving a narrative, finding some meaning in the
trauma or travail.
That process, of course, seems akin to what happens
when people explore such troubles in psychotherapy.
Indeed, Pennebaker's findings suggest one reason why
other studies show medical patients given psychother-
apy in addition to surgery or medical treatment often
fare better medically than do those who receive medical
treatment alone.45
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Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of the clin-

ical power of emotional support was in groups at Stan-
ford University Medical School for women with ad-
vanced metastatic breast cancer. After an initial treat-
ment, often including surgery, these women's cancer
had returned and was spreading through their bodies. It
was only a matter of time, clinically speaking, until the
spreading cancer killed them. Dr. David Spiegel, who
conducted the study, was himself stunned by the find-
ings, as was the medical community: women with ad-
vanced breast cancer who went to weekly meetings with
others survived twice as long as did women with the
same disease who faced it on their own.46
All the women received standard medical care; the
only difference was that some also went to the groups,
where they were able to unburden themselves with oth-
ers who understood what they faced and were willing to
listen to their fears, their pain, and their anger. Often
this was the only place where the women could be open
about these emotions, because other people in their lives
dreaded talking with them about the cancer and their
imminent death. Women who attended the groups lived
for thirty-seven additional months, on average, while
those with the disease who did not go to the groups
died, on average, in nineteen months—a gain in life ex-
pectancy for such patients beyond the reach of any
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medication or other medical treatment. As Dr. Jimmie

Holland, the chief psychiatric oncologist at Sloan-Ket-
tering Memorial Hospital, a cancer treatment center in
New York City, put it to me, "Every cancer patient
should be in a group like this." Indeed, if it had been a
new drug that produced the extended life expectancy,
pharmaceutical companies would be battling to produce
it.

BRINGING EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE TO MEDICAL CARE
The day a routine checkup spotted some blood in my ur-
ine, my doctor sent me for a diagnostic test in which I
was injected with a radioactive dye. I lay on a table while
an overhead X-ray machine took successive images of
the dye's progression through my kidneys and bladder. I
had company for the test: a close friend, a physician
himself, happened to be visiting for a few days and
offered to come to the hospital with me. He sat in the
room while the X-ray machine, on an automated track,
rotated for new camera angles, whirred and clicked; ro-
tated, whirred, clicked.
The test took an hour and a half. At the very end a kid-
ney specialist hurried into the room, quickly introduced
himself, and disappeared to scan the X-rays. He didn't
return to tell me what they showed.
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As we were leaving the exam room my friend and I

passed the nephrologist. Feeling shaken and somewhat
dazed by the test, I did not have the presence of mind to
ask the one question that had been on my mind all
morning. But my companion, the physician, did: "Doc-
tor," he said, "my friend's father died of bladder cancer.
He's anxious to know if you saw any signs of cancer in
the X-rays."
"No abnormalities," was the curt reply as the nephro-
logist hurried on to his next appointment.
My inability to ask the single question I cared about
most is repeated a thousand times each day in hospitals
and clinics everywhere. A study of patients in physi-
cians' waiting rooms found that each had an average of
three or more questions in mind to ask the physician
they were about to see. But when the patients left the
physician's office, an average of only one and a half of
those questions had been answered.47 This finding
speaks to one of the many ways patients' emotional
needs are unmet by today's medicine. Unanswered
questions feed uncertainty, fear, catastrophizing. And
they lead patients to balk at going along with treatment
regimes they don't fully understand.
There are many ways medicine can expand its view of
health to include the emotional realities of illness. For
one, patients could routinely be offered fuller
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information essential to the decisions they must make

about their own medical care; some services now offer
any caller a state-of-the-art computer search of the med-
ical literature on what ails them, so that patients can be
more equal partners with their physicians in making in-
formed decisions.48 Another approach is programs that,
in a few minutes' time, teach patients to be effective
questioners with their physicians, so that when they
have three questions in mind as they wait for the doctor,
they will come out of the office with three answers.49
Moments when patients face surgery or invasive and
painful tests are fraught with anxiety—and are a prime
opportunity to deal with the emotional dimension. Some
hospitals have developed presurgery instruction for pa-
tients that help them assuage their fears and handle
their discomforts—for example, by teaching patients re-
laxation techniques, answering their questions well in
advance of 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.50
Being a hospital patient can be a tremendously lonely,
helpless experience. But some hospitals have begun to
design rooms so that family members can stay with pa-
tients, cooking and caring for them as they would at
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home—a progressive step that, ironically, is routine

throughout the Third World.51
Relaxation training can help patients deal with some
of the distress their symptoms bring, as well as with the
emotions that may be triggering or exacerbating their
symptoms. An exemplary model is Jon Kabat-Zinn's
Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachu-
setts Medical Center, which offers a ten-week course in
mindfulness and yoga to patients; the emphasis is on
being mindful of emotional episodes as they are happen-
ing, and on cultivating a daily practice that offers deep
relaxation. Hospitals have made instructional tapes
from the course available over patients' television
sets—a far better emotional diet for the bedridden than
the usual fare, soap operas.52
Relaxation and yoga are also at the core of the innov-
ative program for treating heart disease developed by
Dr. Dean Ornish. 53 After a year of this program, which
included a low-fat diet, patients whose heart disease was
severe enough to warrant a coronary bypass actually re-
versed the buildup of artery-clogging plaque. Ornish
tells me that relaxation training is one of the most im-
portant parts of the program. Like Kabat-Zinn's, it takes
advantage of what Dr. Herbert Benson calls the "relaxa-
tion response," the physiological opposite of the stress
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arousal that contributes to such a wide spectrum of

medical problems.
Finally, there is the added medical value of an em-
pathic 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 signi-
ficance. 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.54

TOWARD A MEDICINE THAT CARES

Such steps are a beginning. But for medicine to enlarge
its vision to embrace the impact of emotions, two large
implications of the scientific findings must be taken to
heart:

1. Helping people better manage their upsetting feel-

ings —anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and
loneliness —is a form of disease prevention. Since the
data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when
chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping
people handle them better could potentially have a med-
ical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. One
way to do this that could have broad public-health
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effects would be to impart most basic emotional intelli-

gence skills to children, so that they become lifelong
habits. Another high-payoff preventive strategy would
be to teach emotion management to people reaching re-
tirement age, since emotional well-being is one factor
that determines whether an older person declines rap-
idly or thrives. A third target group might be so-called
at-risk populations—the very poor, single working
mothers, residents of high-crime neighborhoods, and
the like—who live under extraordinary pressure day in
and day out, and so might do better medically with help
in handling the emotional toll of these stresses.
2. Many patients can benefit measurably when their
psychological needs are attended to along with their
purely medical ones. While it is a step toward more hu-
mane care when a physician or nurse offers a distressed
patient comfort and consolation, more can be done. But
emotional care is an opportunity too often lost in the
way medicine is practiced today; it is a blind spot for
medicine. Despite mounting data on the medical useful-
ness of attending to emotional needs, as well as support-
ing evidence for connections between the brain's emo-
tional center and the immune system, many physicians
remain skeptical that their patients' emotions matter
clinically, dismissing the evidence for this as trivial and
 359/661

anecdotal, as "fringe," or, worse, as the exaggerations of

a self-promoting few.

Though more and more patients seek a more humane

medicine, it is becoming endangered. Of course, there
remain dedicated nurses and physicians who give their
patients tender, sensitive care. But the changing culture
of medicine itself, as it becomes more responsive to the
imperatives of business, is making such care increas-
ingly difficult to find.
On the other hand, there may be a business advantage
to humane medicine: treating emotional distress in pa-
tients, early evidence suggests, can save money—espe-
cially to the extent that it prevents or delays the onset of
sickness, or helps patients heal more quickly. In a study
of elderly patients with hip fracture at Mt. Sinai School
of Medicine in New York City and at Northwestern
University, patients who received therapy for depression
in addition to normal orthopedic care left the hospital
an average of two days earlier; total savings for the hun-
dred or so patients was $97,361 in medical costs.55
Such care also makes patients more satisfied with
their physicians and medical treatment. In the emerging
medical marketplace, where patients often have the op-
tion to choose between competing health plans, satisfac-
tion levels will no doubt enter the equation of these very
personal decisions—souring experiences can lead
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patients to go elsewhere for care, while pleasing ones

translate into loyalty.
Finally, medical ethics may demand such an ap-
proach. An editorial in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, commenting on a report that de-
pression increases five fold the likelihood of dying after
being treated for a heart attack, notes: "[T]he clear
demonstration that psychological factors like depression
and social isolation distinguish the coronary heart dis-
ease patients at highest risk means it would be unethical
not to start trying to treat these factors."56
If the findings on emotions and health mean anything,
it is that medical care that neglects how people feel as
they battle a chronic or severe disease is no longer ad-
equate. It is time for medicine to take more methodical
advantage of the link between emotion and health. 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 hu-
mane. And, for some, it could speed the course of recov-
ery. "Compassion," as one patient put it in an open letter
to his surgeon, "is not mere hand holding. It is good
medicine."57
 PART FOUR
WINDOWS OF
OPPORTUNITY
 12
The Family Crucible
It's a low-key family tragedy. Carl and Ann are
showing their daughter Leslie, just five, how to play
a brand-new video game. But as Leslie starts to
play, her parents' overly eager attempts to "help"
her just seem to get in the way. Contradictory or-
ders fly in every direction.
"To the right, to the right—stop. Stop. Stop!" Ann,
the mother, urges, her voice growing more intent
and anxious as Leslie, sucking on her lip and
staring wide-eyed at the video screen, struggles to
follow these directives.
"See, you're not lined up . . . put it to the left! To
the left!" Carl, the girl's father, brusquely orders.
Meanwhile Ann, her eyes rolling upward in frus-
tration, yells over his advice, "Stop! Stop!"
Leslie, unable to please either her father or her
mother, contorts her jaw in tension and blinks as
her eyes fill with tears.
Her parents start bickering, ignoring Leslie's
tears. "She's not moving the stick that much!" Ann
tells Carl, exasperated.
As the tears start rolling down Leslie's cheeks,
neither parent makes any move that indicates they
 363/661

notice or care. As Leslie raises her hand to wipe her

eyes, her father snaps, "Okay, put your hand back
on the stick . . . you wanna get ready to shoot. Okay,
put it over!" And her mother barks, "Okay, move it
just a teeny bit!"
But by now Leslie is sobbing softly, alone with her
anguish.

At such moments children learn deep lessons. For

Leslie one conclusion from this painful exchange might
well be that neither her parents, nor anyone else, for
that matter, cares about her feelings.1 When similar mo-
ments are repeated countless times over the course of
childhood they impart some of the most fundamental
emotional messages of a lifetime—lessons that can de-
termine a life course. 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 feelings; 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 things that parents say and do directly
to children, but also in the models they offer for hand-
ling their own feelings and those that pass between hus-
band and wife. Some parents are gifted emotional teach-
ers, others atrocious.
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There are hundreds of studies showing that how par-

ents treat their children—whether with harsh discipline
or empathic understanding, with indifference or
warmth, and so on—has deep and lasting consequences
for the child's emotional life. Only recently, though,
have there been hard data showing that having emotion-
ally intelligent parents is itself of enormous benefit to a
child. The ways a couple handles the feelings between
them—in addition to their direct dealings with a
child—impart powerful lessons to their children, who
are astute learners, attuned to the subtlest emotional ex-
changes in the family. When research teams led by
Carole Hooven and John Gottman at the University of
Washington did a microanalysis of interactions in
couples on how the partners handled their children,
they found that those couples who were more emotion-
ally competent in the marriage were also the most ef-
fective in helping their children with their emotional ups
and downs.2
The families were first seen when one of their children
was just five years old, and again when the child had
reached nine. In addition to observing the parents talk
with each other, the research team also watched families
(including Leslie's) as the father or mother tried to show
their young child how to operate a new video game—a
seemingly innocuous interaction, but quite telling about
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the emotional currents that run between parent and

child.
Some mothers and fathers were like Ann and Carl:
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, fall-
ing 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 parents' will. The video game session was a
surprisingly powerful barometer of the parents' emo-
tional style.
The three most common emotionally inept parenting
styles proved to be:

• Ignoring feelings altogether. Such parents treat a

child's emotional upset as trivial or a bother, something
they should wait to blow over. They fail to use emotional
moments as a chance to get closer to the child or to help
the child learn lessons in emotional competence.
• Being too laissez-faire. These parents notice how a
child feels, but hold that however a child handles the
emotional storm is fine—even, say, hitting. Like those
who ignore a child's feelings, these parents rarely step in
to try to show their child an alternative emotional re-
sponse. They try to soothe all upsets, and will, for
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instance, use bargaining and bribes to get their child to

stop being sad or angry.
• Being contemptuous, showing no respect for how
the child feels. Such parents are typically disapproving,
harsh in both their criticisms and their punishments.
They might, for instance, forbid any display of the
child's anger at all, and become punitive at the least sign
of irritability. These are the parents who angrily yell at a
child who is trying to tell his side of the story, "Don't you
talk back to me!"

Finally, there are parents who seize the opportunity of

a child's upset to act as what amounts to an emotional
coach or mentor. They take their child's feelings seri-
ously enough to try to understand exactly what is upset-
ting them ("Are you angry because Tommy hurt your
feelings?") and to help the child find positive ways to
soothe their feelings ("Instead of hitting him, why don't
you find a toy to play with on your own until you feel
like playing with him again?").
In order for parents to be effective coaches in this
way, they must have a fairly good grasp of the rudiments
of emotional intelligence themselves. One of the basic
emotional lessons for a child, for example, is how to dis-
tinguish among feelings; a father who is too tuned out
of, say, his own sadness cannot help his son understand
the difference between grieving over a loss, feeling sad
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in a sad movie, and the sadness that arises when

something bad happens to someone the child cares
about. Beyond this distinction, there are more sophistic-
ated insights, such as that anger is so often prompted by
first feeling hurt.
As children grow the specific emotional lessons they
are ready for—and in need of—shift. As we saw in
Chapter 7 the lessons in empathy begin in infancy, with
parents who attune to their baby's feelings. Though
some emotional skills are honed with friends through
the years, emotionally adept parents can do much to
help their children with each of the basics of emotional
intelligence: learning how to recognize, manage, and
harness their feelings; empathizing; and handling the
feelings that arise in their relationships.
The impact on children of such parenting is ex-
traordinarily sweeping.3 The University of Washington
team found that when parents are emotionally adept,
compared to those who handle feelings poorly, their
children—understandably—get along better with, show
more affection toward, and have less tension around
their parents. But beyond that, these children also are
better at handling their own emotions, are more effect-
ive at soothing themselves when upset, and get upset
less often. The children are also more relaxed biologic-
ally, with lower levels of stress hormones and other
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physiological indicators of emotional arousal (a pattern

that, if sustained through life, might well augur better
physical health, as we saw in Chapter 11). Other advant-
ages are social: these children are more popular with
and are better-liked by their peers, and are seen by their
teachers as more socially skilled. Their parents and
teachers alike rate these children as having fewer beha-
vioral problems such as rudeness or aggressiveness. Fin-
ally, 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
prepare children for learning as well as life). Thus the
payoff for children whose parents are emotionally adept
is a surprising—almost astounding—range of advantages
across, and beyond, the spectrum of emotional
intelligence.

HEART START
The impact of parenting on emotional competence starts
in the cradle. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, the eminent Har-
vard pediatrician, has a simple diagnostic test of a
baby's basic outlook toward life. He offers two blocks to
an eight-month-old, and then shows the baby how he
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wants her to put the two blocks together. A baby who is

hopeful about life, who has confidence in her own abilit-
ies, says Brazelton,

will pick up one block, mouth it, rub it in her hair,

drop it over the side of the table, watching to see
whether you will retrieve it for her. When you do,
she finally completes the requested task—place the
two blocks together. Then she looks up at you with
a bright-eyed look of expectancy that says, "Tell me
how great I am!"4

Babies like these have gotten a goodly dose of approv-

al and encouragement from the adults in their lives;
they expect to succeed in life's little challenges. By con-
trast, 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. It is not that these ba-
bies fail to bring the blocks together; they understand
the instruction and have the coordination to comply.
But even when they do, reports Brazelton, their de-
meanor is "hangdog," a look that says, "I'm no good.
See, I've failed." Such children are likely to go through
life with a defeatist outlook, expecting no encourage-
ment or interest from teachers, finding school joyless,
perhaps eventually dropping out.
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The difference between the two outlooks—children

who are confident and optimistic versus those who ex-
pect to fail—starts to take shape in the first few years of
life. Parents, says Brazelton, "need to understand how
their actions can help generate the confidence, the curi-
osity, the pleasure in learning and the understanding of
limits" that help children succeed in life. His advice is
informed by a growing body of evidence showing that
success in school depends to a surprising extent on emo-
tional characteristics formed in the years before a child
enters school. As we saw in Chapter 6, for example, the
ability of four-year-olds to control the impulse to grab
for a marshmallow predicted a 210-point advantage in
their SAT scores fourteen years later.
The first opportunity for shaping the ingredients of
emotional intelligence is in the earliest years, though
these capacities continue to form throughout the school
years. The emotional abilities children acquire in later
life build on those of the earliest years. And these abilit-
ies, as we saw in Chapter 6, are the essential foundation
for all learning. A report from the National Center for
Clinical Infant Programs makes the point that school
success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a
precocious ability to read so much as by emotional and
social measures: being self-assured and interested;
knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to
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rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to

follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and
expressing needs while getting along with other chil-
dren.5
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 cog-
nitive difficulties such as learning disabilities). The mag-
nitude of the problem is not minor; in some states close
to one in five children have to repeat first grade, and
then as the years go on fall further behind their peers,
becoming increasingly discouraged, resentful, and
disruptive.
A child's readiness for school depends on the most ba-
sic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the
seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related
to emotional intelligence:6

1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's

body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is
more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes,
and that adults will be helpful.
2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is
positive and leads to pleasure.
3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an
impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is re-
lated to a sense of competence, of being effective.
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4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control

one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of in-
ner control.
5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others
based on the sense of being understood by and under-
standing others.
6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to
verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with oth-
ers. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of
pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.
7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own
needs with those of others in group activity.

Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first

day of kindergarten with these capabilities depends
greatly on how much her parents—and preschool teach-
ers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a
"Heart Start," the emotional equivalent of the Head
Start programs.

GETTING THE EMOTIONAL BASICS

Say a two-month-old baby wakes up at 3 A.M. and starts
crying. Her mother comes in and, for the next half hour,
the baby contentedly nurses in her mother's arms while
her mother gazes at her affectionately, telling her that
she's happy to see her, even in the middle of the night.
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The baby, content in her mother's love, drifts back to

sleep.
Now say another two-month-old baby, who also
awoke crying in the wee hours, is met instead by a moth-
er who is tense and irritable, having fallen asleep just an
hour before after a fight with her husband. The baby
starts to tense up the moment his mother abruptly picks
him up, telling him, "Just be quiet—I can't stand one
more thing! Come on, let's get it over with." As the baby
nurses his mother stares stonily ahead, not looking at
him, reviewing her fight with his father, getting more
agitated herself as she mulls it over. The baby, sensing
her tension, squirms, stiffens, and stops nursing. "That's
all you want?" his mother says. "Then don't eat." With
the same abruptness she puts him back in his crib and
stalks out, letting him cry until he falls back to sleep,
exhausted.
The two scenarios are presented by the report from
the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs as ex-
amples of the kinds of interaction that, if repeated over
and over, instill very different feelings in a toddler about
himself and his closest relationships.7 The first baby is
learning that people can be trusted to notice her needs
and counted on to help, and that she can be effective in
getting help; the second is finding that no one really
cares, that people can't be counted on, and that his
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efforts to get solace will meet with failure. Of course,

most babies get at least a taste of both kinds of interac-
tion. 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.
Such emotional learning begins in life's earliest mo-
ments, and continues throughout childhood. All the
small exchanges between parent and child have an emo-
tional subtext, and in the repetition of these messages
over the years children form the core of their emotional
outlook and capabilities. A little girl who finds a puzzle
frustrating and asks her busy mother to help gets one
message if the reply is the mother's clear pleasure at the
request, and quite another if it's a curt "Don't bother
me—I've got important work to do." When such encoun-
ters become typical of child and parent, they mold the
child's emotional expectations about relationships, out-
looks that will flavor her functioning in all realms of life,
for better or worse.
The risks are greatest for those children whose par-
ents are grossly inept—immature, abusing drugs, de-
pressed or chronically angry, or simply aimless and liv-
ing chaotic lives. Such parents are far less likely to give
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adequate care, let alone attune to their toddler's emo-

tional needs. Simple neglect, studies find, can be more
damaging than outright abuse.8 A survey of maltreated
children found the neglected youngsters doing the worst
of all: they were the most anxious, inattentive, and
apathetic, alternately aggressive and withdrawn. The
rate for having to repeat first grade among them was 65
percent.
The first three or four years of life are a period when
the toddler's brain grows to about two thirds its full size,
and evolves in complexity at a greater rate than it ever
will again. During this period key kinds of learning take
place more readily than later in life—emotional learning
foremost among them. During this time severe stress
can impair the brain's learning centers (and so be dam-
aging to the intellect). Though as we shall see, this can
be remedied to some extent by experiences later in life,
the impact of this early learning is profound. As one re-
port sums up the key emotional lesson of life's first four
years, the lasting consequences are great:
A child who cannot focus his attention, who is sus-
picious rather than trusting, sad or angry rather
than optimistic, destructive rather than respectful
and one who is overcome with anxiety, preoccupied
with frightening fantasy and feels generally un-
happy about himself—such a child has little
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opportunity at all, let alone equal opportunity, to

claim the possibilities of the world as his own.9

HOW TO RAISE A BULLY

Much can be learned about the lifelong effects of emo-
tionally inept parenting—particularly its role in making
children aggressive—from longitudinal studies such as
one of 870 children from upstate New York who were
followed from the time they were eight until they were
thirty.10 The most belligerent among the children—those
quickest to start fights and who habitually used force to
get their way—were the most likely to have dropped out
of school and, by age thirty, to have a record for crimes
of violence. They also seemed to be handing down their
propensity to violence: their children were, in grade
school, just like the troublemakers their delinquent par-
ent had been.
There is a lesson in how aggressiveness is passed from
generation to generation. Any inherited propensities
aside, the troublemakers as grown-ups acted in a way
that made family life a school for aggression. As chil-
dren, the troublemakers had parents who disciplined
them with arbitrary, relentless severity; as parents they
repeated the pattern. This was true whether it had been
the father or the mother who had been identified in
childhood as highly aggressive. Aggressive little girls
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grew up to be just as arbitrary and harshly punitive

when they became mothers as the aggressive boys were
as fathers. And while they punished their children with
special severity, they otherwise took little interest in
their children's lives, in effect ignoring them much of
the time. At the same time the parents offered these
children a vivid—and violent—example of aggressive-
ness, a model the children took with them to school and
to the playground, and followed throughout life. The
parents were not necessarily mean-spirited, nor did they
fail to wish the best for their children; rather, they
seemed to be simply repeating the style of parenting
that had been modeled for them by their own parents.
In this model for violence, these children were discip-
lined capriciously: 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 at
home. Thus punishment came not so much because of
what the 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 every-
where and may strike at any time. Seen in light of the
home life that spawns it, such children's combative and
defiant posture toward the world at large makes a cer-
tain sense, unfortunate though it remains. What is dis-
heartening is how early these dispiriting lessons can be
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learned, and how grim the costs for a child's emotional

life can be.

ABUSE THE EXTINCTION OF

EMPATHY
In the rough-and-tumble play of the day-care cen-
ter, Martin, just two and a half, brushed up against
a little girl, who, inexplicably, broke out crying.
Martin reached for her hand, but as the sobbing girl
moved away, Martin slapped her on the arm.
As her tears continued Martin looked away and
yelled, "Cut it out! Cut it out over and over, each
time faster and louder.
When Martin then made another attempt to pat
her, again she resisted. This time Martin bared his
teeth like a snarling dog, hissing at the sobbing girl.
Once more Martin started patting the crying girl,
but the pats on the back quickly turned into pound-
ing, and Martin went on hitting and hitting the poor
little girl despite her screams.

That disturbing encounter testifies to how abuse—be-

ing beaten repeatedly, at the whim of a parent's
moods—warps a child's natural bent toward empathy.11
Martin's bizarre, almost brutal response to his
playmate's distress is typical of children like him, who
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have themselves been the victims of beatings and other

physical abuse since their infancy. The response stands
in stark contrast to toddlers' usual sympathetic entreat-
ies and attempts to console a crying playmate, reviewed
in Chapter 7. Martin's violent response to distress at the
day-care center may well mirror the lessons he learned
at home about tears and anguish: crying is met at first
with a peremptory consoling gesture, but if it continues,
the progression is from nasty looks and shouts, to hit-
ting, to outright beating. Perhaps most troubling,
Martin already seems to lack the most primitive sort of
empathy, the instinct to stop aggression against
someone who is hurt. At two and a half he displays the
budding moral impulses of a cruel and sadistic brute.
Martin's meanness in place of empathy is typical of
other children like him who are already, at their tender
age, scarred by severe physical and emotional abuse at
home. Martin was part of a group of nine such toddlers,
ages one to three, witnessed in a two-hour observation
at his day-care center. The abused toddlers were com-
pared with nine others at the day-care center from
equally impoverished, high-stress homes, but who were
not physically abused. The differences in how the two
groups of toddlers reacted when another child was hurt
or upset were stark. Of twenty-three such incidents, five
of the nine nonabused toddlers responded to the
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distress of a child nearby with concern, sadness, or em-

pathy. But in the twenty-seven instances where the ab-
used children could have done so, not one showed the
least concern; instead they reacted to a crying child with
expressions of fear, anger, or, like Martin, a physical
attack.
One abused little girl, for instance, made a ferocious,
threatening face at another who had broken out into
tears. One-year-old Thomas, another of the abused chil-
dren, froze in terror when he heard a child crying across
the room; he sat completely still, his face full of fear,
back stiffly straight, his tension increasing as the crying
continued—as though bracing for an attack himself. And
twenty-eight-month-old Kate, also abused, was almost
sadistic: picking on Joey, a smaller infant, she knocked
him to the ground with her feet, and as he lay there
looked tenderly at him and began patting him gently on
the back—only to intensify the pats into hitting him
harder and harder, ignoring his misery. She kept
swinging away at him, leaning in to slug him six or sev-
en times more, until he crawled away.
These children, of course, treat others as they them-
selves 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, threat-
ening, and harsh in their punishments. Such children
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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 chil-
dren. As they go on through, life, they are, as a group,
more likely to have cognitive difficulties in learning,
more likely to be aggressive and unpopular with their
peers (small wonder, if their preschool toughness is a
harbinger of the future), more prone to depression, and,
as adults, more likely to get into trouble with the law
and commit more crimes of violence.12
This failure of empathy is sometimes, if not often, re-
peated over generations, with brutal parents having
themselves been brutalized by their own parents in
childhood.13 It stands in dramatic contrast to the em-
pathy ordinarily displayed by children of parents who
are nurturing, encouraging their toddlers to show con-
cern for others and to understand how meanness makes
other children feel. Lacking such lessons in empathy,
these children seem not to learn it at all.
What is perhaps most troubling about the abused tod-
dlers is how early they seem to have learned to respond
like miniature versions of their own abusive parents.
But given the physical beatings they received as a some-
times 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
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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.
Seeing how the brain itself is shaped by brutality—or
by love—suggests that childhood represents a special
window of opportunity for emotional lessons. These
battered children have had an early and steady diet of
trauma. Perhaps the most instructive paradigm for un-
derstanding the emotional learning such abused chil-
dren have undergone is in seeing how trauma can leave
a lasting imprint on the brain—and how even these sav-
age imprints can be mended.
 13
Trauma and Emotional
Relearning
Som Chit, a Cambodian refugee, balked when her three
sons asked her to buy them toy AK-47 machine guns.
Her sons—ages six, nine, and eleven—wanted the toy
guns to play the game some of the kids at their school
called Purdy. In the game, Purdy, the villain, uses a sub-
machine gun to massacre a group of children, then turns
it on himself. Sometimes, though, the children have it
end differently: it is they who kill Purdy.
Purdy was the macabre reenactment by some of the
survivors of the catastrophic events of February 17,
1989, at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Cali-
fornia. There, during the school's late-morning recess
for first, second, and third graders, Patrick Purdy—who
had himself attended those grades at Cleveland Ele-
mentary some twenty years earlier—stood at the
playground's edge and fired wave after wave of 7.22 mm
bullets at the hundreds of children at play. For seven
minutes Purdy sprayed bullets toward the playground,
then put a pistol to his head and shot himself. When the
police arrived they found five children dying, twenty-
nine wounded.
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In ensuing months, the Purdy game spontaneously

appeared in the play of boys and girls at Cleveland Ele-
mentary, one of many signs that those seven minutes
and their aftermath were seared into the children's
memory. When I visited the school, just a short bike ride
from the neighborhood near the University of the Pacific
where I myself had grown up, it was five months after
Purdy had turned that recess into a nightmare. His pres-
ence was still palpable, even though the most horrific of
the grisly remnants of the shooting—swarms of bullet
holes, pools of blood, bits of flesh, skin, and scalp—were
gone by the morning after the shooting, washed away
and painted over.
By then the deepest scars at Cleveland Elementary
were not to the building but to the psyches of the chil-
dren and staff there, who were trying to carry on with
life as usual.1 Perhaps most striking was how the
memory of those few minutes was revived again and
again by any small detail that was similar in the least. A
teacher told me, for example, that a wave of fright swept
through the school with the announcement that St.
Patrick's Day was coming; a number of the children
somehow got the idea that the day was to honor the
killer, Patrick Purdy.
"Whenever we hear an ambulance on its way to the
rest home down the street, everything halts," another
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teacher told me. "The kids all listen to see if it will stop
here or go on." For several weeks many children were
terrified of the mirrors in the restrooms; a rumor swept
the school that "Bloody Virgin Mary," some kind of
fantasied monster, lurked there. Weeks after the shoot-
ing a frantic girl came running up to the school's prin-
cipal, Pat Busher, yelling, "I hear shots! I hear shots!"
The sound was from the swinging chain on a tetherball
pole.
Many children became hypervigilant, as though con-
tinually on guard against a repetition of the terror; some
boys and girls would hover at recess next to the
classroom doors, not daring to venture out to the play-
ground where the killings had occurred. Others would
only play in small groups, posting a designated child as
lookout. Many continued for months to avoid the "evil"
areas, where children had died.
The memories lived on, too, as disturbing dreams, in-
truding into the children's unguarded minds as they
slept. Apart from nightmares repeating the shooting it-
self in some way, children were flooded with anxiety
dreams that left them apprehensive that they too would
die soon. Some children tried to sleep with their eyes
open so they wouldn't dream.
All of these reactions are well known to psychiatrists
as among the key symptoms of post-traumatic stress
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disorder, or PTSD. At the core of such trauma, says Dr.

Spencer Eth, a child psychiatrist who specializes in
PTSD in children, is "the intrusive memory of the cent-
ral violent action: the final blow with a fist, the plunge of
a knife, the blast of a shotgun. The memories are intense
perceptual experiences—the sight, sound, and smell of
gunfire; the screams or sudden silence of the victim; the
splash of blood; the police sirens."
These vivid, terrifying moments, neuroscientists now
say, become memories emblazoned in the emotional cir-
cuitry. The symptoms are, in effect, signs of an over-
aroused amygdala impelling the vivid memories of a
traumatic moment to continue to intrude on awareness.
As such, the traumatic memories become mental hair
triggers, ready to sound an alarm at the least hint that
the dread moment is about to happen once again. This
hair-trigger phenomenon is a hallmark of emotional
trauma of all kinds, including suffering repeated physic-
al abuse in childhood.
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 thou-
sands 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.
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Violent acts are more pernicious than natural cata-

strophes such as a hurricane because, unlike victims of a
natural disaster, victims of violence feel themselves to
have been intentionally selected as the target of
malevolence. That fact shatters assumptions about the
trustworthiness of people and the safety of the interper-
sonal world, an assumption natural catastrophes leave
untouched. Within an instant, the social world becomes
a dangerous place, one in which people are potential
threats to your safety.
Human cruelties stamp their victims' memories with a
template that regards with fear anything vaguely similar
to the assault itself. A man who was struck on the back
of his head, never seeing his attacker, was so frightened
afterward that he would try to walk down the street dir-
ectly in front of an old lady to feel safe from being hit on
the head again.2 A woman who was mugged by a man
who got on an elevator with her and forced her out at
knife point to an unoccupied floor was fearful for weeks
of going into not just elevators, but also the subway or
any other enclosed space where she might feel trapped;
she ran from her bank when she saw a man put his hand
in his jacket as the mugger had done.
The imprint of horror in memory—and the resulting
hypervigilance—can last a lifetime, as a study of Holo-
caust survivors found. Close to fifty years after they had
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endured semistarvation, the slaughter of their loved

ones, and constant terror in Nazi death camps, the
haunting memories were still alive. A third said they felt
generally fearful. Nearly three quarters said they still be-
came anxious at reminders of the Nazi persecution, such
as the sight of a uniform, a knock at the door, dogs bark-
ing, or smoke rising from a chimney. About 60 percent
said they thought about the Holocaust almost daily,
even after a half century; of those with active symptoms,
as many as eight in ten still suffered from repeated
nightmares. As one survivor said, "If you've been
through Auschwitz and you don't have nightmares, then
you're not normal."

HORROR FROZEN IN MEMORY

The words of a forty-eight-year-old Vietnam vet, some
twenty-four years after enduring a horrifying moment in
a faraway land:

I can't get the memories out of my mind! The im-

ages come flooding back in vivid detail, triggered by
the most inconsequential things, like a door slam-
ming, the sight of an Oriental woman, the touch of a
bamboo mat, or the smell of stir-fried pork. Last
night I went to bed, was having a good sleep for a
change. Then in the early morning a storm front
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passed through and there was a bolt of crackling

thunder. I awoke instantly, frozen in fear. I am right
back in Vietnam, in the middle of the monsoon sea-
son at my guard post. I am sure I'll get hit in the
next volley and convinced I will die. My hands are
freezing, yet sweat pours from my entire body. I feel
each hair on the back of my neck standing on end. I
can't catch my breath and my heart is pounding. I
smell a damp sulfur smell. Suddenly I see what's
left of my buddy Troy . . . on a bamboo platter, sent
back to our camp by the Vietcong.... The next bolt of
lightning and clap of thunder makes me jump so
much that I fall to the floor.3

This horrible memory, vividly fresh and detailed

though more than two decades old, still holds the power
to induce the same fear in this ex-soldier that he felt on
that fateful day. PTSD represents a perilous lowering of
the neural setpoint for alarm, leaving the person to react
to life's ordinary moments as though they were emer-
gencies. The hijacking circuit discussed in Chapter 2
seems critical in leaving such a powerful brand on
memory: the more brutal, shocking, and horrendous the
events that trigger the amygdala hijacking, the more in-
delible the memory. The neural basis for these memor-
ies appears to be a sweeping alteration in the chemistry
of the brain set in motion by a single instance of
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4
overwhelming terror. While the PTSD findings are typ-
ically 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.
The most detailed work on these brain changes is be-
ing done at the National Center for Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, a network of research sites based at
Veterans' Administration hospitals where there are large
pools of those who suffer from PTSD among the veter-
ans of Vietnam and other wars. It is from studies on vets
such as these that most of our knowledge of PTSD has
come. But these insights apply as well to children who
have suffered severe emotional trauma, such as those at
Cleveland Elementary.
"Victims of a devastating trauma may never be the
same biologically," Dr. Dennis Charney told me.5 A Yale
psychiatrist, Charney is director of clinical neuroscience
at the National Center. "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."
The operative word is uncontrollable. If people feel
there is something they can do in a catastrophic
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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 a given event subjectively overwhelming. As
Dr. John Krystal, director of the center's Laboratory of
Clinical Psychopharmacology, told me, "Say someone
being attacked with a knife knows how to defend himself
and takes action, while another person in the same pre-
dicament thinks, I'm dead.' The helpless person is the
one more susceptible to PTSD afterward. It's the feeling
that your life is in danger and there's nothing you can
do to escape it —that's the moment the brain change
begins."
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. Only one rat has a lever in its cage;
when the rat pushes the lever, the shock stops for both
cages. Over days and weeks, both rats get precisely the
same amount of shock. But the rat with the power to
turn the shocks off comes through without lasting signs
of stress. It is only in the helpless one of the pair that the
stress-induced brain changes occur.6 For a child being
shot at on a playground, seeing his playmates bleeding
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and dying—or for a teacher there, unable to stop the

carnage—that helplessness must have been palpable.

PTSD AS A LIMBIC DISORDER

It had been months since a huge earthquake shook her
out of bed and sent her yelling in panic through the
darkened house to find her four-year-old son. They
huddled for hours in the Los Angeles night cold under a
protective doorway, pinned there without food, water, or
light while wave after wave of aftershocks tumbled the
ground beneath them. Now, months later, she had
largely recovered from the ready panic that gripped her
for the first few days afterward, when a door slamming
could start her shivering with fear. The one lingering
symptom was her inability to sleep, a problem that
struck only on those nights her husband was away—as
he had been the night of the quake.
The main symptoms of such learned fearfulness—in-
cluding the most intense kind, PTSD—can be accounted
for by changes in the limbic circuitry focusing on the
amygdala.7 Some of the key changes are in the locus cer-
uleus, a structure that regulates the brain's secretion of
two substances called catecholamines: adrenaline and
noradrenaline. These neurochemicals mobilize the body
for an emergency; the same catecholamine surge stamps
memories with special strength. In PTSD this system
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becomes hyperreactive, secreting extra-large doses of

these brain chemicals in response to situations that hold
little or no threat but somehow are reminders of the ori-
ginal trauma, like the children at Cleveland Elementary
School who panicked when they heard an ambulance
siren similar to those they had heard at their school
after the shooting.
The locus ceruleus and the amygdala are closely
linked, along with other limbic structures such as the
hippocampus and hypothalamus; the circuitry for the
catecholamines extends into the cortex. Changes in
these circuits are thought to underlie PTSD symptoms,
which include anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, being easily
upset and aroused, readiness for fight or flight, and the
indelible encoding of intense emotional memories.8 Vi-
etnam vets with PTSD, one study found, had 40 percent
fewer catecholamine-stopping receptors than did men
without the symptoms—suggesting that their brains had
undergone a lasting change, with their catecholamine
secretion poorly controlled.9
Other changes occur in the circuit linking the limbic
brain with the pituitary gland, which regulates release of
CRF, the main stress hormone the body secretes to mo-
bilize the emergency fight-or-flight response. The
changes lead this hormone to be oversecreted—particu-
larly in the amygdala, hippocampus, and locus
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ceruleus—alerting the body for an emergency that is not

there in reality.10
As Dr. Charles Nemeroff, a Duke University psychiat-
rist, told me, "Too much CRF makes you overreact. For
example, if you're a Vietnam vet with PTSD and a car
backfires at the mall parking lot, it is the triggering of
CRF that floods you with the same feelings as in the ori-
ginal trauma: you start sweating, you're scared, you
have chills and the shakes, you may have flashbacks. In
people who hypersecrete CRF, the startle response is
overactive. For example, if you sneak up behind most
people and suddenly clap your hands, you'll see a
startled jump the first time, but not by the third or
fourth repetition. But people with too much CRF don't
habituate: they'll respond as much to the fourth clap as
to the first."11
A third set of changes occurs in the brain's opioid sys-
tem, which secretes endorphins to blunt the feeling of
pain. It also becomes hyperactive. This neural circuit
again involves the amygdala, this time in concert with a
region in the cerebral cortex. The opioids are brain
chemicals that are powerful numbing agents, like opium
and other narcotics that are chemical cousins. When ex-
periencing high levels of opioids ("the brain's own
morphine"), people have a heightened tolerance for
pain—an effect that has been noted by battlefield
 395/661

surgeons, who found severely wounded soldiers needed

lower doses of narcotics to handle their pain than did ci-
vilians with far less serious injuries.
Something similar seems to occur in PTSD.12 En-
dorphin changes add a new dimension to the neural mix
triggered by reexposure to trauma: a numbing of certain
feelings. This appears to explain a set of "negative" psy-
chological symptoms long noted in PTSD: anhedonia
(the inability to feel pleasure) and a general emotional
numbness, a sense of being cut off from life or from con-
cern about others' feelings. Those close to such people
may experience this indifference as a lack of empathy.
Another possible effect may be dissociation, including
the inability to remember crucial minutes, hours, or
even days of the traumatic event.
The neural changes of PTSD also seem to make a per-
son more susceptible to further traumatizing. A number
of studies with animals have found that when they were
exposed even to mild stress when young, they were far
more vulnerable than unstressed animals to trauma-in-
duced brain changes later in life (suggesting the urgent
need to treat children with PTSD). This seems a reason
that, exposed to the same catastrophe, one person goes
on to develop PTSD and another does not: the amygdala
is primed to find danger, and when life presents it once
again with real danger, its alarm rises to a higher pitch.
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All these neural changes offer short-term advantages

for dealing with the grim and dire emergencies that
prompt them. Under duress, it is adaptive to be highly
vigilant, aroused, ready for anything, impervious to
pain, the body primed for sustained physical demands,
and—for the moment—indifferent to what might other-
wise be intensely disturbing events. These short-term
advantages, however, become lasting problems when
the brain changes so that they become predispositions,
like a car stuck in perpetual high gear. When the amyg-
dala and its connected brain regions take on a new set-
point during a moment of intense trauma, this change in
excitability—this heightened readiness to trigger a neur-
al hijacking—means all of life is on the verge of becom-
ing an emergency, and even an innocent moment is sus-
ceptible to an explosion of fear run amok.

EMOTIONAL RELEARNING
Such traumatic memories seem to remain as fixtures in
brain function because they interfere with subsequent
learning—specifically, with relearning a more normal re-
sponse to those traumatizing events. In acquired fear
such as PTSD, the mechanisms of learning and memory
have gone awry; again, it is the amygdala that is key
among the brain regions involved. But in overcoming
the learned fear, the neocortex is critical.
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Fear conditioning is the name psychologists use for

the process whereby something that is not in the least
threatening becomes dreaded as it is associated in
someone's mind with something frightening. When such
frights are induced in laboratory animals, Charney
notes, the fears can last for years.13 The key region of the
brain that learns, retains, and acts on this fearful re-
sponse is the circuit between the thalamus, amygdala,
and prefrontal lobe—the pathway of neural hijacking.
Ordinarily, when someone learns to be frightened by
something through fear conditioning, the fear subsides
with time. This seems to happen through a natural re-
learning, as the feared object is encountered again in the
absence of anything truly scary. Thus a child who ac-
quires a fear of dogs because of being chased by a
snarling German shepherd gradually and naturally loses
that fear if, say, she moves next door to someone who
owns a friendly shepherd, and spends time playing with
the dog.
In PTSD spontaneous relearning fails to occur. Char-
ney proposes that this may be due to the brain changes
of PTSD, which are so strong that, in effect, the amyg-
dala 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
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of calm—the amygdala never relearns a more mild reac-

tion. "Extinction" of the fear, he observes, "appears to
involve an active learning process," which is itself im-
paired in people with PTSD, "leading to the abnormal
persistence of emotional memories."14
But given the right experiences, even PTSD can lift;
strong emotional memories, and the patterns of thought
and reaction that they trigger, can change with time.
This relearning, Charney proposes, is cortical. The ori-
ginal fear ingrained in the amygdala does not go away
completely; rather, the prefrontal cortex actively sup-
presses the amygdala's command to the rest of the brain
to respond with fear.
"The question is, how quickly do you let go of learned
fear?" asks Richard Davidson, the University of Wiscon-
sin psychologist who discovered the role of the left pre-
frontal cortex as a damper on distress. In a laboratory
experiment in which people first learned an aversion to
a loud noise—a paradigm for learned fear, and a lower-
key parallel of PTSD—Davidson found that people who
had more activity in the left prefrontal cortex got over
the acquired fear more quickly, again suggesting a cor-
tical role in letting go of learned distress.15

REEDUCATING THE EMOTIONAL

BRAIN
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One of the more encouraging findings about PTSD came

from a study of Holocaust survivors, about three quar-
ters of whom were found to have active PTSD symptoms
even a half century later. The positive finding was that a
quarter of the survivors who once had been troubled by
such symptoms no longer had them; somehow the nat-
ural events of their lives had counteracted the problem.
Those who still had the symptoms showed evidence of
the catecholamine-related brain changes typical of
PTSD—but those who had recovered had no such
changes.16 This finding, and others like it, hold out the
promise that the brain changes in PTSD are not in-
delible, and that people can recover from even the most
dire emotional imprinting—in short, that the emotional
circuitry can be reeducated. The good news, then, is that
traumas as profound as those causing PTSD can heal,
and that the route to such healing is through relearning.
One way this emotional healing seems to occur spon-
taneously—at least in children—is through such games
as Purdy. These games, played over and over again, let
children relive a trauma safely, as play. This allows two
avenues for healing: on the one hand, the memory re-
peats in a context of low anxiety, desensitizing it and al-
lowing a nontraumatized set of responses to become as-
sociated with it. Another route to healing is that, in their
minds, children can magically give the tragedy another,
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better outcome: sometimes in playing Purdy, the chil-

dren kill him, boosting their sense of mastery over that
traumatic moment of helplessness.
Games like Purdy are predictable in younger children
who have been through such overwhelming violence.
These macabre games in traumatized children were first
noted by Dr. Lenore Terr, a child psychiatrist in San
Francisco.17 She found such games among children in
Chowchilla, California—just a little over an hour down
the Central Valley from Stockton, where Purdy wreaked
such havoc—who in 1973 had been kidnapped as they
rode a bus home from a summer day camp. The kidnap-
pers buried the bus, children and all, in an ordeal that
lasted twenty-seven hours.
Five years later Terr found the kidnapping still being
reenacted in the victims' games. Girls, for example,
played symbolic kidnapping games with their Barbie
dolls. One girl, who had hated the feeling of other
children's urine on her skin as they lay huddled together
in terror, washed her Barbie over and over again. Anoth-
er played Traveling Barbie, in which Barbie travels
somewhere—it doesn't matter where—and returns
safely, which is the point of the game. A third girl's fa-
vorite was a scenario in which the doll is stuck in a hole
and suffocates.
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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 be-
come 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 damming 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 over-
whelming, a child needs endless repetitions, replaying
the trauma over and over again in a grim, monotonous
ritual.
One way to get at the picture frozen in the amygdala is
through art, which itself is a medium of the uncon-
scious. The emotional brain is highly attuned to symbol-
ic meanings and to the mode Freud called the "primary
process": the messages of metaphor, story, myth, the
arts. This avenue is often used in treating traumatized
children. Sometimes art can open the way for children
to talk about a moment of horror that they would not
dare speak of otherwise.
Spencer Eth, the Los Angeles child psychiatrist who
specializes in treating such children, tells of a five-year-
old boy who had been kidnapped with his mother by her
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ex-lover. The man brought them to a motel room, where

he ordered the boy to hide under a blanket while he beat
the mother to death. The boy was, understandably, re-
luctant to talk with Eth about the mayhem he had heard
and seen while underneath the blanket. So Eth asked
him to draw a picture—any picture.
The drawing was of a race-car driver who had a strik-
ingly large pair of eyes, Eth recalls. The huge eyes Eth
took to refer to the boy's own daring in peeking at the
killer. Such hidden references to the traumatic scene al-
most always appear in the artwork of traumatized chil-
dren; Eth has made having such children draw a picture
the opening gambit in therapy. The potent memories
that preoccupy them intrude in their art just as in their
thoughts. Beyond that, the act of drawing is itself thera-
peutic, beginning the process of mastering the trauma.

EMOTIONAL RELEARNING AND

RECOVERY FROM TRAUMA
Irene had gone on a date that ended in attempted
rape. Though she had fought off the attacker, he
continued to plague her: harassing her with ob-
scene phone calls, making threats of violence, call-
ing in the middle of the night, stalking her and
watching her every move. Once, when she tried to
get the police to help, they dismissed her problem
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as trivial, since "nothing had really happened." By

the time she came for therapy Irene had symptoms
of PTSD, had given up socializing at all, and felt a
prisoner in her own house.

Irene's case is cited by Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a

Harvard psychiatrist whose groundbreaking work out-
lines the steps to recovery from trauma. 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 emo-
tional brain learns once again that life need not be re-
garded as an emergency about to happen.
The first step, regaining a sense of safety, presumably
translates to finding ways to calm the too-fearful, too
easily triggered emotional circuits enough to allow re-
learning.18 Often this begins with helping patients un-
derstand that their jumpiness and nightmares, hypervi-
gilance and panics, are part of the symptoms of PTSD.
This understanding makes the symptoms themselves
less frightening.
Another early step is to help patients regain some
sense of control over what is happening to them, a direct
unlearning of the lesson of helplessness that the trauma
itself imparted. Irene, for example, mobilized her
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friends and family to form a buffer between her and her

stalker, and was able to get the police to intervene.
The sense in which PTSD patients feel "unsafe" goes
beyond fears that dangers lurk around them; their in-
security 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.
Medication offers one way to restore patients' sense
that they need not be so at the mercy of the emotional
alarms that flood them with inexplicable anxiety, keep
them sleepless, or pepper their sleep with nightmares.
Pharmacologists are hoping one day to tailor medica-
tions that will target precisely the effects of PTSD on the
amygdala and connected neurotransmitter circuits. For
now, though, there are medications that counter only
some of these changes, notably the antidepressants that
act on the serotonin system, and beta-blockers like pro-
pranolol, which block the activation of the sympathetic
nervous system. Patients also may learn relaxation tech-
niques that give them the ability to counter their edgi-
ness and nervousness. A physiological calm opens a
window for helping the brutalized emotional circuitry
rediscover that life is not a threat and for giving back to
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patients some of the sense of security they had in their

lives before the trauma happened.
Another step in healing involves retelling and recon-
structing the story of the trauma in the harbor of that
safety, allowing the emotional circuitry to acquire a new,
more realistic understanding of and response to the
traumatic memory and its triggers. As patients retell the
horrific details of the trauma, the memory starts to be
transformed, both in its emotional meaning and in its
effects on the emotional brain. The pace of this retelling
is delicate; ideally it mimics the pace that occurs natur-
ally in those people who are able to recover from trauma
without suffering PTSD. In these cases there often
seems to be an inner clock that "doses" people with in-
trusive memories that relive the trauma, intercut with
weeks or months when they remember hardly anything
of the horrible events.19
This alternation of reimmersion and respite seems to
allow for a spontaneous review of the trauma and re-
learning of emotional response to it. For those whose
PTSD is more intractable, says Herman, retelling their
tale can sometimes trigger overwhelming fears, in which
case the therapist should ease the pace to keep the
patient's reactions within a bearable range, one that will
not disrupt the relearning.
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The therapist encourages the patient to retell the trau-

matic events as vividly as possible, like a horror home
video, retrieving every sordid detail. This includes not
just the specifics of what they saw, heard, smelled, and
felt, but also their reactions—the dread, disgust, nausea.
The goal here is to put the entire memory into words,
which means capturing parts of the memory that may
have been dissociated and so are absent from conscious
recall. 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. This
begins to impart a telling lesson to the emotional cir-
cuitry—that security, rather than unremitting terror, can
be experienced in tandem with the trauma memories.
The five-year-old who drew the picture of the giant
eyes after he witnessed the grisly murder of his mother
did not make any more drawings after that first one; in-
stead he and his therapist, Spencer Eth, played games,
creating a bond of rapport. Only slowly did he begin to
retell the story of the murder, at first in a stereotyped
way, reciting each detail exactly the same in each telling.
 407/661

Gradually, though, his narrative became more open and

free-flowing, his body less tense as he told it. At the
same time his nightmares of the scene came less often,
an indication, says Eth, of some "trauma mastery."
Gradually their talk moved away from the fears left by
the trauma to more of what was happening in the boy's
day-to-day life as he adjusted to a new home with his
father. And finally the boy was able to talk just about his
daily life as the hold of the trauma faded.
Finally, Herman finds that patients need to mourn the
loss the trauma brought—whether an 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 shat-
tering of confidence that people can be trusted. The
mourning that ensues while retelling such painful events
serves a crucial purpose: it marks the ability to let go of
the trauma itself to some degree. It means that instead
of being perpetually captured by this moment in the
past, patients can start to look ahead, even to hope, and
to rebuild a new life free of the trauma's grip. It is as if
the constant recycling and reliving of the trauma's terror
by the emotional circuitry were a spell that could finally
be lifted. Every siren need not bring a flood of fear;
every sound in the night need not compel a flashback to
terror.
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Aftereffects or occasional recurrences of symptoms of-

ten persist, says Herman, but there are specific signs
that the trauma has largely been overcome. These in-
clude reducing the physiological symptoms to a man-
ageable level, and being able to bear the feelings associ-
ated with memories of the trauma. Especially significant
is no longer having trauma memories erupt at uncon-
trollable moments, but rather being able to revisit them
voluntarily, like any other memory—and, perhaps more
important, to put them aside like any other memory.
Finally, it means rebuilding a new life, with strong,
trusting relationships and a belief system that finds
meaning even in a world where such injustice can hap-
pen.20 All of these together are markers of success in
reeducating the emotional brain.

PSYCHOTHERAPY AS AN EMOTIONAL
TUTORIAL
Fortunately, the catastrophic moments in which trau-
matic memories are emblazoned are rare during the
course of life for most of us. But the same circuitry that
can be seen so boldly imprinting traumatic memories is
presumably at work in life's quieter moments, too. The
more ordinary travails of childhood, such as being
chronically ignored and deprived of attention or tender-
ness by one's parents, abandonment or loss, or social
 409/661

rejection may never reach the fever pitch of trauma, but

they surely leave their imprint on the emotional brain,
creating distortions—and tears and rages—in intimate
relationships later in life. If PTSD can be healed, so can
the more muted emotional scars that so many of us
bear; that is the task of psychotherapy. And, in general,
it is in learning to deal skillfully with these loaded reac-
tions that emotional intelligence comes into play.
The dynamic between the amygdala and the more
fully informed reactions of the prefrontal cortex may of-
fer a neuroanatomical model for how psychotherapy re-
shapes deep, maladaptive emotional patterns. As Joseph
LeDoux, the neuroscientist who discovered the
amygdala's hair-trigger role in emotional outbursts,
conjectures, "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."
Given the brain architecture that underlies emotional
relearning, what seems to remain, even after successful
psychotherapy, is a vestigial reaction, a remnant of the
original sensitivity or fear at the root of a troubling emo-
tional pattern.21 The prefrontal cortex can refine or put
the brakes on the amygdala's impulse to rampage, but
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cannot keep it from reacting in the first place. Thus

while we cannot decide when we have our emotional
outbursts, we have more control over how long they
last. A quicker recovery time from such outbursts may
well be one mark of emotional maturity.
Over the course of therapy, what seems to change in
the main are the responses that people make once an
emotional reaction is triggered—but the tendency for
the reaction to be triggered in the first place does not
disappear entirely. Evidence for this comes from a series
of studies of psychotherapy conducted by Lester Lubor-
sky and his colleagues at the University of
Pennsylvania.22 They analyzed the main relationship
conflicts that brought dozens of patients into psycho-
therapy—issues such as a deep craving to be accepted or
find intimacy, or a fear of being a failure or being overly
dependent. They then carefully analyzed the typical
(always self-defeating) responses the patients made
when these wishes and fears were activated in their rela-
tionships—responses such as being too demanding,
which created a backlash of anger or coldness in the oth-
er person, or withdrawing in self-defense from an anti-
cipated slight, leaving the other person miffed by the
seeming rebuff. During such ill-fated encounters, the
patients, understandably, felt flooded by upsetting feel-
ings—hopelessness and sadness, resentment and anger,
 411/661

tension and fear, guilt and self-blame, and so on.

Whatever the specific pattern of the patient, it seemed
to show up in most every important relationship, wheth-
er with a spouse or lover, a child or parent, or peers and
bosses at work.
Over the course of long-term therapy, however, these
patients made two kinds of changes: their emotional re-
action to the triggering events became less distressing,
even calm or bemused, and their overt responses be-
came more effective in getting what they truly wanted
from the relationship. What did not change, however,
was their underlying wish or fear, and the initial twinge
of feeling. By the time the patients had but a few ses-
sions left in therapy, the encounters they told about
showed they had only half as many negative emotional
reactions compared to when they first started therapy,
and were twice as likely to get the positive response they
deeply desired from the other person. But what did not
change at all was the particular sensitivity at the root of
these needs.
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
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habits of the heart learned in childhood—can be re-

shaped. Emotional learning is lifelong.
 14
Temperament Is Not Destiny
So much for altering emotional patterns that have been
learned. But what about those responses that are givens
of our genetic endowment—what of changing the ha-
bitual reactions of people who by nature are, say, highly
volatile, or painfully shy? This range of the emotional
compass falls under the sweep of temperament, the
background murmur of feelings that mark our basic dis-
position. Temperament can be defined in terms of the
moods that typify our emotional life. To some degree we
each have such a favored emotional range; temperament
is a given at birth, part of the genetic lottery that has
compelling force in the unfolding of life. Every parent
has seen this: from birth a child will be calm and placid
or testy and difficult. The question is whether such a
biologically determined emotional set can be changed by
experience. Does our biology fix our emotional destiny,
or can even an innately shy child grow into a more con-
fident adult?
The clearest answer to this question comes from the
work of Jerome Kagan, the eminent developmental psy-
chologist at Harvard University.1 Kagan posits that there
are at least four temperamental types—timid, bold, up-
beat, and melancholy—and that each is due to a
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different pattern of brain activity. There are likely innu-

merable differences in temperamental endowment, each
based in innate differences in emotional circuitry; for
any given emotion people can differ in how easily it trig-
gers, how long it lasts, how intense it becomes. Kagan's
work concentrates on one of these patterns: the dimen-
sion of temperament that runs from boldness to
timidity.
For decades mothers have been bringing their infants
and toddlers to Kagan's Laboratory for Child Develop-
ment on the fourteenth floor of Harvard's William
James Hall to take part in his studies of child develop-
ment. It was there that Kagan and his coresearchers no-
ticed early signs of shyness in a group of twenty-one-
month-old toddlers brought for experimental observa-
tions. In free play with other toddlers, some were bubbly
and spontaneous, playing with other babies without the
least hesitation. Others, though, were uncertain and
hesitant, hanging back, clinging to their mothers, quietly
watching the others at play. Almost four years later,
when these same children were in kindergarten, Kagan's
group observed them again. Over the intervening years
none of the outgoing children had become timid, while
two thirds of the timid ones were still reticent.
Kagan finds that children who are overly sensitive and
fearful grow into shy and timorous adults; from birth
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about 15 to 20 percent of children are "behaviorally in-

hibited," 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.
Tom, one of the boys in Kagan's study, is typical of the
shy type. At every measurement through child-
hood—two, five, and seven years of age—Tom was
among the most timid children. When interviewed at
thirteen, Tom was tense and stiff, biting his lip and
wringing his hands, his face impassive, breaking into a
tight smile only when talking about his girlfriend; his
answers were short, his manner subdued.2 Throughout
the middle years of childhood, until about age eleven,
Tom remembers being painfully shy, breaking into a
sweat whenever he had to approach playmates. He was
also troubled by intense fears: of his house burning
down, of diving into a swimming pool, of being alone in
the dark. In frequent nightmares, he was attacked by
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monsters. Though he has felt less shy in the last two

years or so, he still feels some anxiety around other chil-
dren, and his worries now center on doing well at
school, even though he is in the top 5 percent of his
class. The son of a scientist, Tom finds a career in that
field appealing, since its relative solitude fits his intro-
verted inclinations.
By contrast, Ralph was one of the boldest and most
outgoing children at every age. Always relaxed and talk-
ative, 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. During
childhood he had only two short-lived fears—one of
dogs, after a big dog jumped on him at age three, and
another of flying, when he heard about plane crashes at
age seven. Sociable and popular, Ralph has never
thought of himself as shy.
The timid children seem to come into life with a neur-
al circuitry that makes them more reactive to even mild
stress—from birth, their hearts beat faster than other in-
fants' in response to strange or novel situations. At
twenty-one months, when the reticent toddlers were
holding back from playing, heart rate monitors showed
that their hearts were racing with anxiety. That easily
aroused anxiety seems to underlie their lifelong
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timidity: they treat any new person or situation as

though it were a potential threat. Perhaps as a result,
middle-aged women who remember having been espe-
cially 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-re-
lated problems such as migraine headaches, irritable
bowel, and other stomach problems.3

THE NEUROCHEMISTRY OF TIMIDITY

The difference between cautious Tom and bold Ralph,
Kagan believes, lies in the excitability of a neural circuit
centered on the amygdala. Kagan proposes that people
like Tom, who are prone to fearfulness, are born with a
neurochemistry that makes this circuit easily aroused,
and so they avoid the unfamiliar, shy away from uncer-
tainty, and suffer anxiety. Those who, like Ralph, have a
nervous system calibrated with a much higher threshold
for amygdala arousal, are less easily frightened, more
naturally outgoing, and eager to explore new places and
meet new people.
An early clue to which pattern a child has inherited is
how difficult and irritable she is as an infant, and how
distressed she becomes when confronted with
something or someone unfamiliar. While about one in
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five infants falls into the timid category, about two in

five have the bold temperament—at least at birth.
Part of Kagan's evidence comes from observations of
cats that are unusually timid. About one in seven house-
cats has a pattern of fearfulness akin to the timid
children's: they draw away from novelty (instead of ex-
hibiting a cat's legendary curiosity), they are reluctant to
explore new territory, and they attack only the smallest
rodents, being too timid to take on larger ones that their
more courageous feline peers would pursue with gusto.
Direct brain probes have found that portions of the
amygdala are unusually excitable in these timid cats, es-
pecially when, for instance, they hear a threatening howl
from another cat.
The cats' timidity blossoms at about one month of age,
which is the point when their amygdala matures enough
to take control of the brain circuitry to approach or
avoid. One month in kitten brain maturation is akin to
eight months in a human infant; it is at eight or nine
months, Kagan notes, that "stranger" fear appears in ba-
bies—if the baby's mother leaves a room and there is a
stranger present, the result is tears. 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.
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One sign of this heightened sensitivity is that, for ex-

ample, when young men and women who were quite shy
in childhood are measured in a laboratory while exposed
to stresses such as harsh smells, their heart rate stays el-
evated much longer than for their more outgoing
peers—a sign that surging norepinephrine is keeping
their amygdala excited and, through connected neural
circuits, their sympathetic nervous system aroused.4
Kagan finds that timid children have higher levels of re-
activity across the range of sympathetic nervous system
indices, from higher resting blood pressure and greater
dilation of the pupils, to higher levels of norepinephrine
markers in their urine.
Silence is another barometer of timidity. Whenever
Kagan's team observed shy and bold children in a natur-
al setting—in their kindergarten classes, with other chil-
dren they did not know, or talking with an interview-
er—the timid children talked less. One timid kinder-
gartener would say nothing when other children spoke
to her, and spent most of her day just watching the oth-
ers play. Kagan speculates that a timid silence in the
face of novelty or a perceived threat is a sign of the activ-
ity 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).
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These sensitive children are at high risk for develop-

ing an anxiety disorder such as panic attacks, starting as
early as sixth or seventh grade. In one study of 754 boys
and girls in those grades, 44 were found to have already
suffered at least one episode of panic, or to have had
several preliminary symptoms. These anxiety episodes
were usually triggered by the ordinary alarms of early
adolescence, such as a first date or a big exam—alarms
that most children handle without developing more seri-
ous problems. But teenagers who were timid by tem-
perament and who had been unusually frightened by
new situations got panic symptoms such as heart palpit-
ations, shortness of breath, or a choking feeling, along
with the feeling that something horrible was going to
happen to them, like going crazy or dying. The research-
ers believe that while the episodes were not significant
enough to rate the psychiatric diagnosis "panic dis-
order," they signal that these teenagers would be at
greater risk for developing the disorder as the years
went on; many adults who suffer panic attacks say the
attacks began during their teen years.5
The onset of the anxiety attacks was closely tied to pu-
berty. Girls with few signs of puberty reported no such
attacks, but of those who had gone through puberty
about 8 percent said they had experienced panic. Once
they have had such an attack, they are prone to
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developing the dread of a recurrence that leads people

with panic disorder to shrink from life.

NOTHING BOTHERS ME: THE

CHEERFUL TEMPERAMENT
In the 1920s, as a young woman, my aunt June left her
home in Kansas City and ventured on her own to Shang-
hai—a dangerous journey for a solitary woman in those
years. There June met and married a British detective in
the colonial police force of that international center of
commerce and intrigue. When the Japanese captured
Shanghai at the outset of World War II, my aunt and her
husband were interned in the prison camp depicted in
the book and movie Empire of the Sun. After surviving
five horrific years in the prison camp, she and her hus-
band had, literally, lost everything. Penniless, they were
repatriated to British Columbia.
I remember as a child first meeting June, an ebullient
elderly woman whose life had followed a remarkable
course. In her later years she suffered a stroke that left
her partly paralyzed; after a slow and arduous recovery
she was able to walk again, but with a limp. In those
years I remember going for an outing with June, then in
her seventies. Somehow she wandered off, and after sev-
eral minutes I heard a feeble yell—June crying for help.
She had fallen and could not get up on her own. I rushed
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to help her up, and as I did so, instead of complaining or

lamenting she laughed at her predicament. Her only
comment was a lighthearted "Well, at least I can walk
again."
By nature, some people's emotions seem, like my
aunt's, to gravitate toward the positive pole; these
people are naturally upbeat and easygoing, while others
are dour and melancholy. This dimension of tempera-
ment—ebullience at one end, melancholy at the oth-
er—seems linked to the relative activity of the right and
left prefrontal areas, the upper poles of the emotional
brain. That insight has emerged largely from the work of
Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psycholo-
gist. He discovered that people who have greater activity
in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by
temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in
people and in what life presents them with, bouncing
back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with
relatively greater activity on the right side are given to
negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life's
difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they
cannot turn off their worries and depressions.
In one of Davidson's experiments volunteers with the
most pronounced activity in the left frontal areas were
compared with the fifteen who showed most activity on
the right. Those with marked right frontal activity
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showed a distinctive pattern of negativity on a personal-

ity test: they fit the caricature portrayed by Woody
Allen's comedy roles, the alarmist who sees catastrophe
in the smallest thing—prone to funks and moodiness,
and suspicious of a world they saw as fraught with over-
whelming difficulties and lurking dangers. By contrast
to their melancholy counterparts, those with stronger
left frontal activity saw the world very differently. Soci-
able and cheerful, they typically felt a sense of enjoy-
ment, 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.6
People who have a history of clinical depression,
Davidson found, had lower levels of brain activity in the
left frontal lobe, and more on the right, than did people
who had never been depressed. He found the same pat-
tern in patients newly diagnosed with depression.
Davidson speculates that people who overcome depres-
sion have learned to increase the level of activity in their
left prefrontal lobe—a speculation awaiting experiment-
al testing.
Though his research is on the 30 percent or so of
people at the extremes, just about anyone can be classi-
fied by their brain wave patterns as tending toward one
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or the other type, says Davidson. The contrast in tem-

perament between the morose and the cheerful shows
up in many ways, large and small. For example, in one
experiment volunteers watched short film clips. Some
were amusing—a gorilla taking a bath, a puppy at play.
Others, like an instructional film for nurses featuring
grisly details of surgery, were quite distressing. The
right-hemisphere, somber folks found the happy movies
only mildly amusing, but they felt extreme fear and dis-
gust in reaction to the surgical blood and gore. The
cheerful group had minimal reactions to the surgery;
their strongest reactions were of delight when they saw
the upbeat films.
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 tempera-
ment—like that toward timidity or boldness—emerges
within the first year of life, a fact that strongly suggests
it too is genetically determined. Like most of the brain,
the frontal lobes are still maturing in the first few
months of life, and so their activity cannot be reliably
measured until the age of ten months or so. But in in-
fants that young, Davidson found that the activity level
of the frontal lobes predicted whether they would cry
when their mothers left the room. The correlation was
virtually 100 percent: of dozens of infants tested this
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way, every infant who cried had more brain activity on

the right side, while those who did not had more activity
on the left.
Still, even if this basic dimension of temperament is
laid down from birth, or very nearly from birth, those of
us who have the morose pattern are not necessarily
doomed to go through life brooding and crotchety. The
emotional lessons of childhood can have a profound im-
pact on temperament, either amplifying or muting an
innate predisposition. The great plasticity of the brain in
childhood means that experiences during those years
can have a lasting impact on the sculpting of neural
pathways for the rest of life. Perhaps the best illustration
of the kinds of experiences that can alter temperament
for the better is in an observation that emerged from
Kagan's research with timid children.

TAMING THE OVEREXCITABLE

AMYGDALA
The encouraging news from Kagan's studies is that not
all fearful infants grow up hanging back from life—tem-
perament is not destiny. The overexcitable amygdala
can be tamed, with the right experiences. 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
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parents, and so how they learn to handle their natural

timidness. Those parents who engineer gradual em-
boldening experiences for their children offer them what
may be a lifelong corrective to their fearfulness.
About one in three infants who come into the world
with all the signs of an overexcitable amygdala have lost
their timidness by the time they reach kindergarten.7
From observations of these once-fearful children at
home, it is clear that parents, and especially mothers,
play a major role in whether an innately timid child
grows bolder with time or continues to shy away from
novelty and become upset by challenge. Kagan's re-
search team found that some of the mothers held to the
philosophy that they should protect their timid toddlers
from whatever was upsetting; others felt that it was
more important to help their timid child learn how to
cope with these upsetting moments, and so adapt to
life's small struggles. The protective belief seems to have
abetted the fearfulness, probably by depriving the
youngsters of opportunities for learning how to over-
come their fears. The "learn to adapt" philosophy of
childrearing seems to have helped fearful children be-
come braver.
Observations in the homes when the babies were
about six months old found that the protective mothers,
trying to soothe their infants, picked them up and held
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them when they fretted or cried, and did so longer than

those mothers who tried to help their infants learn to
master these moments of upset. The ratio of times the
infants were held when calm and when upset showed
that the protective mothers held their infants much
longer during the upsets than the calm periods.
Another difference emerged when the infants were
around one year old: the protective mothers were more
lenient and indirect in setting limits for their toddlers
when they were doing something that might be harmful,
such as mouthing an object they might swallow. The
other mothers, by contrast, were emphatic, setting firm
limits, giving direct commands, blocking the child's ac-
tions, insisting on obedience.
Why should firmness lead to a reduction in fearful-
ness? Kagan speculates that there is something learned
when a baby has his steady crawl toward what seems to
him an intriguing object (but to his mother a dangerous
one) interrupted by her warning, "Get away from that!"
The infant is suddenly forced to deal with a mild uncer-
tainty. The repetition of this challenge hundreds and
hundreds of times during the first year of life gives the
infant continual rehearsals, in small doses, of meeting
the unexpected in life. For fearful children that is pre-
cisely the encounter that has to be mastered, and man-
ageable doses are just right for learning the lesson.
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When the encounter takes place with parents who,

though loving, do not rush to pick up and soothe the
toddler over every little upset, he gradually learns to
manage such moments on his own. By age two, when
these formerly fearful toddlers are brought back to
Kagan's laboratory, they are far less likely to break out
into tears when a stranger frowns at them, or an experi-
menter puts a blood-pressure cuff around their arm.
Kagan's conclusion: "It appears that mothers who
protect their high[ly] reactive infants from frustration
and anxiety in the hope of effecting a benevolent out-
come seem to exacerbate the infant's uncertainty and
produce the opposite effect."8 In other words, the pro-
tective 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. At the neurological level, presumably, this
means their prefrontal circuits missed the chance to
learn alternate responses to knee-jerk fear; instead,
their tendency for unbridled fearfulness may have been
strengthened simply through repetition.
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
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of its physiological basis—no human quality is beyond

change."
Throughout childhood some timid children grow
bolder as experience continues to mold the key neural
circuitry. One of the signs that a timid child will be more
likely to overcome this natural inhibition is having a
higher level of social competence: being cooperative and
getting along with other children; being empathic, prone
to giving and sharing, and considerate; and being able to
develop close friendships. These traits marked a group
of children first identified as having a timid tempera-
ment at age four, who shook it off by the time they were
ten years old.9
By contrast, those timid four-year-olds whose tem-
perament changed little over the same six years tended
to be less able emotionally: crying and falling apart un-
der stress more easily; being emotionally inappropriate;
being fearful, sulky, or whiny; overreacting to minor
frustration with anger; having trouble delaying gratifica-
tion; being overly sensitive to criticism, or mistrustful.
These emotional lapses are, of course, likely to mean
their relationships with other children will be troubled,
should they be able to overcome their initial reluctance
to engage.
By contrast, it is easy to see why the more emotionally
competent—though shy by temperament—children
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spontaneously outgrew their timidity. Being more so-

cially skilled, they were far more likely to have a succes-
sion of positive experiences with other children. Even if
they were tentative about, say, speaking to a new play-
mate, once the ice was broken they were able to shine
socially. The regular repetition of such social success
over many years would naturally tend to make the timid
more sure of themselves.
These advances toward boldness are encouraging;
they suggest that ever innate emotional patterns can
change to some degree. A child who comes into the
world easily frightened can learn to be calmer, or even
outgoing, in the face of the unfamiliar. Fearfulness—or
any other temperament—may be part of the biological
givens of our emotional lives, but we are not necessarily
limited to a specific emotional menu by our inherited
traits. There is a range of possibility even within genetic
constraints. As behavioral geneticists observe, genes
alone do not determine behavior; our environment, es-
pecially what we experience and learn as we grow,
shapes how a temperamental predisposition expresses
itself as life unfolds. 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.
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CHILDHOOD: A WINDOW OF
OPPORTUNITY
The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It
continues to shape itself through life, with the most in-
tense growth occurring during childhood. Children are
born with many more neurons than their mature brain
will retain; through a process known as "pruning" the
brain actually loses the neuronal connections that are
less used, and forms strong connections in those syn-
aptic circuits that have been utilized the most. Pruning,
by doing away with extraneous synapses, improves the
signal-to-noise ratio in the brain by removing the cause
of the "noise." This process is constant and quick; syn-
aptic connections can form in a matter of hours or days.
Experience, particularly in childhood, sculpts the brain.
The classic demonstration of the impact of experience
on brain growth was by Nobel Prize-winners Thorsten
Wiesel and David Hubel, both neuroscientists.10 They
showed that in cats and monkeys, there was a critical
period during the first few months of life for the devel-
opment of the synapses that carry signals from the eye
to the visual cortex, where those signals are interpreted.
If one eye was kept closed during that period, the num-
ber of synapses from that eye to the visual cortex
dwindled away, while those from the open eye multi-
plied. If after the critical period ended the closed eye
 432/661

was reopened, the animal was functionally blind in that

eye. Although nothing was wrong with the eye itself,
there were too few circuits to the visual cortex for sig-
nals from that eye to be interpreted.
In humans the corresponding critical period for vision
lasts for the first six years of life. During this time nor-
mal seeing stimulates the formation of increasingly
complex neural circuitry for vision that begins in the eye
and ends in the visual cortex. If a child's eye is taped
closed for even a few weeks, it can produce a measurable
deficit in the visual capacity of that eye. If a child has
had one eye closed for several months during this peri-
od, and later has it restored, that eye's vision for detail
will be impaired.
A vivid demonstration of the impact of experience on
the developing brain is in studies of "rich" and "poor"
rats.11 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 bar-
ren and lacking diversions. Over a period of months the
neocortices of the rich rats developed far more complex
networks of synaptic circuits interconnecting the neur-
ons; the poor rats' neuronal circuitry was sparse by com-
parison. The difference was so great that the rich rats'
brains were heavier, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they
were far smarter at solving mazes than the poor rats.
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Similar experiments with monkeys show these differ-

ences between those "rich" and "poor" in experience,
and the same effect is sure to occur in humans.
Psychotherapy—that is, systematic emotional relearn-
ing—stands as a case in point for the way experience can
both change emotional patterns and shape the brain.
The most dramatic demonstration comes from a study
of people being treated for obsessive-compulsive dis-
order.12 One of the more common compulsions is hand
washing, which can be done so often, even hundreds of
times in a day, that the person's skin cracks. PET scan
studies show that obsessive-compulsives have greater
than normal activity in the prefrontal lobes.13
Half of the patients in the study received the standard
drug treatment, fluoxetine (better known by the brand
name Prozac), and half got behavior therapy. During the
therapy they were systematically exposed to the object
of their obsession or compulsion without performing it;
patients with hand-washing compulsions were put at a
sink, but not allowed to wash. At the same time they
learned to question the fears and dreads that spurred
them on—for example, that failure to wash would mean
they would get a disease and die. Gradually, through
months of such sessions, the compulsions faded, just as
they did with the medication.
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The remarkable finding, though, was a PET scan test

showing that the behavior therapy patients had as signi-
ficant a decrease in the activity of a key part of the emo-
tional brain, the caudate nucleus, as did the patients
successfully treated with the drug fluoxetine. Their ex-
perience had changed brain function—and relieved
symptoms—as effectively as the medication!
CRUCIAL WINDOWS

Of all species we humans take the longest for our brains

to fully mature. While each area of the brain develops at
a different rate during childhood, the onset of puberty
marks one of the most sweeping periods of pruning
throughout the brain. Several brain areas critical for
emotional life are among the slowest to mature. While
the sensory areas mature during early childhood, and
the limbic system by puberty, the frontal lobes—seat of
emotional self-control, understanding, and artful re-
sponse—continue to develop into late adolescence, until
somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years of age.14
The habits of emotional management that are re-
peated 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 ac-
quired in childhood become set in the basic synaptic
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wiring of 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 syn-
aptic 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 in the regu-
latory circuitry of the emotional brain. As we have seen,
critical experiences include how dependable and re-
sponsive to the child's needs parents are, the opportun-
ities and guidance a child has in learning to handle her
own distress and control impulse, and practice in em-
pathy. By the same token, neglect or abuse, the misat-
tunement of a self-absorbed or indifferent parent, or
brutal discipline can leave their imprint on the emotion-
al circuitry.15
One of the most essential emotional lessons, first
learned in infancy and refined throughout childhood, is
how to soothe oneself when upset. For very young in-
fants, soothing comes from caretakers: a mother hears
her infant crying, picks him up, holds and rocks him un-
til he calms down. This biological attunement, some the-
orists propose, helps the child begin to learn how to do
the same for himself.16 During a critical period between
ten and eighteen months, the orbitofrontal area of the
prefrontal cortex is rapidly forming the connections
with the limbic brain that will make it a key on/off
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switch for distress. The infant who through countless

episodes of being soothed is helped along in learning
how to calm down, the speculation goes, will have
stronger connections in this circuit for controlling dis-
tress, and so throughout life will be better at soothing
himself when upset.
To be sure, the art of soothing oneself is mastered
over many years, and with new means, as brain matura-
tion offers a child progressively more sophisticated emo-
tional tools. Remember, the frontal lobes, so important
for regulating limbic impulse, mature into adoles-
cence.17 Another key circuit that continues to shape it-
self through childhood centers on the vagus nerve,
which at one end regulates the heart and other parts of
the body, and at the other sends signals to the amygdala
from the adrenals, prompting it to secrete the cat-
echolamines, which prime the fight-or-flight response. A
University of Washington team that assessed the impact
of childrearing discovered that emotionally adept par-
enting led to a change for the better in vagus-nerve
function.
As John Gottman, the psychologist who led the re-
search, explained, "Parents modify their children's vagal
tone"—a measure of how easily triggered the vagus
nerve is—"by coaching them emotionally: talking to chil-
dren about their feelings and how to understand them,
 437/661

not being critical and judgmental, problem-solving

about emotional predicaments, coaching them on what
to do, like alternatives to hitting, or to withdrawing
when you're sad." When parents did this well, children
were better able to suppress the vagal activity that keeps
the amygdala priming the body with fight-or-flight hor-
mones—and so were better behaved.
It stands to reason that the key skills of emotional in-
telligence each have critical periods extending over sev-
eral years in childhood. Each period represents a win-
dow 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
adulthood. It may explain, too, why psychotherapy can
often take so long to affect some of these patterns—and
why, as we've seen, even after therapy those patterns
tend to remain as underlying propensities, though with
an overlay of new insights and relearned responses.
To be sure, the brain remains plastic throughout life,
though not to the spectacular extent seen in childhood.
All learning implies a change in the brain, a strengthen-
ing of synaptic connection. The brain changes in the pa-
tients with obsessive-compulsive disorder show that
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emotional habits are malleable throughout life, with

some sustained effort, even at the neural level. What
happens with the brain in PTSD (or in therapy, for that
matter) is an analog of the effects all repeated or intense
emotional experiences bring, for better or for worse.
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
who 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 chil-
dren the nurturing and guidance that cultivates the es-
sential emotional skills in the first place?
 PART FIVE
EMOTIONAL LITERACY
 15
The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
It began as a small dispute, but had escalated. Ian
Moore, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in
Brooklyn, and Tyrone Sinkler, a junior, had had a
falling-out with a buddy, fifteen-year-old Khalil Sump-
ter. Then they had started picking on him and making
threats. Now it exploded.
Khalil, scared that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat
him up, brought a .38 caliber pistol to school one morn-
ing, and, fifteen feet from a school guard, shot both boys
to death at point-blank range in the school's hallway.
The incident, chilling as it is, can be read as yet anoth-
er sign of a desperate need for lessons in handling emo-
tions, settling disagreements peaceably, and just plain
getting along. Educators, long disturbed by school
children's lagging scores in math and reading, are realiz-
ing there is a different and more alarming deficiency:
emotional illiteracy.1 And while laudable efforts are be-
ing made to raise academic standards, this new and
troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the stand-
ard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it,
the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care
more about how well school children can read and write
than whether they'll be alive next week."
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Signs of the deficiency can be seen in violent incidents

such as the shooting of Ian and Tyrone, growing ever
more common in American schools. But these are more
than isolated events; the heightening of the turmoil of
adolescence and troubles of childhood can be read for
the United States—a bellwether of world trends—in stat-
istics such as these:2
In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the
United States saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for vi-
olent crimes ever; teen arrests for forcible rape had
doubled; teen murder rates quadrupled, mostly due to
an increase in shootings.3 During those same two dec-
ades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did the
number of children under fourteen who are murder vic-
tims.4
More, and younger, teenage girls are getting pregnant.
As of 1993 the birthrate among girls ten to fourteen has
risen steadily for five years in a row—some call it "babies
having babies"—as has the proportion of unwanted teen
pregnancies and peer pressure to have sex. Rates of
venereal disease among teenagers have tripled over the
last three decades.5
While these figures are discouraging, if the focus is on
African-American youth, especially in the inner city,
they are utterly bleak—all the rates are higher by far,
sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled or higher. For
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example, heroin and cocaine use among white youth

climbed about 300 percent over the two decades before
the 1990s; for African-American youth it jumped to a
staggering 13 times the rate of twenty years before.6
The most common cause of disability among teen-
agers is mental illness. Symptoms of depression, wheth-
er major or minor, affect up to one third of teenagers;
for girls, the incidence of depression doubles at puberty.
The frequency of eating disorders in teenage girls has
skyrocketed.7
Finally, unless things change, the long-term prospects
for today's children marrying and having a fruitful,
stable life together are growing more dismal with each
generation. As we saw in Chapter 9, while during the
1970s and 1980s the divorce rate was around 50 per-
cent, as we entered the 1990s the rate among newlyweds
predicted that two out of three marriages of young
people would end in divorce.

AN EMOTIONAL MALAISE
These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal
miner's tunnel whose death warns of too little oxygen.
Beyond such sobering numbers, the plight of today's
children can be seen at more subtle levels, in day-to-day
problems that have not yet blossomed into outright
crises. Perhaps the most telling data of all—a direct
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barometer of dropping levels of emotional compet-

ence—are from a national sample of American children,
ages seven to sixteen, comparing their emotional condi-
tion in the mid-1970s and at the end of the 1980s.8
Based on parents' and teachers' assessments, there was
a steady worsening. No one problem stood out; all indic-
ators simply crept steadily in the wrong direction. Chil-
dren, on average, were doing more poorly in these spe-
cific ways:

• Withdrawal or social problems: preferring to be

alone; being secretive; sulking a lot; lacking energy; feel-
ing unhappy; being overly dependent
• Anxious and depressed: being lonely; having many
fears and worries; needing to be perfect; feeling un-
loved; feeling nervous or sad and depressed
• Attention or thinking problems: unable to pay atten-
tion or sit still; daydreaming; acting without thinking;
being too nervous to concentrate; doing poorly on
schoolwork; unable to get mind off thoughts
• Delinquent or aggressive: hanging around kids who
get in trouble; lying and cheating; arguing a lot; being
mean to other people; demanding attention; destroying
other people's things; disobeying at home and at school;
being stubborn and moody; talking too much; teasing a
lot; having a hot temper
 444/661

While any of these problems in isolation raises no eye-

brows, taken as a group they are barometers of a sea
change, a new kind of toxicity seeping into and poison-
ing the very experience of childhood, signifying sweep-
ing deficits in emotional competences. This emotional
malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for
children. While Americans often decry their problems as
particularly bad compared to other cultures', studies
around the world have found rates on a par with or
worse than in the United States. For example, in the
1980s teachers and parents in the Netherlands, China,
and Germany rated children at about the same level of
problems as were found for American children in 1976.
And some countries had children in worse shape than
current U.S. levels, including Australia, France, and
Thailand. But this may not remain true for long. The lar-
ger forces that propel the downward spiral in emotional
competence seem to be picking up speed in the United
States relative to many other developed nations.9
No children, rich or poor, are exempt from risk; these
problems are universal, occurring in all ethnic, racial,
and income groups. Thus while children in poverty have
the worst record on indices of emotional skills, their
rate of deterioration over the decades was no worse
than for middle-class children or for wealthy children:
all show the same steady slide. There has also been a
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corresponding threefold rise in the number of children

who have gotten psychological help (perhaps a good
sign, signaling that help is more available), as well as a
near doubling of the number of children who have
enough emotional problems that they should get such
help but have not (a bad sign)—from about 9 percent in
1976 to 18 percent in 1989.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, the eminent Cornell University
developmental psychologist who did an international
comparison of children's well-being, says: "In the ab-
sence of good support systems, external stresses have
become so great that even strong families are falling
apart. The hecticness, instability, and inconsistency of
daily family life are rampant in all segments of our soci-
ety, including the well-educated and well-to-do. What is
at stake is nothing less than the next generation, partic-
ularly males, who in growing up are especially vulner-
able to such disruptive forces as the devastating effects
of divorce, poverty, and unemployment. The status of
American children and families is as desperate as ever....
We are depriving millions of children of their compet-
ence and moral character."10
This is not just an American phenomenon but a global
one, with worldwide competition to drive down labor
costs creating economic forces that press on the family.
These are times of financially besieged families in which
 446/661

both parents work long hours, so that children are left to

their own devices or the TV baby-sits; when more chil-
dren than ever grow up in poverty; when the one-parent
family is becoming ever more commonplace; when more
infants and toddlers are left in day care so poorly run
that it amounts to neglect. All this means, even for well-
intentioned parents, the erosion of the countless small,
nourishing exchanges between parent and child that
build emotional competences.
If families no longer function effectively to put all our
children on a firm footing for life, what are we to do? A
more careful look at the mechanics of specific problems
suggests how given deficits in emotional or social com-
petences lay the foundation for grave problems—and
how well-aimed correctives or preventives could keep
more children on track.

TAMING AGGRESSION
In my elementary school the tough kid was Jimmy, a
fourth grader when I was in first grade. He was the kid
who would steal your lunch money, take your bike, slug
you as soon as talk to you. Jimmy was the classic bully,
starting fights with the least provocation, or none at all.
We all stood in awe of Jimmy—and we all stood at a dis-
tance. Everyone hated and feared Jimmy; no one would
play with him. It was as though everywhere he went on
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the playground an invisible bodyguard cleared kids out

of his way.
Kids like Jimmy are clearly troubled. But what may be
less obvious is that being so flagrantly aggressive in
childhood is a mark of emotional and other troubles to
come. Jimmy was in jail for assault by the time he
reached sixteen.
The lifelong legacy of childhood aggressiveness in kids
like Jimmy has emerged from many studies.11 As we
have seen, the family life of such aggressive children
typically includes parents who alternate neglect with
harsh and capricious punishments, a pattern that, per-
haps understandably, makes the children a bit paranoid
or combative.
Not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn
social outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what
they perceive as slights or unfairness. But the one per-
ceptual flaw that unites such children is that they per-
ceive slights where none were intended, imagining their
peers to be more hostile toward them than they actually
are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as
threatening ones—an innocent bump is seen as a ven-
detta—and to attack in return. That, of course, leads
other children to shun them, isolating them further.
Such angry, isolated children are highly sensitive to in-
justices and being treated unfairly. They typically see
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themselves as victims and can recite a list of instances

when, say, teachers blamed them for doing something
when in fact they were innocent. Another trait of such
children is that once they are in the heat of anger they
can think of only one way to react: by lashing out.
These perceptual biases can be seen at work in an ex-
periment in which bullies are paired with a more peace-
able child to watch videos. In one video, a boy drops his
books when another knocks into him, and children
standing nearby laugh; the boy who dropped the books
gets angry and tries to hit one of those who laughed.
When the boys who watched the video talk about it af-
terward, the bully always sees the boy who struck out as
justified. Even more telling, when they have to rate how
aggressive the boys were during their discussion of the
video, the bullies see the boy who knocked into the other
as more combative, and the anger of the boy who struck
out as justified.12
This jump to judgment testifies to a deep perceptual
bias in people who are unusually aggressive: they act on
the basis of the assumption of hostility or threat, paying
too little attention to what is actually going on. Once
they assume threat, they leapfrog to action. For in-
stance, if an aggressive boy is playing checkers with an-
other who moves a piece out of turn, he'll interpret the
move as "cheating" without pausing to find out if it had
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been an innocent mistake. His presumption is of

malevolence rather than innocence; his reaction is auto-
matic hostility. Along with the knee-jerk perception of a
hostile act is entwined an equally automatic aggression;
instead of, say, pointing out to the other boy that he
made a mistake, he will jump to accusation, yelling, hit-
ting. And the more such children do this, the more auto-
matic aggression becomes for them, and the more the
repertoire of alternatives—politeness, joking—shrinks.
Such children are emotionally vulnerable in the sense
that they have a low threshold for upset, getting peeved
more often by more things; once upset, their thinking is
muddled, so that they see benign acts as hostile and fall
back on their overlearned habit of striking out.13
These perceptual biases toward hostility are already in
place by the early grades. While most children, and es-
pecially boys, are rambunctious in kindergarten and
first grade, the more aggressive children fail to learn a
modicum of self-control by second grade. Where other
children have started to learn negotiation and com-
promise for playground disagreements, the bullies rely
more and more on force and bluster. They pay a social
price: within two or three hours of a first playground
contact with a bully, other children already say they dis-
like him.14
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But studies that have followed children from the

preschool years into the teenage ones find that up to half
of first graders who are disruptive, unable to get along
with other kids, disobedient with their parents, and res-
istant with teachers will become delinquents in their
teen years.15 Of course, not all such aggressive children
are on the trajectory that leads to violence and criminal-
ity in later life. But of all children, these are the ones
most at risk for eventually committing violent crimes.
The drift toward crime shows up surprisingly early in
these children's lives. When children in a Montreal
kindergarten were rated for hostility and trouble mak-
ing, those highest at age five already had far greater
evidence of delinquency just five to eight years later, in
their early teens. They were about three times as likely
as other children to admit they had beaten up someone
who had not done anything to them, to have shoplifted,
to have used a weapon in a fight, to have broken into or
stolen parts from a car, and to have been drunk—and all
this before they reached fourteen years of age.16
The prototypical pathway to violence and criminality
starts with children who are aggressive and hard to
handle in first and second grade.17 Typically, from the
earliest school years their poor impulse control also con-
tributes to their being poor students, seen as, and seeing
themselves as, "dumb"—a judgment confirmed by their
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being shunted to special-education classes (and though

such children may have a higher rate of "hyperactivity"
or learning disorders, by no means all do). Children who
on entering school already have learned in their homes a
"coercive" style—that is, bullying—are also written off by
their teachers, who have to spend too much time keep-
ing the children in line. The defiance of classroom rules
that comes naturally to these children means that they
waste time that would otherwise be used in learning;
their destined academic failure is usually obvious by
about third grade. While boys on a trajectory toward de-
linquency tend to have lower IQ scores than their peers,
their impulsivity is more directly at cause: impulsivity in
ten-year-old boys is almost three times as powerful a
predictor of their later delinquency as is their IQ.18
By fourth or fifth grade these kids—by now seen as
bullies or just "difficult"—are rejected by their peers and
are unable to make friends easily, if at all, and have be-
come academic failures. Feeling themselves friendless,
they gravitate to other social outcasts. Between grade
four and grade nine they commit themselves to their
outcast group and a life of defying the law: they show a
five fold increase in their truancy, drinking, and drug
taking, with the biggest boost between seventh and
eighth grade. By the middle-school years, they are
joined by another type of "late starters," who are
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attracted to their defiant style; these late starters are of-

ten youngsters who are completely unsupervised at
home and have started roaming the streets on their own
in grade school. In the high-school years this outcast
group typically drops out of school in a drift toward de-
linquency, engaging in petty crimes such as shoplifting,
theft, and drug dealing.
(A telling difference emerges in this trajectory
between boys and girls. A study of fourth-grade girls
who were "bad"—getting in trouble with teachers and
breaking rules, but not unpopular with their
peers—found that 40 percent had a child by the time
they finished the high-school years.19 That was three
times the average pregnancy rate for girls in their
schools. In other words, antisocial teenage girls don't get
violent—they get pregnant.)
There is, of course, no single pathway to violence and
criminality, and many other factors can put a child at
risk: being born in a high-crime neighborhood where
they are exposed to more temptations to crime and viol-
ence, coming from a family under high levels of stress,
or living in poverty. But none of these factors makes a
life of violent crime inevitable. All things being equal,
the psychological forces at work in aggressive children
greatly intensify the likelihood of their ending up as vi-
olent criminals. As Gerald Patterson, a psychologist who
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has closely followed the careers of hundreds of boys into

young adulthood, puts it, "the anti-social acts of a five-
year-old may be prototypic of the acts of the delinquent
adolescent."20

SCHOOL FOR BULLIES

The bent of mind that aggressive children take with
them through life is one that almost ensures they will
end up in trouble. A study of juvenile offenders con-
victed of violent crimes and of aggressive high-school
students found a common mind-set: When they have
difficulties with someone, they immediately see the oth-
er person in an antagonistic way, jumping to conclu-
sions about the other person's hostility toward them
without seeking any further information or trying to
think of a peaceful way to settle their differences. At the
same time, the negative consequence of a violent solu-
tion—a fight, typically—never crosses their mind. Their
aggressive bent is justified in their mind by beliefs like,
"It's okay to hit someone if you just go crazy from an-
ger"; "If you back down from a fight everyone will think
you're a coward"; and "People who get beaten up badly
don't really suffer that much."21
But timely help can change these attitudes and stop a
child's trajectory toward delinquency; several experi-
mental programs have had some success in helping such
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aggressive kids learn to control their antisocial bent be-

fore it leads to more serious trouble. One, at Duke
University, worked with anger-ridden grade-school
troublemakers in training sessions for forty minutes
twice a week for six to twelve weeks. The boys were
taught, for example, to see how some of the social cues
they interpreted as hostile were in fact neutral or
friendly. They learned to take the perspective of other
children, to get a sense of how they were being seen and
of what other children might be thinking and feeling in
the encounters that had gotten them so angry. They also
got direct training in anger control through enacting
scenes, such as being teased, that might lead them to
lose their temper. One of the key skills for anger control
was monitoring their feelings—becoming aware of their
body's sensations, such as flushing or muscle tensing, as
they were getting angry, and to take those feelings as a
cue to stop and consider what to do next rather than
strike out impulsively.
John Lochman, a Duke University psychologist who
was one of the designers of the program, told me,
"They'll discuss situations they've been in recently, like
being bumped in the hallway when they think it was on
purpose. The kids will talk about how they might have
handled it. One kid said, for example, that he just stared
at the boy who bumped him and told him not to do it
 455/661

again, and walked away. That put him in the position of

exerting some control and keeping his self-esteem,
without starting a fight."
This appeals; many such aggressive boys are unhappy
that they lose their temper so easily, and so are receptive
to learning to control it. In the heat of the moment, of
course, such cool-headed responses as walking away or
counting to ten so the impulse to hit will pass before re-
acting are not automatic; the boys practice such altern-
atives in role-playing scenes such as getting on a bus
where other kids are taunting them. That way they can
try out friendly responses that preserve their dignity
while giving them an alternative to hitting, crying, or
running away in shame.
Three years after the boys had been through the train-
ing, Lochman compared these boys with others who had
been just as aggressive, but did not have the benefit of
the anger-control sessions. He found that, in adoles-
cence, the boys who graduated from the program were
much less disruptive in class, had more positive feelings
about themselves, and were less likely to drink or take
drugs. And the longer they had been in the program, the
less aggressive they were as teenagers.

PREVENTING DEPRESSION
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Dana, sixteen, had always seemed to get along. But

now, suddenly, she just could not relate with other
girls, and, more troubling for her, she could not find
a way to hold on to boyfriends, even though she
slept with them. Morose and constantly fatigued,
Dana lost interest in eating, in having fun of any
kind; she said she felt hopeless and helpless to do
anything to escape her mood, and was thinking of
suicide.
The drop into depression had been triggered by
her most recent breakup. She said she didn't know
how to go out with a boy without getting sexually
involved right away—even if she was uncomfortable
about it—and that she did not know how to end a
relationship even if it was unsatisfying. She went to
bed with boys, she said, when all she really wanted
to do was get to know them better.
She had just moved to a new school, and felt shy
and anxious about making friends with girls there.
For instance, she held back from starting conversa-
tions, only talking once someone spoke to her. She
felt unable to let them know what she was like, and
didn't even feel she knew what to say after "Hello,
how are you?"22

Dana went for therapy to an experimental program for

depressed adolescents at Columbia University. Her
 457/661

treatment focused on helping her learn how to handle

her relationships better: how to develop a friendship,
how to feel more confident with other teens, how to as-
sert limits on sexual closeness, how to be intimate, how
to express her feelings. In essence, it was a remedial tu-
torial in some of the most basic emotional skills. And it
worked; her depression lifted.
Particularly in young people, problems in relation-
ships are a trigger for depression. The difficulty is as of-
ten in children's relationships with their parents as it is
with their peers. Depressed children and teenagers are
frequently unable or unwilling to talk about their sad-
ness. They seem unable to label their feelings accurately,
showing instead a sullen irritability, impatience, cranki-
ness, and anger—especially toward their parents. This,
in turn, makes it harder for their parents to offer the
emotional support and guidance the depressed child ac-
tually needs, setting in motion a downward spiral that
typically ends in constant arguments and alienation.
A new look at the causes of depression in the young
pinpoints deficits in two areas of emotional competence:
relationship skills, on the one hand, and a depression-
promoting way of interpreting setbacks, on the other.
While some of the tendency to depression almost cer-
tainly is due to genetic destiny, some of that tendency
seems due to reversible, pessimistic habits of thought
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that predispose children to react to life's small de-

feats—a bad grade, arguments with parents, a social re-
jection—by becoming depressed. And there is evidence
to suggest that the predisposition to depression,
whatever its basis, is becoming ever more widespread
among the young.

A COST OF MODERNITY: RISING

RATES OF DEPRESSION
These millennial years are ushering in an Age of Melan-
choly, just as the twentieth century became an Age of
Anxiety. International data show what seems to be a
modern epidemic of depression, one that is spreading
side by side with the adoption throughout the world of
modern ways. Each successive generation worldwide
since the opening of the century has lived with a higher
risk than their parents of suffering a major depres-
sion—not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, de-
jection, and self-pity, and an overwhelming hopeless-
ness—over the course of life.23 And those episodes are
beginning at earlier and earlier ages. Childhood depres-
sion, once virtually unknown (or, at least, unrecognized)
is emerging as a fixture of the modern scene.
Although the likelihood of becoming depressed rises
with age, the greatest increases are among young
people. For those born after 1955 the likelihood they will
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suffer a major depression at some point in life is, in

many countries, three times or more greater than for
their grandparents. Among Americans born before
1905, the rate of those having a major depression over a
lifetime was just 1 percent; for those born since 1955, by
age twenty-four about 6 percent had become depressed.
For those born between 1945 and 1954, the chances of
having had a major depression before age thirty-four are
ten times greater than for those born between 1905 and
1914.24 And for each generation the onset of a person's
first episode of depression has tended to occur at an
ever-earlier age.
A worldwide study of more than thirty-nine thousand
people found the same trend in Puerto Rico, Canada,
Italy, Germany, France, Taiwan, Lebanon, and New Zea-
land. In Beirut, the rise of depression tracked political
events closely, the upward trends rocketing during peri-
ods of civil war. In Germany, for those born before 1914
the rate of depression by age thirty-five is 4 percent; for
those born in the decade before 1944 it is 14 percent at
age thirty-five. Worldwide, generations that came of age
during politically troubled times had higher rates of de-
pression, though the overall upward trend holds apart
from any political events.
The lowering into childhood of the age when people
first experience depression also seems to hold
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worldwide. When I asked experts to hazard a guess as to

why, there were several theories.
Dr. Frederick Goodwin, then director of the National
Institute of Mental Health, speculated, "There's been a
tremendous erosion of the nuclear family—a doubling of
the divorce rate, a drop in parents' time available to chil-
dren, and an increase in mobility. You don't grow up
knowing your extended family much anymore. The
losses of these stable sources of self-identification mean
a greater susceptibility to depression."
Dr. David Kupfer, chairman of psychiatry at the
University of Pittsburgh medical school, pointed to an-
other trend: "With the spread of industrialization after
World War II, in a sense nobody was home anymore. In
more and more families there has been growing parental
indifference to children's needs as they grow up. This is
not a direct cause of depression, but it sets up a vulner-
ability. Early emotional stressors may affect neuron de-
velopment, which can lead to a depression when you are
under great stress even decades later."
Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psy-
chologist, proposed: "For the last thirty or forty years
we've seen the ascendance of individualism and a wan-
ing of larger beliefs in religion, and in supports from the
community and extended family. That means a loss of
resources that can buffer you against setbacks and
 461/661

failures. To the extent you see a failure as something

that is lasting and which you magnify to taint everything
in your life, you are prone to let a momentary defeat be-
come a lasting source of hopelessness. But if you have a
larger perspective, like a belief in God and an afterlife,
and you lose your job, it's just a temporary defeat."
Whatever the cause, depression in the young is a
pressing problem. In the United States, estimates vary
widely for how many children and teens are depressed
in any given year, as opposed to vulnerability over their
lifetime. Some epidemiological studies using strict cri-
teria—the official diagnostic symptoms for depres-
sion—have found that for boys and girls between ten
and thirteen the rate of major depression over the
course of a year is as high as 8 or 9 percent, though oth-
er studies place it at about half that rate (and some as
low as about 2 percent). At puberty, some data suggest,
the rate nearly doubles for girls; up to 16 percent of girls
between fourteen and sixteen suffer a bout of depres-
sion, while the rate is unchanged for boys.25

THE COURSE OF DEPRESSION IN THE

YOUNG
That depression should not just be treated, but preven-
ted, in children is clear from an alarming discovery:
Even mild episodes of depression in a child can augur
 462/661
26
more severe episodes later in life. This challenges the
old assumption that depression in childhood does not
matter in the long run, since children supposedly "grow
out of it." Of course, every child gets sad from time to
time; childhood and adolescence are, like adulthood,
times of occasional disappointments and losses large
and small with the attendant grief. The need for preven-
tion is not for these times, but for those children for
whom sadness spirals downward into a gloom that
leaves them despairing, irritable, and withdrawn—a far
more severe melancholy.
Among children whose depression was severe enough
that they were referred for treatment, three quarters had
a subsequent episode of severe depression, according to
data collected by Maria Kovacs, a psychologist at
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh.27
.Kovacs studied children diagnosed with depression
when they were as young as eight years old, assessing
them every few years until some were as old as twenty-
four.
The children with major depression had episodes last-
ing about eleven months on average, though in one in
six of them it persisted for as long as eighteen months.
Mild depression, which began as early as age five in
some children, was less incapacitating but lasted far
longer—an average of about four years. And, Kovacs
 463/661

found, children who have a minor depression are more

likely to have it intensify into major depression—a so-
called double depression. Those who develop double de-
pression are much more prone to suffer recurring epis-
odes as the years go on. As children who had an episode
of depression grew into adolescence and early adult-
hood, they suffered from depression or manic-depress-
ive disorder, on average, one year in three.
The cost to children goes beyond the suffering caused
by depression itself. Kovacs told me, "Kids learn social
skills in their peer relations—for example, what to do if
you want something and aren't getting it, seeing how
other children handle the situation and then trying it
yourself. But depressed kids are likely to be among the
neglected children in a school, the ones other kids don't
play with much."28
The sullenness or sadness such children feel leads
them to avoid initiating social contacts, or to look away
when another child is trying to engage them—a social
signal the other child only takes as a rebuff; the end res-
ult is that depressed children end up rejected or neg-
lected on the playground. This lacuna in their interper-
sonal experience means they miss out on what they
would normally learn in the rough-and-tumble of play,
and so can leave them social and emotional laggards,
with much catching up to do after the depression lifts.29
 464/661

Indeed, when depressed children have been compared

to those without depression, they have been found to be
more socially inept, to have fewer friends, to be less pre-
ferred than others as playmates, to be less liked, and to
have more troubled relationships with other children.
Another cost to these children is doing poorly in
school; depression interferes with their memory and
concentration, making it harder to pay attention in class
and retain what is taught. A child who feels no joy in
anything will find it hard to marshal the energy to mas-
ter challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in
learning. Understandably, the longer children in
Kovacs's study were depressed, the more their grades
dropped and the poorer they did on achievement tests,
so that they were more likely to be held back in school.
In fact, there was a direct correlation between the length
of time a child had been depressed and his grade-point
average, with a steady plummet over the course of the
episode. All of this academic rough going, of course,
compounds the depression. As Kovacs observes, "Ima-
gine you're already feeling depressed, and you start
flunking out of school, and you sit home by yourself in-
stead of playing with other kids."

DEPRESSIONOGENIC WAYS OF
THOUGHT
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Just as with adults, pessimistic ways of interpreting

life's defeats seem to feed the sense of helplessness and
hopelessness at the heart of children's depression. That
people who are already depressed think in these ways
has long been known. What has only recently emerged,
though, is that children who are most prone to melan-
choly tend toward this pessimistic outlook before they
become depressed. This insight suggests a window of
opportunity for inoculating them against depression be-
fore it strikes.
One line of evidence comes from studies of children's
beliefs about their own ability to control what happens
in their lives—for example, being able to change things
for the better. This is assessed by children's ratings of
themselves in such terms as "When I have problems at
home I'm better than most kids at helping to solve the
problems" and "When I work hard I get good grades."
Children who say none of these positive descriptions fits
them have little sense that they can do anything to
change things; this sense of helplessness is highest in
those children who are most depressed.30
A telling study looked at fifth and sixth graders in the
few days after they received report cards. As we all re-
member, report cards are one of the greatest sources of
elation and despair in childhood. But researchers find a
marked consequence in how children assess their role
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when they get a worse grade than they expected. Those

who see a bad grade as due to some personal flaw ("I'm
stupid") feel more depressed than those who explain it
away in terms of something they could change ("If I
work harder on my math homework I'll get a better
grade").31
Researchers identified a group of third, fourth, and
fifth graders whom classmates had rejected, and tracked
which ones continued to be social outcasts in their new
classes the following year. How the children explained
the rejection to themselves seemed crucial to whether
they became depressed. Those who saw their rejection
as due to some flaw in themselves grew more depressed.
But the optimists, who felt that they could do something
to change things for the better, were not especially de-
pressed despite the continuing rejection.32 And in a
study of children making the notoriously stressful trans-
ition to seventh grade, those who had the pessimistic at-
titude responded to high levels of hassles at school and
to any additional stress at home by becoming de-
pressed.33
The most direct evidence that a pessimistic outlook
makes children highly susceptible to depression comes
from a five-year study of children beginning when they
were in third grade.34 Among the younger children, the
strongest predictor that they would become depressed
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was a pessimistic outlook coupled with a major blow

such as parents divorcing or a death in the family, which
left the child upset, unsettled, and, presumably, with
parents less able to offer a nurturing buffer. As the chil-
dren grew through the elementary-school years, there
was a telling shift in their thinking about the good and
bad events of their lives, with the children increasingly
ascribing them to their own traits: "I'm getting good
grades because I'm smart"; "I don't have many friends
because I'm no fun." This shift seems to set in gradually
over the third to fifth grades. As this happens those chil-
dren who develop a pessimistic outlook—attributing the
setbacks in their lives to some dire flaw in them-
selves—begin to fall prey to depressed moods in reaction
to setbacks. What's more, the experience of depression
itself seems to reinforce these pessimistic ways of think-
ing, so that even after the depression lifts, the child is
left with what amounts to an emotional scar, a set of
convictions fed by the depression and solidified in the
mind: that he can't do well in school, is unlikable, and
can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods.
These fixed ideas can make the child all the more vul-
nerable to another depression down the road.

SHORT-CIRCUITING DEPRESSION
 468/661

The good news: there is every sign that teaching chil-

dren more productive ways of looking at their diffi-
culties lowers their risk of depression.* In a study of one
Oregon high school, about one in four students had
what psychologists call a "low-level depression," not
severe enough to say it was beyond ordinary unhappi-
ness as yet.35 Some may have been in the early weeks or
months of what was to become a depression.
In a special after-school class seventy-five of the
mildly depressed students learned to challenge the
thinking patterns associated with depression, to become
more adept at making friends, to get along better with
their parents, and to engage in more social activities
they found pleasant. By the end of the eight-week pro-
gram, 55 percent of the students had recovered from
their mild depression, while only about a quarter of
equally depressed students who were not in the program
had begun to pull out of their depression. A year later a
quarter of those in the comparison group had gone on to
fall into a major depression, as opposed to only 14 per-
cent of students in the depression-prevention program.
Though they lasted just eight sessions, the classes
seemed to have cut the risk of depression in half.36
Similarly promising findings came from a special
once-a-week class given to ten-to thirteen-year-old
youngsters at odds with their parents and showing some
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signs of depression. In after-school sessions they

learned some basic emotional skills, including handling
disagreements, thinking before acting, and, perhaps
most important, challenging the pessimistic beliefs as-
sociated with depression—for example, resolving to
study harder after doing poorly on an exam instead of
thinking, "I'm just not smart enough."
"What a child learns in these classes is that moods like
anxiety, sadness, and anger don't just descend on you
without your having any control over them, but that you
can change the way you feel by what you think," points
out psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the developers
of the twelve-week program. Because disputing the de-
pressing thoughts vanquishes the gathering mood of
gloom, Seligman added, "it's an instant reinforcer that
becomes a habit."
Again the special sessions lowered depression rates by
one half—and did so as long as two years later. A year
after the classes ended, just 8 percent of those who par-
ticipated scored at a moderate-to-severe level on a test
of depression, versus 29 percent of children in a com-
parison group. And after two years, about 20 percent of
those in the course were showing some signs of at least
mild depression, compared to 44 percent of those in the
comparison group.
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Learning these emotional skills at the cusp of adoles-

cence may be especially helpful. Seligman observes,
"These kids seem to be better at handling the routine
teenage agonies of rejection. They seem to have learned
this at a crucial window for risk of depression, just as
they enter the teen years. And the lesson seems to per-
sist and grow a bit stronger over the course of the years
after they learn it, suggesting the kids are actually using
it in their day-to-day lives."
Other experts on childhood depression applaud the
new programs. "If you want to make a real difference for
psychiatric illness like depression, you have to do
something before the kids get sick in the first place," Ko-
vacs commented. "The real solution is a psychological
inoculation."

EATING DISORDERS
During my days as a graduate student in clinical psycho-
logy in the late 1960s, I knew two women who suffered
from eating disorders, though I realized this only after
many years had passed. One was a brilliant graduate
student in mathematics at Harvard, a friend from my
undergraduate days; the other was on the staff at M.I.T.
The mathematician, though skeletally thin, simply could
not bring herself to eat; food, she said, repulsed her. The
librarian had an ample figure and was given to bingeing
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on ice cream, Sara Lee carrot cake, and other desserts;

then—as she once confided with some embarrass-
ment—she would secretly go off to the bathroom and
make herself vomit. Today the mathematician would be
diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, the librarian with
bulimia.
In those years there were no such labels. Clinicians
were just beginning to comment on the problem; Hilda
Bruch, the pioneer in this movement, published her
seminal article on eating disorders in 1969.37 Bruch,
puzzled by women who were starving themselves to
death, proposed that one of the several underlying
causes lay in an inability to label and respond appropri-
ately to bodily urges—notably, of course, hunger. Since
then the clinical literature on eating disorders has
mushroomed, with a multitude of hypotheses about the
causes, ranging from ever-younger girls feeling com-
pelled to compete with unattainably high standards of
female beauty, to intrusive mothers who enmesh their
daughters in a controlling web of guilt and blame.
Most of these hypotheses suffered from one great
drawback: they were extrapolations from observations
made during therapy. Far more desirable, from a sci-
entific viewpoint, are studies of large groups of people
over a period of several years, to see who among them
eventually comes down with the problem. That kind of
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study allows a clean comparison that can tell, for ex-

ample, if having controlling parents predisposes a girl to
eating disorders. Beyond that, it can identify the cluster
of conditions that leads to the problem, and distinguish
them from conditions that might seem to be a cause, but
which actually are found as often in people without the
problem as in those who come for treatment.
When just such a study was done with more than nine
hundred girls in the seventh through tenth grades, emo-
tional deficits—particularly a failure to tell distressing
feelings from one another and to control them—were
found to be key among the factors leading to eating dis-
orders.38 Even by tenth grade, there were sixty-one girls
in this affluent, suburban Minneapolis high school who
already had serious symptoms of anorexia or bulimia.
The greater the problem, the more the girls reacted to
setbacks, difficulties, and minor annoyances with in-
tense negative feelings that they could not soothe, and
the less their awareness of what, exactly, they were feel-
ing. When these two emotional tendencies were coupled
with being highly dissatisfied with their body, then the
outcome was anorexia or bulimia. Overly controlling
parents were found not to play a prime role in causing
eating disorders. (As Bruch herself had warned, theories
based on hindsight were unlikely to be accurate; for ex-
ample, parents can easily become intensely controlling
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in response to their daughter's eating disorder, out of

desperation to help her.) Also judged irrelevant were
such popular explanations as fear of sexuality, early on-
set of puberty, and low self-esteem.
Instead, the causal chain this prospective study re-
vealed began with the effects on young girls of growing
up in a society preoccupied with unnatural thinness as a
sign of female beauty. Well in advance of adolescence,
girls are already self-conscious about their weight. One
six-year-old, for example, broke into tears when her
mother asked her to go for a swim, saying she'd look fat
in a swimsuit. In fact, says her pediatrician, who tells
the story, her weight was normal for her height.39 In one
study of 271 young teenagers, half the girls thought they
were too fat, even though the vast majority of them were
normal in weight. But the Minneapolis study showed
that an obsession with being overweight is not in and of
itself sufficient to explain why some girls go on to devel-
op eating disorders.
Some obese people are unable to tell the difference
between being scared, angry, and hungry, and so lump
all those feelings together as signifying hunger, which
leads them to overeat whenever they feel upset.40 So-
mething similar seems to be happening in these girls.
Gloria Leon, the University of Minnesota psychologist
who did the study of young girls and eating disorders,
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observed that these girls "have poor awareness of their

feelings and body signals; that was the strongest single
predictor that they would go on to develop an eating dis-
order within the next two years. Most children learn to
distinguish among their sensations, to tell if they're feel-
ing bored, angry, depressed, or hungry—it's a basic part
of emotional learning. But these girls have trouble dis-
tinguishing among their most basic feelings. They may
have a problem with their boyfriend, and not be sure
whether they're angry, or anxious, or depressed—they
just experience a diffuse emotional storm that they do
not know how to deal with effectively. Instead they learn
to make themselves feel better by eating; that can be-
come a strongly entrenched emotional habit."
But when this habit for soothing themselves interacts
with the pressures girls feel to stay thin, the way is
paved for eating disorders to develop. "At first she might
start with binge eating," Leon observes. "But to stay thin
she may turn to vomiting or laxatives, or intense physic-
al exertion to undo the weight gain from overeating.
Another avenue this struggle to handle emotional confu-
sion can take is for the girl not to eat at all—it can be a
way to feel you have at least some control over these
overwhelming feelings."
The combination of poor inner awareness and weak
social skills means that these girls, when upset by
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friends or parents, fail to act effectively to soothe either

the relationship or their own distress. Instead their up-
set triggers the eating disorder, whether it be that of
bulimia or anorexia, or simply binge eating. Effective
treatments for such girls, Leon believes, need to include
some remedial instruction in the emotional skills they
lack. "Clinicians find," she told me, "that if you address
the deficits therapy works better. These girls need to
learn to identify their feelings and learn ways to soothe
themselves or handle their relationships better, without
turning to their maladaptive eating habits to do the job."

ONLY THE LONELY: DROPOUTS

It's a grade-school drama: Ben, a fourth grader with few
friends, has just heard from his one buddy, Jason, that
they aren't going to play together this lunch peri-
od—Jason wants to play with another boy, Chad, in-
stead. Ben, crushed, hangs his head and cries. After his
sobs subside, Ben goes over to the lunch table where
Jason and Chad are eating.
"I hate your guts!" Ben yells at Jason.
"Why?" Jason asks.
"Because you lied," Ben says, his tone accusatory.
"You said this whole week that you were gonna play with
me and you lied."
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Ben then stalks off to his empty table, crying quietly.

Jason and Chad go over to him and try to talk to him,
but Ben puts his fingers in his ears, determinedly ignor-
ing them, and runs out of the lunchroom to hide behind
the school Dumpster. A group of girls who have wit-
nessed the exchange try to play a peacemaker role, find-
ing Ben and telling him that Jason is willing to play with
him too. But Ben will have none of it, and tells them to
leave him alone. He nurses his wounds, sulking and sob-
bing, defiantly alone.41
A poignant moment, to be sure; the feeling of being
rejected and friendless is one most everyone goes
through at some point in childhood or adolescence. But
what is most telling about Ben's reaction is his failure to
respond to Jason's efforts to repair their friendship, a
stance that extends his plight when it might have ended.
Such an inability to seize key cues is typical of children
who are unpopular; as we saw in Chapter 8, socially re-
jected children typically are poor at reading emotional
and social signals; even when they do read such signals,
they may have limited repertoires for response.
Dropping out of school is a particular risk for children
who are social rejects. The dropout rate for children who
are rejected by their peers is between two and eight
times greater than for children who have friends. One
study found, for example, that about 25 percent of
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children who were unpopular in elementary school had

dropped out before completing high school, compared
to a general rate of 8 percent.42 Small wonder: imagine
spending thirty hours a week in a place where no one
likes you.
Two kinds of emotional proclivities lead children to
end up as social outcasts. As we have seen, one is the
propensity to angry outbursts and to perceive hostility
even where none is intended. The second is being timid,
anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these tem-
peramental factors, it is children who are "off—whose
awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfort-
able—who tend to be shunted aside.
One way these children are "off is in the emotional
signals they send. When grade schoolers with few
friends were asked to match an emotion such as disgust
or anger with faces that displayed a range of emotions,
they made far more mismatches than did children who
were popular. When kindergarteners were asked to ex-
plain ways they might make friends with someone or
keep from having a fight, it was the unpopular chil-
dren—the ones others shied away from playing
with—who came up with self-defeating answers ("Punch
him" for what to do when both children wanted the
same toy, for example), or vague appeals for help from a
grown-up. And when teenagers were asked to role-play
 478/661

being sad, angry, or mischievous, the more unpopular

among them gave the least convincing performances. It
is perhaps no surprise that such children come to feel
that they are helpless to do any better at making friends;
their social incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Instead of learning new approaches to mak-
ing friends, they simply keep doing the same things that
have not worked for them in the past, or come up with
even more inept responses.43
In the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key
emotional criteria: they are not seen as fun to be with,
and they don't know how to make another child feel
good. Observations of unpopular children at play show,
for example, that they are much more likely than others
to cheat, sulk, quit when losing, or show off and brag
about winning. Of course, most children want to win at
a game—but win or lose, most children are able to con-
tain their emotional reaction so that it does not under-
mine the relationship with the friend they play games
with.
While children who are socially tone-deaf—who con-
tinually have trouble reading and responding to emo-
tions—end up as social isolates, this does not apply, of
course, to children who go through a temporary period
of feeling left out. But for those who are continually ex-
cluded and rejected, their painful outcast status clings to
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them as they continue their school years. The con-

sequences of ending up at the social margins are poten-
tially great as a child continues on into adulthood. For
one, it is in the cauldron of close friendships and the tu-
mult of play that children refine the social and emotion-
al skills that they will bring to relationships later in life.
Children who are excluded from this realm of learning
are, inevitably, disadvantaged.
Understandably, those who are rejected report great
anxiety and many worries, as well as being depressed
and lonely. In fact, how popular a child was in third
grade has been shown to be a better predictor of mental-
health problems at age eighteen than anything
else—teachers' and nurses' ratings, school performance
and IQ, even scores on psychological tests.44 And, as we
have seen, in later stages of life people who have few
friends and are chronically lonely are at greater risk for
medical diseases and an early death.
As psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out, we
learn how to negotiate intimate relations—to work out
differences and share our deepest feelings—in our first
close friendships with same-sex chums. But children
who are socially rejected are only half as likely as their
peers to have a best friend during the crucial years of
elementary school, and so miss out on one of the essen-
tial chances for emotional growth.45 One friend can
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make the difference—even when all others turn their

backs (and even when that friendship is not all that
solid).

COACHING FOR FRIENDSHIP

There is hope for rejected children, despite their inept-
ness. Steven Asher, a University of Illinois psychologist,
has designed a series of "friendship coaching" sessions
for unpopular children that has shown some success.46
Identifying third and fourth graders who were the least
liked in their classes, Asher gave them six sessions in
how to "make playing games more fun" through being
"friendly, fun, and nice." To avoid stigma, the children
were told that they were acting as "consultants" to the
coach, who was trying to learn what kinds of things
make it more enjoyable to play games.
The children were coached to act in ways Asher had
found typical of more popular children. For example,
they were encouraged to think of alternative suggestions
and compromises (rather than fighting) if they disagree
about the rules; to remember to talk with and ask ques-
tions about the other child while they play; to listen and
look at the other child to see how he's doing; to say
something nice when the other person does well; to
smile and offer help or suggestions and encouragement.
The children also tried out these basic social amenities
 481/661

while playing games such as Pick-up Sticks with a class-

mate, and were coached afterward on how well they did.
This minicourse in getting along had a remarkable ef-
fect: a year later the children who were coached—all of
whom were selected because they were the least-liked in
their class—were now solidly in the middle of classroom
popularity. None were social stars, but none were
rejects.
Similar results have been found by Stephen Nowicki,
an Emory University psychologist.47 His program trains
social outcasts to hone their ability to read and respond
appropriately to other children's feelings. The children,
for example, are videotaped while practicing expression
of feelings such as happiness and sadness, and are
coached to improve their emotional expressiveness.
They then try out their newly honed skills with a child
they want to make friends with.
Such programs have reported a 50 to 60 percent suc-
cess rate in raising the popularity of rejected children.
These programs (at least as presently designed) seem to
work best for third and fourth graders rather than chil-
dren in higher grades, and to be more helpful for so-
cially inept children than for highly aggressive ones. But
that is all a matter for fine-tuning; the hopeful sign is
that many or most rejected children can be brought into
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the circle of friendship with some basic emotional

coaching.

DRINKING AND DRUGS: ADDICTION

AS SELF-MEDICATION
Students at the local campus call it drinking to black
—bingeing on beer to the point of passing out. One of
the techniques: attach a funnel to a garden hose, so that
a can of beer can be downed in about ten seconds. The
method is not an isolated oddity. One survey found that
two fifths of male college students down seven or more
drinks at a time, while 11 percent call themselves "heavy
drinkers." Another term, of course, might be
"alcoholics."48 About half of college men and almost 40
percent of women have at least two binge-drinking epis-
odes in a month.49
While in the United States use of most drugs among
young people generally tapered off in the 1980s, there is
a steady trend toward more alcohol use at ever-younger
ages. A 1993 survey found that 35 percent of college wo-
men said they drank to get drunk, while just 10 percent
did so in 1977; overall, one in three students drinks to
get drunk. That poses other risks: 90 percent of all rapes
reported on college campuses happened when either the
assailant or the victim—or both—had been drinking.50
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Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death

among young people between fifteen and twenty-four.51
Experimentation with drugs and alcohol might seem a
rite of passage for adolescents, but this first taste can
have long-lasting results for some. For most alcoholics
and drug abusers, the beginnings of addiction can be
traced to their teen years, though few of those who so
experiment end up as alcoholics or drug abusers. By the
time students leave high school, over 90 percent have
tried alcohol, yet only about 14 percent eventually be-
come alcoholics; of the millions of Americans who ex-
perimented with cocaine, fewer than 5 percent became
addicted.52 What makes the difference?
To be sure, those living in high-crime neighborhoods,
where crack is sold on the corner and the drug dealer is
the most prominent local model of economic success,
are most at risk for substance abuse. Some may end up
addicted through becoming small-time dealers them-
selves, others simply because of the easy access or a peer
culture that glamorizes drugs—a factor that heightens
the risk of drug use in any neighborhood, even (and per-
haps especially) the most well-off. But still the question
remains, of the pool of those exposed to these lures and
pressures, and who go on to experiment, which ones are
most likely to end up with a lasting habit?
 484/661

One current scientific theory is that those who stay

with the habit, becoming increasingly dependent on al-
cohol or drugs, are using these substances as a medica-
tion of sorts, a way to soothe feelings of anxiety, anger,
or depression. Through their early experimentation they
hit upon a chemical fix, a way to calm the feelings of
anxiety or melancholy that have tormented them. Thus
of several hundred seventh-and eighth-grade students
tracked for two years, it was those who reported higher
levels of emotional distress who subsequently went on
to have the highest rates of substance abuse.53 This may
explain why so many young people are able to experi-
ment with drugs and drinking without becoming ad-
dicted, while others become dependent almost from the
start: those most vulnerable to addiction seem to find in
the drug or alcohol an instant way to soothe emotions
that have distressed them for years.
As Ralph Tarter, a psychologist at the Western Psychi-
atric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, put it, "For
people who are biologically predisposed, the first drink
or dose of a drug is immensely reinforcing, in a way oth-
ers just don't experience. Many recovering drug abusers
tell me, 'The moment I took my first drug, I felt normal
for the first time.' It stabilizes them physiologically, at
least in the short term."54 That, of course, is the devil's
 485/661

bargain of addiction: a short-term good feeling in ex-

change for the steady meltdown of one's life.
Certain emotional patterns seem to make people more
likely to find emotional relief in one substance rather
than another. For example, there are two emotional
pathways to alcoholism. One starts with someone who
was highly-strung and anxious in childhood, who typic-
ally discovers as a teenager that alcohol will calm the
anxiety. Very often they are children—usually sons—of
alcoholics who themselves have turned to alcohol to
soothe their nerves. One biological marker for this pat-
tern is undersecretion of GABA, a neurotransmitter that
regulates anxiety—too little GABA is experienced as a
high level of tension. One study found that sons of alco-
holic fathers had low levels of GABA and were highly
anxious, but when they drank alcohol, their GABA levels
rose as their anxiety fell.55 These sons of alcoholics drink
to ease their tension, finding in alcohol a relaxation that
they could not seem to get otherwise. Such people may
be vulnerable to abusing sedatives as well as alcohol for
the same anxiety-reduction effect.
A neuropsychological study of sons of alcoholics who
at age twelve showed signs of anxiety such as a
heightened heart rate in response to stress, as well as
impulsivity, found the boys also had poor frontal lobe
functioning.56 Thus the brain areas that might have
 486/661

helped ease their anxiety or control their impulsiveness

brought them less help than in other boys. And since the
pre-frontal lobes also handle working memory—which
holds in mind the consequences of various routes of ac-
tion while making a decision—their deficit could support
a slide into alcoholism by helping them ignore the long-
term drawbacks of drinking, even as they found an im-
mediate sedation from anxiety through alcohol.
This craving for calm seems to be an emotional mark-
er of a genetic susceptibility to alcoholism. A study of
thirteen hundred relatives of alcoholics found that the
children of alcoholics who were most at risk for becom-
ing alcoholics themselves were those who reported hav-
ing chronically high levels of anxiety. Indeed, the re-
searchers concluded that alcoholism develops in such
people as "self-medication of anxiety symptoms."57
A second emotional pathway to alcoholism comes
from a high level of agitation, impulsivity, and boredom.
This pattern shows up in infancy as being restless,
cranky, and hard to handle, in grade school as having
the "fidgets," hyperactivity, and getting into trouble, a
propensity that, as we have seen, can push such children
to seek out friends on the fringe—sometimes leading to
a criminal career or the diagnosis of "antisocial person-
ality disorder." Such people (and they are mainly men)
have as their main emotional complaint agitation; their
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main weakness is unrestrained impulsivity; their usual

reaction to boredom—which they often feel—is an im-
pulsive search for risk and excitement. As adults, people
with this pattern (which may be tied to deficiencies in
two other neurotransmitters, serotonin and MAO) find
that alcohol can soothe their agitation. And the fact that
they can't stand monotony makes them ready to try any-
thing; coupled with their general impulsivity, it makes
them prone to abusing an almost random list of drugs
besides alcohol.58
While depression can drive some to drink, the meta-
bolic effects of alcohol often simply worsen the depres-
sion after a short lift. People who turn to alcohol as an
emotional palliative do so much more often to calm
anxiety than for depression; an entirely different class of
drugs soothes the feelings of people who are de-
pressed—at least temporarily. Feeling chronically un-
happy puts people at greater risk for addiction to stimu-
lants such as cocaine, which provide a direct antidote to
feeling depressed. One study found that more than half
the patients being treated at a clinic for cocaine addic-
tion would have been diagnosed with severe depression
before they started their habit, and the deeper the pre-
ceding depression, the stronger the habit.59
Chronic anger may lead to still another kind of sus-
ceptibility. In a study of four hundred patients being
 488/661

treated for addiction to heroin and other opioids, the

most striking emotional pattern was a lifelong difficulty
handling anger and a quickness to rage. Some of the pa-
tients themselves said that with opiates they finally felt
normal and relaxed.60
Though the predisposition to substance abuse may, in
many cases, be brain-based, the feelings that drive
people to "self-medicate" themselves through drink or
drugs can be handled without recourse to medication, as
Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs
have demonstrated for decades. Acquiring the ability to
handle those feelings—soothing anxiety, lifting depres-
sion, calming rage—removes the impetus to use drugs or
alcohol in the first place. These basic emotional skills
are taught remedially in treatment programs for drug
and alcohol abuse. It would be far better, of course, if
they were learned early in life, well before the habit be-
came established.

NO MORE WARS: A FINAL COMMON

PREVENTIVE PATHWAY
Over the last decade or so "wars" have been proclaimed,
in turn, on teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and
most recently violence. The trouble with such cam-
paigns, though, is that they come too late, after the tar-
geted problem has reached epidemic proportions and
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taken firm root in the lives of the young. They are crisis
intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by
sending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving
an inoculation that would ward off the disease in the
first place. Instead of more such "wars," what we need is
to follow the logic of prevention, offering our children
the skills for facing life that will increase their chances of
avoiding any and all of these fates.61
My focus on the place of emotional and social deficits
is not to deny the role of other risk factors, such as
growing up in a fragmented, abusive, or chaotic family,
or in an impoverished, crime-and drug-ridden neigh-
borhood. Poverty itself delivers emotional blows to chil-
dren: poorer children at age five are already more fear-
ful, anxious, and sad than their better-off peers, and
have more behavior problems such as frequent tantrums
and destroying things, a trend that continues through
the teen years. The press of poverty corrodes family life
too: there tend to be fewer expressions of parental
warmth, more depression in mothers (who are often
single and jobless), and a greater reliance on harsh pun-
ishments such as yelling, hitting, and physical threats.62
But there is a role that emotional competence plays
over and above family and economic forces—it may be
decisive in determining the extent to which any given
child or teenager is undone by these hardships or finds a
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core of resilience to survive them. Long-term studies of

hundreds of children brought up in poverty, in abusive
families, or by a parent with severe mental illness show
that those who are resilient even in the face of the most
grinding hardships tend to share key emotional skills.63
These include a winning sociability that draws people to
them, self-confidence, an optimistic persistence in the
face of failure and frustration, the ability to recover
quickly from upsets, and an easygoing nature.
But the vast majority of children face such difficulties
without these advantages. Of course, many of these
skills are innate, the luck of genes—but even qualities of
temperament can change for the better, as we saw in
Chapter 14. One line of intervention, of course, is polit-
ical and economic, alleviating the poverty and other so-
cial conditions that breed these problems. But apart
from these tactics (which seem to move ever lower on
the social agenda) there is much that can be offered to
children to help them grapple better with such debilitat-
ing hardships.
Take the case of emotional disorders, afflictions that
about one in two Americans experiences over the course
of life. A study of a representative sample of 8,098
Americans found that 48 percent suffered from at least
one psychiatric problem during their lifetime.64 Most
severely affected were the 14 percent of people who
 491/661

developed three or more psychiatric problems at once.

This group was the most troubled, accounting for 60
percent of all psychiatric disorders occurring at any one
time, and 90 percent of the most severe and disabling
ones. While they need intensive care now, the optimal
approach would be, wherever possible, to prevent these
problems in the first place. To be sure, not every mental
disorder can be prevented—but there are some, and per-
haps many, that can. Ronald Kessler, the University of
Michigan sociologist who did the study, told me, "We
need to intervene early in life. Take a young girl who has
a social phobia in the sixth grade, and starts drinking in
junior high school to handle her social anxieties. By her
late twenties, when she shows up in our study, she's still
fearful, has become both an alcohol and drug abuser,
and is depressed because her life is so messed up. The
big question is, what could we have done early in her life
to have headed off the whole downward spiral?"
The same holds, of course, for dropping out or viol-
ence, or most of the litany of perils faced by young
people today. Educational programs to prevent one or
another specific problem such as drug use and violence
have proliferated wildly in the last decade or so, creating
a mini-industry within the education marketplace. But
many of them—including many of the most slickly mar-
keted and most widely used—have proven to be
 492/661

ineffective. A few, to the chagrin of educators, even

seemed to increase the likelihood of the problems they
were meant to head off, particularly drug abuse and teen
sex.

Information Is Not Enough

An instructive case in point is sexual abuse of children.
As of 1993, about two hundred thousand substantiated
cases were reported annually in the United States, with
that number growing by about 10 percent per year. And
while estimates vary widely, most experts agree that
between 20 and 30 percent of girls and about half that
number of boys are victims of some form of sexual ab-
use by age seventeen (the figures rise or fall depending
on how sexual abuse is defined, among other factors).65
There is no single profile of a child who is particularly
vulnerable to sexual abuse, but most feel unprotected,
unable to resist on their own, and isolated by what has
happened to them.
With these risks in mind, many schools have begun to
offer programs to prevent sexual abuse. Most such pro-
grams are tightly focused on basic information about
sexual abuse, teaching kids, for example, to know the
difference between "good" and "bad" touching, alerting
them to the dangers, and encouraging them to tell an
adult if anything untoward happens to them. But a
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national survey of two thousand children found that this

basic training was little better than nothing—or actually
worse than nothing—in helping children do something
to prevent being victimized, whether by a school bully or
a potential child molester. 66 Worse, the children who
had only such basic programs and who had sub-
sequendy become victims of sexual assault were actually
half as likely to report it afterward than were children
who had had no programs at all.
By contrast, children given more comprehensive
training—including related emotional and social com-
petences—were better able to protect themselves against
the threat of being victimized: they were far more likely
to demand to be left alone, to yell or fight back, to
threaten to tell, and to actually tell if something bad did
happen to them. This last benefit—reporting the ab-
use—is preventive in a telling sense: many child mo-
lesters victimize hundreds of children. A study of child
molesters in their forties found that, on average, they
had one victim a month since their teenage years. A re-
port on a bus driver and a high-school computer teacher
reveals they molested about three hundred children
each year between them—yet not one of the children re-
ported the sexual abuse; the abuse came to light only
after one of the boys who had been abused by the teach-
er started to sexually abuse his sister.67
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Those children who got the more comprehensive pro-

grams were three times more likely than those in min-
imal programs to report abuse. What worked so well?
These programs were not one-shot topics, but were giv-
en at different levels several times over the course of a
child's school career, as part of health or sex education.
They enlisted parents to deliver the message to the child
along with what was taught in school (children whose
parents did this were the very best at resisting threats of
sexual abuse).
Beyond that, social and emotional competences made
the difference. It is not enough for a child simply to
know about "good" and "bad" touching; children need
the self-awareness to know when a situation feels wrong
or distressing long before the touching begins. This en-
tails not just self-awareness, but also enough self-con-
fidence and assertiveness to trust and act on those feel-
ings of distress, even in the face of an adult who may be
trying to reassure her that "it's okay." And then a child
needs a repertoire of ways to disrupt what is about to
happen—everything from running away to threatening
to tell. For these reasons, the better programs teach chil-
dren to stand up for what they want, to assert their
rights rather than be passive, to know what their bound-
aries are and defend them.
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The most effective programs, then, supplemented the

basic sexual-abuse information with essential emotional
and social skills. These programs taught children to find
ways to solve interpersonal conflicts more positively, to
have more self-confidence, not to blame themselves if
something happened, and to feel they had a network of
support in teachers and parents whom they could turn
to. And if something bad did happen to them, they were
far more likely to tell.

The Active Ingredients

Such findings have led to a reenvisioning of what the in-
gredients of an optimal prevention program should be,
based on those that impartial evaluations showed to be
truly effective. In a five-year project sponsored by the
W. T. Grant Foundation, a consortium of researchers
studied this landscape and distilled the active ingredi-
ents that seemed crucial to the success of those pro-
grams that worked.68 The list of key skills the consorti-
um concluded should be covered, no matter what specif-
ic problem it is designed to prevent, reads like the in-
gredients of emotional intelligence (see Appendix D for
the full list).69
The emotional skills include self-awareness; identify-
ing, expressing, and managing feelings; impulse control
and delaying gratification; and handling stress and
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anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is knowing the

difference between feelings and actions, and learning to
make better emotional decisions by first controlling the
impulse to act, then identifying alternative actions and
their consequences before acting. Many competences
are interpersonal: reading social and emotional cues,
listening, being able to resist negative influences, taking
others' perspectives, and understanding what behavior
is acceptable in a situation.
These are among the core emotional and social skills
for life, and include at least partial remedies for most, if
not all, of the difficulties I have discussed in this
chapter. The choice of specific problems these skills
might inoculate against is nearly arbitrary—similar
cases for the role of emotional and social competences
could have been made for, say, unwanted teen preg-
nancy or teen suicide.
To be sure, the causes of all such problems are com-
plex, interweaving differing ratios of biological destiny,
family dynamics, the politics of poverty, and the culture
of the streets. No single kind of intervention, including
one targeting emotions, can claim to do the whole job.
But to the degree emotional deficits add to a child's
risk—and we have seen that they add a great deal—at-
tention must be paid to emotional remedies, not to the
exclusion of other answers, but along with them. The
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next question is, what would an education in the emo-

tions look like?
* In children, unlike adults, medication is not a clear
alternative to therapy or preventive education for treat-
ing depression; children metabolize medications differ-
ently than do adults. Tricyclic antidepressants, often
successful with adults, have failed in controlled studies
with children to prove better than an inactive placebo
drug. Newer depression medications, including Prozac,
are as yet untested for use in children. And desipramine,
one of the most common (and safest) tricyclics used
with adults, has, at this writing, become the focus of
FDA scrutiny as a possible cause of death in children.
 16
Schooling the Emotions
The main hope of a nation lies in the proper edu-
cation of its youth.
—ERASMUS

It's a strange roll call, going around the circle of fifteen

fifth graders sitting Indian-style on the floor. As a teach-
er calls their names the students respond not with the
vacant "Here" standard in schools, but instead call out a
number that indicates how they feel; one means low
spirits, ten high energy.
Today spirits are high:
"Jessica."
"Ten: I'm jazzed, it's Friday."
"Patrick."
"Nine: excited, a little nervous."
"Nicole."
"Ten: peaceful, happy..."
It's a class in Self Science at the Nueva Learning
Center, a school retrofitted into what used to be the
grand manse of the Crocker family, the dynasty that
founded one of San Francisco's biggest banks. Now the
building, which resembles a miniature version of the
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San Francisco Opera House, houses a private school

that offers what may be a model course in emotional
intelligence.
The subject in Self Science is feelings—your own and
those that erupt in relationships. The topic, by its very
nature, demands that teachers and students focus on the
emotional fabric of a child's life—a focus that is determ-
inedly ignored in almost every other classroom in Amer-
ica. The strategy here includes using the tensions and
traumas of children's lives as the topic of the day. Teach-
ers speak to real issues—hurt over being left out, envy,
disagreements that could escalate into a schoolyard
battle. As Karen Stone McCown, developer of the Self
Science Curriculum and director of Nueva, put it,
"Learning doesn't take place in isolation from kids' feel-
ings. Being emotionally literate is as important for
learning as instruction in math and reading."1
Self Science is a pioneer, an early harbinger of an idea
that is spreading to schools coast to coast.* Names for
these classes range from "social development" to "life
skills" to "social and emotional learning." Some, refer-
ring to Howard Gardner's idea of multiple intelligences,
use the term "personal intelligences." The common
thread is the goal of raising the level of social and emo-
tional competence in children as a part of their regular
education—not just something taught remedially to
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children who are faltering and identified as "troubled,"

but a set of skills and understandings essential for every
child.
The emotional-literacy courses have some remote
roots in the affective-education movement of the 1960s.
The thinking then was that psychological and motiva-
tional lessons were more deeply learned if they involved
an immediate experience of what was being taught con-
ceptually. The emotional-literacy movement, though,
turns the term affective education inside out—instead of
using affect to educate, it educates affect itself.
More immediately, many of these courses and the mo-
mentum for their spread come from an ongoing series of
school-based prevention programs, each targeting a spe-
cific problem: teen smoking, drug abuse, pregnancy,
dropping out, and most recently violence. As we saw in
the last chapter, the W. T. Grant Consortium's study of
prevention programs found they are far more effective
when they teach a core of emotional and social compet-
ences, such as impulse control, managing anger, and
finding creative solutions to social predicaments. From
this principle a new generation of interventions has
emerged.
As we saw in Chapter 15, interventions designed to
target the specific deficits in emotional and social skills
that undergird problems such as aggression or
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depression can be highly effective as buffers for chil-

dren. But those well-designed interventions, in the
main, have been run by research psychologists as exper-
iments. The next step is to take the lessons learned from
such highly focused programs and generalize them as a
preventive measure for the entire school population,
taught by ordinary teachers.
This more sophisticated and more effective approach
to prevention includes information about problems such
as AIDS, drugs, and the like, at the points in youngsters'
lives when they are beginning to face them. But its main,
ongoing subject is the core competence that is brought
to bear on any of these specific dilemmas: emotional
intelligence.
This new departure in bringing emotional literacy into
schools makes emotions and social life themselves top-
ics, rather than treating these most compelling facets of
a child's day as irrelevant intrusions or, when they lead
to eruptions, relegating them to occasional disciplinary
trips to the guidance counselor or the principal's office.
The classes themselves may at first glance seem un-
eventful, much less a solution to the dramatic problems
they address. But that is largely because, like good chil-
drearing at home, the lessons imparted are small but
telling, delivered regularly and over a sustained period
of years. That is how emotional learning becomes
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ingrained; as experiences are repeated over and over,

the brain reflects them as strengthened pathways, neur-
al habits to apply in times of duress, frustration, hurt.
And while the everyday substance of emotional literacy
classes may look mundane, the outcome—decent human
beings—is more critical to our future than ever.

A LESSON IN COOPERATION
Compare a moment from a class in Self Science with the
classroom experiences you can recall.
A fifth-grade group is about to play the Cooperation
Squares game, in which the students team up to put to-
gether a series of square-shaped jigsaw puzzles. The
catch: their teamwork is all in silence, with no gesturing
allowed.
The teacher, Jo-An Varga, divides the class into three
groups, each assigned to a different table. Three observ-
ers, each familiar with the game, get an evaluation sheet
to assess, for example, who in the group takes the lead
in organizing, who is a clown, who disrupts.
The students dump the pieces of the puzzles on the
table and go to work. Within a minute or so it's clear
that one group is surprisingly efficient as a team; they
finish in just a few minutes. A second group of four is
engaged in solitary, parallel efforts, each working separ-
ately on their own puzzle, but getting nowhere. Then
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they slowly start to work collectively to assemble their

first square, and continue to work as a unit until all the
puzzles are solved.
But the third group still struggles, with only one
puzzle nearing completion, and even that looking more
like a trapezoid than a square. Sean, Fairlie, and Rah-
man have yet to find the smooth coordination that the
other two groups fell into. They are clearly frustrated,
frantically scanning the pieces on the table, seizing on
likely possibilities and putting them near the partly fin-
ished squares, only to be disappointed by the lack of fit.
The tension breaks a bit when Rahman takes two of
the pieces and puts them in front of his eyes like a mask;
his partners giggle. This will prove to be a pivotal mo-
ment in the day's lesson.
Jo-An Varga, the teacher, offers some encouragement:
"Those of you who have finished can give one specific
hint to those who are still working."
Dagan moseys over to the still-struggling group,
points to two pieces that jut out from the square, and
suggests, "You've got to move those two pieces around."
Suddenly Rahman, his wide face furrowed in concentra-
tion, grasps the new gestalt, and the pieces quickly fall
into place on the first puzzle, then the others. There's
spontaneous applause as the last piece falls into place on
the third group's final puzzle.
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A POINT OF CONTENTION
But as the class goes on to mull over the object lessons
in teamwork they've received, there is another, more in-
tense interchange. Rahman, tall and with a shock of
bushy black hair cut into a longish crew cut, and Tucker,
the group's observer, are locked in contentious discus-
sion over the rule that you can't gesture. Tucker, his
blond hair neatly combed except for a cowlick, wears a
baggy blue T-shirt emblazoned with the motto "Be Re-
sponsible," which somehow underscores his official role.
"You can too offer a piece—that's not gesturing,"
Tucker says to Rahman in an emphatic, argumentative
tone.
"But that is gesturing," Rahman insists, vehement.
Varga notices the heightened volume and increasingly
aggressive staccato of the exchange, and gravitates to
their table. This is a critical incident, a spontaneous ex-
change of heated feeling; it is in moments such as this
that the lessons already learned will pay off, and new
ones can be taught most profitably. And, as every good
teacher knows, the lessons applied in such electric mo-
ments will last in students' memories.
"This isn't a criticism—you cooperated very well—but
Tucker, try to say what you mean in a tone of voice that
doesn't sound so critical," Varga coaches.
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Tucker, his voice calmer now, says to Rahman, "You

can just put a piece where you think it goes, give
someone what you think they need, without gesturing.
Just offering."
Rahman responds in an angry tone, "You could have
just gone like this"—he scratches his head to illustrate
an innocent movement—"and he'd say 'No gesturing!' "
There is clearly more to Rahman's ire than this dis-
pute about what does or does not constitute a gesture.
His eyes constantly go to the evaluation sheet Tucker
has filled out, which—though it has not yet been men-
tioned—has actually provoked the tension between
Tucker and Rahman. On the evaluation sheet Tucker
has listed Rahman's name in the blank for "Who is
disruptive?"
Varga, noticing Rahman looking at the offending
form, hazards a guess, saying to Tucker, "He's feeling
that you used a negative word—disruptive —about him.
What did you mean?"
"I didn't mean it was a bad kind of disruption," says
Tucker, now conciliatory.
Rahman isn't buying it, but his voice is calmer, too:
"That's a little farfetched, if you ask me."
Varga emphasizes a positive way of seeing it. "Tucker
is trying to say that what could be considered disruptive
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could also be part of lightening things up during a frus-

trating time."
"But," Rahman protests, now more matter-of-fact,
"disruptive is like when we're all concentrating hard on
something and if I went like this"—he makes a ridicu-
lous, clowning expression, his eyes bulging, cheeks
puffed out—"that would be disruptive."
Varga tries more emotional coaching, telling Tucker,
"In trying to help, you didn't mean he was disruptive in
a bad way. But you send a different message in how
you're talking about it. Rahman is needing you to hear
and accept his feelings. Rahman was saying that having
negative words like disruptive feels unfair. He doesn't
like being called that."
Then, to Rahman, she adds, "I appreciate the way
you're being assertive in talking with Tucker. You're not
attacking. But it's not pleasant to have a label like dis-
ruptive put on you. When you put those pieces up to
your eyes it seems like you were feeling frustrated and
wanted to lighten things up. But Tucker called it dis-
ruptive because he didn't understand your intent. Is that
right?"
Both boys nod assent as the other students finish
clearing away the puzzles. This small classroom melo-
drama is reaching its finale. "Do you feel better?" Varga
asks. "Or is this still distressing?"
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"Yeah, I feel okay," says Rahman, his voice softer now

that he feels heard and understood. Tucker nods, too,
smiling. The boys, noticing that everyone else has
already left for the next class, turn in unison and dash
out together.

POSTMORTEM: A FIGHT THAT DID

NOT BREAK OUT
As a new group starts to find their chairs, Varga dissects
what has just transpired. The heated exchange and its
cooling-down draw on what the boys have been learning
about conflict resolution. What typically escalates to
conflict begins, as Varga puts it, with "not communicat-
ing, making assumptions, and jumping to conclusions,
sending a 'hard' message in ways that make it tough for
people to hear what you're saying."
Students in Self Science learn that the point is not to
avoid conflict completely, but to resolve disagreement
and resentment before it spirals into an out-and-out-
fight. There are signs of these earlier lessons in how
Tucker and Rahman handled the dispute. Both, for ex-
ample, made some effort to express their point of view
in a way that would not accelerate the conflict. This as-
sertiveness (as distinct from aggression or passivity) is
taught at Nueva from third grade on. It emphasizes ex-
pressing feelings forthrightly, but in a way that will not
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spiral into aggression. While at the beginning of their

dispute neither boy was looking at the other, as it went
on they began to show signs of "active listening," facing
each other, making eye contact, and sending the silent
cues that let a speaker know that he is being heard.
By putting these tools into action, helped along by
some coaching, "assertiveness" and "active listening" for
these boys become more than just empty phrases on a
quiz—they become ways of reacting the boys can draw
on at those moments when they need them most
urgently.
Mastery in the emotional domain is especially difficult
because skills need to be acquired when people are usu-
ally least able to take in new information and learn new
habits of response—when they are upset. Coaching in
these moments helps. "Anyone, adult or fifth grader,
needs some help being a self-observer when they're so
upset," Varga points out. "Your heart is pounding, your
hands are sweaty, you're jittery, and you're trying to
listen clearly while keeping your own self-control to get
through it without screaming, blaming, or clamming up
in defensiveness."
For anyone familiar with the rough-and-tumble of
fifth-grade boys, what may be most remarkable is that
both Tucker and Rahman tried to assert their views
without resorting to blaming, name-calling, or yelling.
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Neither let their feelings escalate to a contemptuous "f

you!" or a fist fight, nor cut off the other by stalking out
of the room. What could have been the seed of a full-
fledged battle instead heightened the boys' mastery of
the nuances of conflict resolution. How differently it all
could have gone in other circumstances. Youngsters
daily come to blows—and even worse—over less.

CONCERNS OF THE DAY

At the traditional circle that opens each class in Self
Science, the numbers are not always so high as they
were today. When they are low—the ones, twos, or
threes that indicate feeling terrible—it opens the way for
someone to ask, "Do you want to talk about why you feel
that way?" And, if the student wants (no one is pres-
sured to talk about things they don't want to), it allows
the airing of whatever is so troubling—and the chance to
consider creative options for handling it.
The troubles that emerge vary with the grade level. In
the lower grades typical ones are teasing, feeling left out,
fears. Around sixth grade a new set of concerns
emerges—hurt feelings about not being asked on a date,
or being left out; friends who are immature; the painful
predicaments of the young ("Big kids are picking on
me"; "My friends are smoking, and they're always trying
to get me to try, too").
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These are the topics of gripping import in a child's life,

which are aired on the periphery of school—at lunch, on
the bus to school, at a friend's house—if at all. More of-
ten than not, these are the troubles that children keep to
themselves, obsessing about them alone at night, having
no one to mull them over with. In Self Science they can
become topics of the day.
Each of these discussions is potential grist for the ex-
plicit goal of Self Science, which is illuminating the
child's sense of self and relationships with others. While
the course has a lesson plan, it is flexible so that when
moments such as the conflict between Rahman and
Tucker occur they can be capitalized on. The issues that
students bring up provide the living examples to which
students and teachers alike can apply the skills they are
learning, such as the conflict-resolution methods that
cooled down the heat between the two boys.

THE ABC'S OF EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE
In use for close to twenty years, the Self Science cur-
riculum stands as a model for the teaching of emotional
intelligence. The lessons sometimes are surprisingly
sophisticated; as Nueva's director, Karen Stone
McCown, told me, "When we teach about anger, we help
kids understand that it is almost always a secondary
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reaction and to look for what's underneath—are you

hurt? jealous? Our kids learn that you always have
choices about how you respond to emotion, and the
more ways you know to respond to an emotion, the rich-
er your life can be."
A list of the contents of Self Science is an almost
point-for-point match with the ingredients of emotional
intelligence—and with the core skills recommended as
primary prevention for the range of pitfalls threatening
children (see Appendix E for the full list).2 The topics
taught include self-awareness, in the sense of recogniz-
ing feelings and building a vocabulary for them, and see-
ing the links between thoughts, feelings, and reactions;
knowing if thoughts or feelings are ruling a decision;
seeing the consequences of alternative choices; and ap-
plying these insights to decisions about such issues as
drugs, smoking, and sex. Self-awareness also takes the
form of recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and
seeing yourself in a positive but realistic light (and so
avoiding a common pitfall of the self-esteem
movement).
Another emphasis is managing emotions: realizing
what is behind a feeling (for example, the hurt that trig-
gers anger), and learning ways to handle anxieties, an-
ger, and sadness. Still another emphasis is on taking
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responsibility for decisions and actions, and following

through on commitments.
A key social ability is empathy, understanding others'
feelings and taking their perspective, and respecting dif-
ferences in how people feel about things. Relationships
are a major focus, including learning to be a good listen-
er and question-asker; distinguishing between what
someone says or does and your own reactions and judg-
ments; being assertive rather than angry or passive; and
learning the arts of cooperation, conflict resolution, and
negotiating compromise.
There are no grades given in Self Science; life itself is
the final exam. But at the end of the eighth grade, as stu-
dents are about to leave Nueva for high school, each is
given a Socratic examination, an oral test in Self
Science. One question from a recent final: "Describe an
appropriate response to help a friend solve a conflict
over someone pressuring them to try drugs, or over a
friend who likes to tease." Or, "What are some healthy
ways to deal with stress, anger, and fear?"
Were he alive today, Aristotle, so concerned with emo-
tional skillfulness, might well approve.

EMOTIONAL LITERACY IN THE INNER

CITY
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Skeptics understandably will ask if a course like Self

Science could work in a less privileged setting, or if it is
only possible in a small private school like Nueva, where
every child is, in some respect, gifted. In short, can emo-
tional competence be taught where it may be most ur-
gently needed, in the gritty chaos of an inner-city public
school? One answer is to visit the Augusta Lewis Troup
Middle School in New Haven, which is as far from the
Nueva Learning Center socially and economically as it is
geographically.
To be sure, the atmosphere at Troup has much of the
same excitement about learning—the school is also
known as the Troup Magnet Academy of Science and is
one of two such schools in the district that are designed
to draw fifth-to eighth-grade students from all over New
Haven to an enriched science curriculum. Students
there can ask questions about the physics of outer space
through a satellite-dish hookup to astronauts in Hous-
ton or program their computers to play music. But des-
pite these academic amenities, as in many cities, white
flight to the New Haven suburbs and to private schools
has left Troup's enrollment about 95 percent black and
Hispanic.
Just a few short blocks from the Yale campus—and
again a distant universe—Troup is in a decaying
working-class neighborhood that, in the 1950s, had
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twenty thousand people employed in nearby factories,

from Olin Brass Mills to Winchester Arms. Today that
job base has shrunk to under three thousand, shrinking
with it the economic horizons of the families who live
there. New Haven, like so many other New England
manufacturing cities, has sunk into a pit of poverty,
drugs, and violence.
It was in response to the urgencies of this urban
nightmare that in the 1980s a group of Yale psycholo-
gists and educators designed the Social Competence
Program, a set of courses that covers virtually the same
terrain as the Nueva Learning Center's Self Science cur-
riculum. But at Troup the connection to the topics is of-
ten more direct and raw. It is no mere academic exercise
when, in the eighth-grade sex education class, students
learn how personal decision-making can help them
avoid diseases such as AIDS. New Haven has the highest
proportion of women with AIDS in the United States; a
number of the mothers who send their children to Troup
have the disease—and so do some of the students there.
Despite the enriched curriculum, students at Troup
struggle with all the problems of the inner city; many
children have home situations so chaotic, if not horrific,
they just cannot manage to get to school some days.
As in all New Haven schools, the most prominent sign
that greets a visitor is in the familiar form of a yellow
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diamond-shaped traffic sign, but reads "Drug-Free

Zone." At the door is Mary Ellen Collins, the school's fa-
cilitator—an all-purpose ombudsman who sees to spe-
cial problems as they surface, and whose role includes
helping teachers with the demands of the social compet-
ence curriculum. If a teacher is unsure of how to teach a
lesson, Collins will come to the class to show how.
"I taught in this school for twenty years," Collins says,
greeting me. "Look at this neighborhood—I can't see
only teaching academic skills anymore, with the prob-
lems these kids face just in living. Take the kids here
who are struggling because they have AIDS themselves
or it's in their homes—I'm not sure they'd say it during
the discussion on AIDS, but once a kid knows a teacher
will listen to an emotional problem, not just academic
ones, the avenue is open to have that conversation."
On the third floor of the old brick school Joyce
Andrews is leading her fifth graders through the social
competence class they get three times a week. Andrews,
like all the other fifth-grade teachers, went to a special
summer course in how to teach it, but her exuberance
suggests the topics in social competence come naturally
to her.
Today's lesson is on identifying feelings; being able to
name feelings, and so better distinguish between them,
is a key emotional skill. Last night's assignment was to
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bring in pictures of a person's face from a magazine,

name which emotion the face displays, and explain how
to tell the person has those feelings. After collecting the
assignment, Andrews lists the feelings on the
board—sadness, worry, excitement, happiness, and so
on—and launches into a fast-paced repartee with the
eighteen students who managed to get to school that
day. Sitting in four-desk clusters, the students excitedly
raise their hands high, straining to catch her eye so they
can give their answer.
As she adds frustrated to the list on the board,
Andrews asks, "How many people ever felt frustrated?"
Every hand goes up.
"How do you feel when you're frustrated?"
The answers come in a cascade: "Tired." "Confused."
"You can't think right." "Anxious."
As aggravated is added to the list, Joyce says, "I know
that one—when does a teacher feel aggravated?"
"When everyone is talking," a girl offers, smiling.
Without missing a beat, Andrews passes out a mimeo-
graphed worksheet. In one column are faces of boys and
girls, each displaying one of the six basic emo-
tions—happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, disgus-
ted—and a description of the facial muscle activity un-
derlying each, for example:
AFRAID:
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• The mouth is open and drawn back.

• The eyes are open and the inner corners go up.
• The eyebrows are raised and drawn together.
• There are wrinkles in the middle of the forehead.3

While they read through the sheet, expressions of fear,

anger, surprise, or disgust float over the faces of the kids
in Andrews's class as they imitate the pictures and fol-
low the facial-muscle recipes for each emotion. This les-
son comes straight from Paul Ekman's research on facial
expression; as such, it is taught in most every college in-
troductory psychology course—and rarely, if ever, in
grade school. This elementary lesson in connecting a
name with a feeling, and the feeling with the facial ex-
pression that matches it, might seem so obvious that it
need not be taught at all. Yet it may serve as an antidote
to surprisingly common lapses in emotional literacy.
Schoolyard bullies, remember, often strike out in anger
because they misinterpret neutral messages and expres-
sions as hostile, and girls who develop eating disorders
fail to distinguish anger from anxiety from hunger.

EMOTIONAL LITERACY IN DISGUISE

With the curriculum already besieged by a proliferation
of new topics and agendas, some teachers who under-
standably feel overburdened resist taking extra time
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from the basics for yet another course. So an emerging

strategy in emotional education is not to create a new
class, but to blend lessons on feelings and relationships
with other topics already taught. Emotional lessons can
merge naturally into reading and writing, health, sci-
ence, social studies, and other standard courses as well.
While in the New Haven schools Life Skills is a separate
topic in some grades, in other years the social develop-
ment curriculum blends into courses such as reading or
health. Some of the lessons are even taught as part of
math class—notably basic study skills such as how to put
aside distractions, motivate yourself to study, and man-
age your impulses so you can attend to learning.
Some programs in emotional and social skills take no
curriculum or class time as a separate subject at all, but
instead infiltrate their lessons into the very fabric of
school life. One model for this approach—essentially, an
invisible emotional and social competence course—is
the Child Development Project, created by a team direc-
ted by psychologist Eric Schaps. The project, based in
Oakland, California, is currently being tried in a handful
of schools across the nation, most in neighborhoods that
share many of the troubles of New Haven's decaying
core.4
The project offers a prepackaged set of materials that
fit into existing courses. Thus first graders in their
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reading class get a story, "Frog and Toad Are Friends,"

in which Frog, eager to play with his hibernating friend
Toad, plays a trick on him to get him up early. The story
is used as a platform for a class discussion about friend-
ship, and issues such as how people feel when someone
plays a trick on them. A succession of adventures brings
up topics such as self-consciousness, being aware of a
friend's needs, what it feels like to be teased, and shar-
ing feelings with friends. A set curriculum plan offers in-
creasingly sophisticated stories as children go through
the elementary and middle-school grades, giving teach-
ers entry points to discuss topics such as empathy,
perspective-taking, and caring.
Another way emotional lessons are woven into the
fabric of existing school life is through helping teachers
rethink how to discipline students who misbehave. The
assumption in the Child Development program is that
such moments are ripe opportunities to teach children
skills that are lacking—impulse control, explaining their
feelings, resolving conflicts—and that there are better
ways to discipline than coercion. A teacher seeing three
first graders pushing to be the first in the lunchroom
line might suggest that they each guess a number, and
let the winner go first. The immediate lesson is that
there are impartial, fair ways to settle such pint-size dis-
putes, while the deeper teaching is that disputes can be
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negotiated. And since that is an approach those children

can take with them to settle other similar disputes ("Me
first!"is, after all, epidemic in lower grades—if not
through much of life, in one form or another) it has a
more positive message than the ubiquitous, authoritari-
an "Stop that!"

THE EMOTIONAL TIMETABLE

"My friends Alice and Lynn won't play with me."
That poignant grievance is from a third-grade girl at
John Muir Elementary School in Seattle. The anonym-
ous sender put it in the "mailbox" in her classroom—ac-
tually a specially painted cardboard box—where she and
her classmates are encouraged to write in their com-
plaints and problems so the whole class can talk about
them and try to think of ways to deal with them.
The discussion will not mention the names of those
involved; instead the teacher points out that all children
share such problems from time to time, and they all
need to learn how to handle them. As they talk about
how it feels to be left out, or what they might do to be in-
cluded, they have the chance to try out new solutions to
these quandaries—a corrective for the one-track think-
ing that sees conflict as the only route to solving
disagreements.
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The mailbox allows flexibility as to exactly which

crises and issues will become the subject of the class, for
a too-rigid agenda can be out of step with the fluid real-
ities of childhood. As children change and grow the pre-
occupation of the hour changes accordingly. To be most
effective, emotional lessons must be pegged to the de-
velopment of the child, and repeated at different ages in
ways that fit a child's changing understanding and
challenges.
One question is how early to begin. Some say the first
few years of life are none too soon. The Harvard pediat-
rician T. Berry Brazelton proposes that many parents
can benefit from being coached as emotional mentors to
their infants and toddlers, as some home-visit programs
do. A strong argument can be made for emphasizing so-
cial and emotional skills more systematically in
preschool programs such as Head Start; as we saw in
Chapter 12, children's readiness to learn depends to a
large extent on acquiring some of these basic emotional
skills. The preschool years are crucial ones for laying
foundation skills, and there is some evidence that Head
Start, when run well (an important caveat), can have
beneficial long-term emotional and social effects on the
lives of its graduates even into their early adult
years—fewer drug problems and arrests, better mar-
riages, greater earning power.5
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Such interventions work best when they track the

emotional timetable of development.6 As the wail of
newborns testifies, babies have intense feelings from the
moment they are born. But the newborn's brain is far
from fully mature; as we saw in Chapter 15, only as its
nervous system reaches final development—a process
that unfolds according to an innate biological clock over
the entire course of childhood and into early adoles-
cence—will the child's emotions ripen completely. The
newborn's repertoire of feeling is primitive compared to
the emotional range of a five-year-old, which, in turn, is
lacking when measured against the fullness of feelings
of a teenager. Indeed, adults all too readily fall into the
trap of expecting children to have reached a maturity far
beyond their years, forgetting that each emotion has its
preprogrammed moment of appearance in a child's
growth. A four-year-old's braggadocio, for example,
might bring a parent's reprimand—and yet the self-con-
sciousness that can breed humility typically does not
emerge until age five or so.
The timetable for emotional growth is intertwined
with allied lines of development, particularly for cogni-
tion, on the one hand, and brain and biological matura-
tion, on the other. As we have seen, emotional capacities
such as empathy and emotional self-regulation start to
build virtually from infancy. The kindergarten year
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marks a peak ripening of the "social emotions"—feelings

such as insecurity and humility, jealousy and envy, pride
and confidence—all of which require the capacity for
comparing oneself with others. The five-year-old, on en-
tering the wider social world of school, enters too the
world of social comparison. It is not just the external
shift that elicits these comparisons, but also the emer-
gence of a cognitive skill: being able to compare oneself
to others on particular qualities, whether popularity, at-
tractiveness, or skateboarding talents. This is the age
when, for example, having an older sister who gets
straight A's can make the younger sister start to think of
herself as "dumb" by comparison.
Dr. David Hamburg, a psychiatrist and president of
the Carnegie Corporation, which has evaluated some
pioneering emotional-education programs, sees the
years of transition into grade school and then again into
junior high or middle school as marking two crucial
points in a child's adjustment.7 From ages six to eleven,
says Hamburg, "school is a crucible and a defining ex-
perience that will heavily influence children's adoles-
cence and beyond. A child's sense of self-worth depends
substantially on his or her ability to achieve in school. A
child who fails in school sets in motion the self-defeat-
ing attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire
lifespan." Among the essentials for profiting from
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school, Hamburg notes, are an ability "to postpone grat-

ification, to be socially responsible in appropriate ways,
to maintain control over their emotions, and to have an
optimistic oudook"—in other words, emotional intelli-
gence.8
Puberty—because it is a time of extraordinary change
in the child's biology, thinking capacities, and brain
functioning—is also a crucial time for emotional and so-
cial lessons. As for the teen years, Hamburg observes
that "most adolescents are ten to fifteen years old when
they are exposed to sexuality, alcohol and drugs,
smoking," and other temptations.9
The transition to middle school or junior high marks
an end to childhood, and is itself a formidable emotional
challenge. All other problems aside, as they enter this
new school arrangement virtually all students have a dip
in self-confidence and a jump in self-consciousness;
their very notions of themselves are rocky and in tumult.
One of the greatest specific blows is in "social self-es-
teem"—students' confidence that they can make and
keep friends. It is at this juncture, Hamburg points out,
that it helps immensely to buttress boys' and girls' abilit-
ies to build close relationships and navigate crises in
friendships, and to nurture their self-confidence.
Hamburg notes that as students are entering middle
school, just on the cusp of adolescence, there is
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something different about those who have had emotion-

al literacy classes: they find the new pressures of peer
politics, the upping of academic demands, and the
temptations to smoke and use drugs less troubling than
do their peers. They have mastered emotional abilities
that, at least for the short term, inoculate them against
the turmoil and pressures they are about to face.

TIMING IS ALL
As developmental psychologists and others map the
growth of emotions, they are able to be more specific
about just what lessons children should be learning at
each point in the unfolding of emotional intelligence,
what the lasting deficits are likely to be for those who
fail to master the right competences at the appointed
time, and what remedial experiences might make up for
what was missed.
In the New Haven program, for example, children in
the youngest grades get basic lessons in self-awareness,
relationships, and decision-making. In first grade stu-
dents sit in a circle and roll the "feelings cube," which
has words such as sad or excited on each side. At their
turn, they describe a time they had that feeling, an exer-
cise that gives them more certainty in tying feelings to
words and helps with empathy as they hear others hav-
ing the same feelings as themselves.
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By fourth and fifth grade, as peer relationships take

on an immense importance in their lives, they get les-
sons that help their friendships work better: empathy,
impulse control, and anger management. The Life Skills
class on reading emotions from facial expressions that
the Troup school fifth graders were trying, for example,
is essentially about empathizing. For impulse control,
there is a "stoplight" poster displayed prominently, with
six steps:
Red light 1. Stop, calm down, and think before you
act.
Yellow 2. Say the problem and how you feel.
light
3. Set a positive goal.
4. Think of lots of solutions.
5. Think ahead to the consequences.
Green 6. Go ahead and try the best plan.
Light

The stoplight notion is regularly invoked when a child,

for example, is about to strike out in anger, or withdraw
into a huff at some slight, or burst into tears at being
teased, and offers a concrete set of steps for dealing with
these loaded moments in a more measured way. Beyond
the management of feelings, it points a way to more
 527/661

effective action. And, as a habitual way of handling the

unruly emotional impulse—to think before acting from
feelings—it can evolve into a basic strategy for dealing
with the risks of adolescence and beyond.
In sixth grade the lessons relate more directly to the
temptations and pressures for sex, drugs, or drinking
that begin to enter children's lives. By ninth grade, as
teenagers are confronted with more ambiguous social
realities, the ability to take multiple perspectives—your
own as well as those of others involved—is emphasized.
"If a kid is mad because he saw his girlfriend talking
with another guy," says one of the New Haven teachers,
"he'd be encouraged to consider what might be going on
from their point of view, too, rather than just plunge in-
to a confrontation."

EMOTIONAL LITERACY AS
PREVENTION
Some of the most effective programs in emotional liter-
acy were developed as a response to a specific problem,
notably violence. One of the fastest-growing of these
prevention-inspired emotional literacy courses is the
Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, in several hun-
dred New York City public schools and schools across
the country. The conflict-resolution course focuses on
how to settle schoolyard arguments that can escalate
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into incidents like the hallway shooting of Ian Moore

and Tyrone Sinkler by their classmate at Jefferson High
School.
Linda Lantieri, the founder of the Resolving Conflict
Creatively Program and director of the Manhattan-
based national center for the approach, sees it as having
a mission far beyond just preventing fights. She says,
"The program shows students that they have many
choices for dealing with conflict besides passivity or ag-
gression. We show them the futility of violence while re-
placing it with concrete skills. Kids learn to stand up for
their rights without resorting to violence. These are
lifelong skills, not just for those most prone to viol-
ence."10
In one exercise, students think of a single realistic
step, no matter how small, that might have helped settle
some conflict they have had. In another students enact a
scene in which a big sister trying to do her homework
gets fed up with her younger sister's loud rap tape. In
frustration the older sister turns off the tape despite the
younger one's protests. The class brainstorms ways they
might work out the problem that would satisfy both
sisters.
One key to the success of the conflict-resolution pro-
gram is extending it beyond the classroom to the play-
ground and cafeteria, where tempers are more likely to
 529/661

explode. To that end, some students are trained as me-

diators, a role that can begin in the latter years of ele-
mentary school. When tension erupts, students can seek
out a mediator to help them settle it. The schoolyard
mediators learn to handle fights, taunts and threats, in-
terracial incidents, and the other potentially incendiary
incidents of school life.
The mediators learn to phrase their statements in
ways that make both parties feel the mediator is impar-
tial. Their tactics include sitting down with those in-
volved and getting them to listen to the other person
without interruptions or insults. They have each party
calm down and state their position, then have each
paraphrase what's been said so it's clear they've really
heard. Then they all try to think of solutions that both
sides can live with; the settlements are often in the form
of a signed agreement.
Beyond the mediation of a given dispute, the program
teaches students to think differently about disagree-
ments in the first place. As Angel Perez, trained as a me-
diator while in grade school, put it, the program
"changed my way of thinking. I used to think, hey, if
somebody picks on me, if somebody does something to
me, the only thing was to fight, do something to get back
at them. Since I had this program, I've had a more posit-
ive way of thinking. If something's done negative to me,
 530/661

I don't try to do the negative thing back—I try to solve

the problem." And he has found himself spreading the
approach in his community.
While the focus of Resolving Conflict Creatively is on
preventing violence, Lantieri sees it as having a wider
mission. Her view is that the skills needed to head off vi-
olence cannot be separated from the full spectrum of
emotional competence—that, for example, knowing
what you are feeling or how to handle impulse or grief is
as important for violence prevention as is managing an-
ger. Much of the training has to do with emotional ba-
sics such as recognizing an expanded range of feelings
and being able to put names to them, and empathizing.
When she describes the evaluation results of her
program's effects, Lantieri points with as much pride to
the increase in "caring among the kids" as to the drops
in fights, put-downs, and name-calling.
A similar convergence on emotional literacy occurred
with a consortium of psychologists trying to find ways to
help youngsters on a trajectory toward a life marked by
crime and violence. Dozens of studies of such boys—as
we saw in Chapter 15—yielded a clear sense of the path
most take, starting from impulsiveness and a quickness
to anger in their earliest school years, through becoming
social rejects by the end of grade school, to bonding with
a circle of others like themselves and beginning crime
 531/661

sprees in the middle-school years. By early adulthood, a

large portion of these boys have acquired police records
and a readiness for violence.
When it came to designing interventions that might
help such boys get off this road to violence and crime,
the result was, once again, an emotional-literacy pro-
gram.11 One of these, developed by a consortium includ-
ing Mark Greenberg at the University of Washington, is
the PATHS curriculum (PATHS is the acronym for Par-
ents and Teachers Helping Students). While those at
risk for a trajectory toward crime and violence are most
in need of these lessons, the course is given to all those
in a class, avoiding any stigmatizing of a more troubled
subgroup.
Still, the lessons are useful for all children. These in-
clude, for example, learning in the earliest school years
to control their impulses; lacking this ability, children
have special trouble paying attention to what is being
taught and so fall behind in their learning and grades.
Another is recognizing their feelings; the PATHS cur-
riculum has fifty lessons on different emotions, teaching
the most basic, such as happiness and anger, to the
youngest children, and later touching on more complic-
ated feelings such as jealousy, pride, and guilt. The
emotional-awareness lessons include how to monitor
what they and those around them are feeling, and—most
 532/661

important for those prone to aggression—how to recog-

nize when someone is actually hostile, as opposed to
when the attribution of hostility comes from oneself.
One of the most important lessons, of course, is anger
management. The basic premise children learn about
anger (and all other emotions as well) is that "all feel-
ings are okay to have," but some reactions are okay and
others not. Here one of the tools for teaching self-con-
trol is the same "stoplight" exercise used in the New
Haven course. Other units help children with their
friendships, a counter to the social rejections that can
help propel a child toward delinquency.

RETHINKING SCHOOLS: TEACHING

BY BEING, COMMUNITIES THAT CARE
As family life no longer offers growing numbers of chil-
dren a sure footing in life, schools are left as the one
place communities can turn to for correctives to
children's deficiencies in emotional and social compet-
ence. That is not to say that schools alone can stand in
for all the social institutions that too often are in or
nearing collapse. But since virtually every child goes to
school (at least at the outset), it offers a place to reach
children with basic lessons for living that they may nev-
er get otherwise. Emotional literacy implies an expan-
ded mandate for schools, taking up the slack for failing
 533/661

families in socializing children. This daunting task re-

quires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their
traditional mission and that people in the community
become more involved with schools.
Whether or not there is a class explicitly devoted to
emotional literacy may matter far less than how these
lessons are taught. There is perhaps no subject where
the quality of the teacher matters so much, since how a
teacher handles her class is in itself a model, a de facto
lesson in emotional competence—or the lack thereof.
Whenever a teacher responds to one student, twenty or
thirty others learn a lesson.
There is a self-selection in the kind of teacher who
gravitates to courses such as these, because not every-
one is suited by temperament. To begin with, teachers
need to be comfortable talking about feelings; not every
teacher is at ease doing so or wants to be. There is little
or nothing in the standard education of teachers that
prepares them for this kind of teaching. For these reas-
ons, emotional literacy programs typically give pro-
spective teachers several weeks of special training in the
approach.
While many teachers may be reluctant at the outset to
tackle a topic that seems so foreign to their training and
routines, there is evidence that once they are willing to
try it, most will be pleased rather than put off. In the
 534/661

New Haven schools, when teachers first learned that

they would be trained to teach the new emotional liter-
acy courses, 31 percent said they were reluctant to do so.
After a year of teaching the courses, more than 90 per-
cent said they were pleased by them, and wanted to
teach them again the following year.

AN EXPANDED MISSION FOR

SCHOOLS
Beyond teacher training, emotional literacy expands our
vision of the task of schools themselves, making them
more explicitly society's agent for seeing that children
learn these essential lessons for life—a return to a classic
role for education. This larger design requires, apart
from any specifics of curriculum, using opportunities in
and out of class to help students turn moments of per-
sonal crisis into lessons in emotional competence. It
also works best when the lessons at school are coordin-
ated with what goes on in children's homes. Many emo-
tional literacy programs include special classes for par-
ents to teach them about what their children are learn-
ing, not just to complement what is imparted at school,
but to help parents who feel the need to deal more ef-
fectively with their children's emotional life.
That way, children get consistent messages about
emotional competence in all parts of their lives. In the
 535/661

New Haven schools, says Tim Shriver, director of the

Social Competence Program, "if kids get into a beef in
the cafeteria, they'll be sent to a peer mediator, who sits
down with them and works through their conflict with
the same perspective-taking technique they learned in
class. Coaches will use the technique to handle conflicts
on the playing field. We hold classes for parents in using
these methods with kids at home."
Such parallel lines of reinforcement of these emotion-
al lessons—not just in the classroom, but also on the
playground; not just in the school, but also in the
home—is optimal. That means weaving the school, the
parents, and the community together more tightly. It in-
creases the likelihood that what children learned in
emotional literacy classes will not stay behind at school,
but will be tested, practiced, and sharpened in the actual
challenges of life.
Another way in which this focus reshapes schools is in
building a campus culture that makes it a "caring com-
munity," a place where students feel respected, cared
about, and bonded to classmates, teachers, and the
school itself.12 For example, schools in areas such as
New Haven, where families are disintegrating at a high
rate, offer a range of programs that recruit caring people
in the community to get engaged with students whose
home life is shaky at best. In the New Haven schools,
 536/661

responsible adults volunteer as mentors, regular com-

panions for students who are foundering and who have
few, if any, stable and nurturing adults in their home
life.
In short, the optimal design of emotional literacy pro-
grams is to begin early, be age-appropriate, run
throughout the school years, and intertwine efforts at
school, at home, and in the community.
Even though much of this fits neatly into existing
parts of the school day, these programs are a major
change in any curriculum. It would be naive not to anti-
cipate hurdles in getting such programs into schools.
Many parents may feel that the topic itself is too person-
al a domain for the schools, that such things are best left
to parents (an argument that gains credibility to the ex-
tent that parents actually do address these topics—and
is less convincing when they fail to). Teachers may be
reluctant to yield yet another part of the school day to
topics that seem so unrelated to the academic basics;
some teachers may be too uncomfortable with the topics
to teach them, and all will need special training to do so.
Some children, too, will resist, especially to the extent
that these classes are out of synch with their actual con-
cerns, or feel like intrusive impositions on their privacy.
And then there is the dilemma of maintaining high qual-
ity, and ensuring that slick education marketers do not
 537/661

peddle ineptly designed emotional-competence pro-

grams that repeat the disasters of, say, ill-conceived
courses on drugs or teen pregnancy.
Given all this, why should we bother to try?

DOES EMOTIONAL LITERACY MAKE A

DIFFERENCE
It's every teacher's nightmare: one day Tim Shriver
opened the local paper to read that Lamont, one of his
favorite former students, had been shot nine times on a
New Haven street, and was in critical condition. "La-
mont had been one of the school leaders, a huge—six
foot two—and hugely popular linebacker, always smil-
ing," recalls Shriver. "Back then Lamont had enjoyed
coming to a leadership club I led, where we would toss
around ideas in a problem-solving model known as
SOCS."
The acronym is for Situation, Options, Consequence,
Solutions—a four-step method: say what the situation is
and how it makes you feel; think about your options for
solving the problem and what their consequences might
be; pick a solution and execute it—a grown-up version of
the stoplight method. Lamont, Shriver added, loved
brainstorming imaginative but potentially effective ways
to handle the pressing dilemmas of high-school life,
 538/661

such as problems with girlfriends and how to avoid

fights.
But those few lessons seemed to have failed him after
high school. Drifting on the streets in a sea of poverty,
drugs, and guns, Lamont at twenty-six lay in a hospital
bed, shrouded in bandages, his body riddled with bullet
holes. Rushing to the hospital, Shriver found Lamont
barely able to talk, his mother and girlfriend huddled
over him. Seeing his former teacher, Lamont motioned
him to the bedside, and as Shriver leaned over to hear,
whispered, "Shrive, when I get out of here, I'm gonna
use the SOCS method."
Lamont went through Hillhouse High in the years be-
fore the social-development course was given there.
Would his life have turned out differently had he be-
nefited from such an education throughout his school
years, as children in New Haven public schools do now?
The signs point to a possible yes, though no one can ever
say for sure.
As Tim Shriver put it, "One thing is clear: the proving
ground for social problem-solving is not just the
classroom, but the cafeteria, the streets, home." Con-
sider testimony from teachers in the New Haven pro-
gram. One recounts how a former student, still single,
visited and said that she almost certainly would have
been an unwed mother by now "if she hadn't learned to
 539/661

stand up for her rights during our Social Development

classes."13 Another teacher recalls how a student's rela-
tionship with her mother was so poor that their talks
continually ended up as screaming matches; after the
girl learned about calming down and thinking before re-
acting, the mother told her teacher that they could now
talk without going "off the deep end." At the Troup
school, a sixth grader passed a note to the teacher of her
Social Development class; her best friend, the note said,
was pregnant, had no one to talk to about what to do,
and was planning suicide—but she knew the teacher
would care.
A revealing moment came when I was observing a
seventh-grade class in social development in the New
Haven Schools, and the teacher asked for "someone to
tell me about a disagreement they've had recently that
ended in a good way."
A plumpish twelve-year-old girl shot up her hand:
"This girl was supposed to be my friend and someone
said she wanted to fight me. They told me she was going
to get me in a corner after school."
But instead of confronting the other girl in anger, she
applied an approach encouraged in the class—finding
out what is going on before jumping to conclusions: "So
I went to the girl and I asked why she said that stuff.
And she said she never did. So we never had a fight."
 540/661

The story seems innocuous enough. Except that the

girl who tells the tale had already been expelled from
another school for fighting. In the past she attacked
first, asked questions later—or not at all. For her to en-
gage a seeming adversary in a constructive way rather
than immediately wading into an angry confrontal is a
small but real victory.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the impact of such
emotional literacy classes are the data shared with me
by the principal of this twelve-year-old's school. An un-
bendable rule there is that children caught fighting are
suspended. But as the emotional literacy classes have
been phased in over the years there has been a steady
drop in the number of suspensions. "Last year," says the
principal, "there were 106 suspensions. So far this
year—we're up to March—there have been only 26."
These are concrete benefits. But apart from such anec-
dotes of lives bettered or saved, there is the empirical
question of how much emotional literacy classes really
matter to those who go through them. The data suggest
that although such courses do not change anyone
overnight, as children advance through the curriculum
from grade to grade, there are discernible improvements
in the tone of a school and the outlook—and level of
emotional competence—of the girls and boys who take
them.
 541/661

There have been a handful of objective evaluations,

the best of which compare students in these courses
with equivalent students not taking them, with inde-
pendent observers rating the children's behavior.
Another method is to track changes in the same stu-
dents before and after the courses based on objective
measures of their behavior, such as the number of
schoolyard fights or suspensions. Pooling such assess-
ments reveals a widespread benefit for children's emo-
tional and social competence, for their behavior in and
out of the classroom, and for their ability to learn (see
Appendix F for details):

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS

• Improvement in recognizing and naming own

emotions
• Better able to understand the causes of feelings
• Recognizing the difference between feelings and
actions

MANAGING EMOTIONS

• Better frustration tolerance and anger management

• Fewer verbal put-downs, fights, and classroom
disruptions
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• Better able to express anger appropriately, without

fighting
• Fewer suspensions and expulsions
• Less aggressive or self-destructive behavior
• More positive feelings about self, school, and family
• Better at handling stress
• Less loneliness and social anxiety

HARNESSING EMOTIONS PRODUCTIVELY

• More responsible
• Better able to focus on the task at hand and pay
attention
• Less impulsive; more self-control
• Improved scores on achievement tests

EMPATHY: READING EMOTIONS

• Better able to take another person's perspective

• Improved empathy and sensitivity to others' feelings
• Better at listening to others

HANDLING RELATIONSHIPS

• Increased ability to analyze and understand

relationships
• Better at resolving conflicts and negotiating
disagreements
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• Better at solving problems in relationships

• More assertive and skilled at communicating
• More popular and outgoing; friendly and involved
with peers
• More sought out by peers
• More concerned and considerate
• More "pro-social" and harmonious in groups
• More sharing, cooperation, and helpfulness
• More democratic in dealing with others

One item on this list demands special attention: emo-

tional literacy programs improve children's academic
achievement scores and school performance. This is not
an isolated finding; it recurs again and again in such
studies. In a time when too many children lack the capa-
city to handle their upsets, to listen or focus, to rein in
impulse, to feel responsible for their work or care about
learning, anything that will buttress these skills will help
in their education. In this sense, emotional literacy en-
hances schools' ability to teach. Even in a time of back-
to-basics and budget cuts, there is an argument to be
made that these programs help reverse a tide of educa-
tional decline and strengthen schools in accomplishing
their main mission, and so are well worth the
investment.
Beyond these educational advantages, the courses
seem to help children better fulfill their roles in life,
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becoming better friends, students, sons and daugh-

ters—and in the future are more likely to be better hus-
bands and wives, workers and bosses, parents, and cit-
izens. While not every boy and girl will acquire these
skills with equal sureness, to the degree they do we are
all the better for it. "A rising tide lifts all boats," as Tim
Shriver put it. "It's not just the kids with problems, but
all kids who can benefit from these skills; these are an
inoculation for life."

CHARACTER, MORALITY, AND THE

ARTS OF DEMOCRACY
There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that
emotional intelligence represents: character. Character,
writes Amitai Etzioni, the George Washington
University social theorist, is "the psychological muscle
that moral conduct requires."14 And philosopher John
Dewey saw that a moral education is most potent when
lessons are taught to children in the course of real
events, not just as abstract lessons—the mode of emo-
tional literacy.15
If character development is a foundation of democrat-
ic societies, consider some of the ways emotional intelli-
gence buttresses this foundation. The bedrock of charac-
ter is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers
since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control. A
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related keystone of character is being able to motivate

and guide oneself, whether in doing homework, finish-
ing a job, or getting up in the morning. And, as we have
seen, the ability to defer gratification and to control and
channel one's urges to act is a basic emotional skill, one
that in a former day was called will. "We need to be in
control of ourselves—our appetites, our passions—to do
right by others," notes Thomas Lickona, writing about
character education.16 "It takes will to keep emotion un-
der the control of reason."
Being able to put aside one's self-centered focus and
impulses has social benefits: it opens the way to em-
pathy, to real listening, to taking another person's per-
spective. Empathy, as we have seen, leads to caring, al-
truism, and compassion. Seeing things from another's
perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so
breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences. These
capacities are ever more called on in our increasingly
pluralistic society, allowing people to live together in
mutual respect and creating the possibility of productive
public discourse. These are basic arts of democracy.17
Schools, notes Etzioni, have a central role in cultivat-
ing character by inculcating self-discipline and empathy,
which in turn enable true commitment to civic and mor-
al values.18 In doing so, it is not enough to lecture chil-
dren about values: they need to practice them, which
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happens as children build the essential emotional and

social skills. In this sense, emotional literacy goes hand
in hand with education for character, for moral develop-
ment, and for citizenship.

A LAST WORD
As I complete this book some troubling newspaper
items catch my eye. One announces that guns have be-
come the number-one cause of death in America, edging
out auto accidents. The second says that last year
murder rates rose by 3 percent.19 Particularly disturbing
is the prediction in that second article, by a criminolo-
gist, that we are in a lull before a "crime storm" to come
in the next decade. The reason he gives is that murders
by teenagers as young as fourteen and fifteen are on the
rise, and that age group represents the crest of a mini
baby boom. In the next decade this group will become
eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, the age at which vi-
olent crimes peak in the course of a criminal career. The
harbingers are on the horizon: A third article says that
in the four years between 1988 and 1992 Justice Depart-
ment figures show a 68 percent jump in the number of
juveniles charged with murder, aggravated assault, rob-
bery, and forcible rape, with aggravated assault alone up
80 percent.20
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These teenagers are the first generation to have not

just guns but automatic weaponry easily available to
them, just as their parents' generation was the first to
have wide access to drugs. The toting of guns by teen-
agers means that disagreements that in a former day
would have led to fistfights can readily lead to shootings
instead. And, as another expert points out, these teen-
agers "just aren't very good at avoiding disputes."
One reason they are so poor at this basic life skill, of
course, is that as a society we have not bothered to make
sure every child is taught the essentials of handling an-
ger or resolving conflicts positively—nor have we
bothered to teach empathy, impulse control, or any of
the other fundamentals of emotional competence. By
leaving the emotional lessons children learn to chance,
we risk largely wasting the window of opportunity
presented by the slow maturation of the brain to help
children cultivate a healthy emotional repertoire.
Despite high interest in emotional literacy among
some educators, these courses are as yet rare; most
teachers, principals, and parents simply do not know
they exist. The best models are largely outside the edu-
cation mainstream, in a handful of private schools and a
few hundred public schools. Of course no program, in-
cluding this one, is an answer to every problem. But giv-
en the crises we find ourselves and our children facing,
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and given the quantum of hope held out by courses in

emotional literacy, we must ask ourselves: Shouldn't we
be teaching these most essential skills for life to every
child—now more than ever?
And if not now, when?
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* For more information on emotional literacy courses:

The Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and
Emotional Learning (CASED, Yale Child Study Center,
P.O. Box 207900, 230 South Frontage Road, New
Haven, CT 06520-7900.
 APPENDIX A
What Is Emotion?
A word about what I refer to under the rubric emotion, a
term whose precise meaning psychologists and philo-
sophers have quibbled over for more than a century. In
its most literal sense, the Oxford English Dictionary
defines emotion as "any agitation or disturbance of
mind, feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental
state." I take emotion to refer to a feeling and its dis-
tinctive thoughts, psychological and biological states,
and range of propensities to act. There are hundreds of
emotions, along with their blends, variations, muta-
tions, and nuances. Indeed, there are many more sub-
tleties of emotion than we have words for.
Researchers continue to argue over precisely which
emotions can be considered primary—the blue, red, and
yellow of feeling from which all blends come—or even if
there are such primary emotions at all. Some theorists
propose basic families, though not all agree on them.
The main candidates and some of the members of their
families:

• Anger: fury, outrage, resentment, wrath, exaspera-

tion, indignation, vexation, acrimony, animosity,
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annoyance, irritability, hostility, and, perhaps at the ex-

treme, pathological hatred and violence
• Sadness: grief, sorrow, cheerlessness, gloom,
melancholy, self-pity, loneliness, dejection, despair, and,
when pathological, severe depression
• Fear: anxiety, apprehension, nervousness, concern,
consternation, misgiving, wariness, qualm, edginess,
dread, fright, terror; as a psychopathology, phobia and
panic
• Enjoyment: happiness, joy, relief, contentment,
bliss, delight, amusement, pride, sensual pleasure, thrill,
rapture, gratification, satisfaction, euphoria, whimsy,
ecstasy, and at the far edge, mania
• Love: acceptance, friendliness, trust, kindness, affin-
ity, devotion, adoration, infatuation, agape
• Surprise: shock, astonishment, amazement, wonder
• Disgust: contempt, disdain, scorn, abhorrence, aver-
sion, distaste, revulsion
• Shame: guilt, embarrassment, chagrin, remorse, hu-
miliation, regret, mortification, and contrition

To be sure, this list does not resolve every question

about how to categorize emotion. For example, what
about blends such as jealousy, a variant of anger that
also melds sadness and fear? And what of the virtues,
such as hope and faith, courage and forgiveness, cer-
tainty and equanimity? Or some of the classic vices,
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feelings such as doubt, complacency, sloth, and tor-

por—or boredom? There are no clear answers; the sci-
entific debate on how to classify emotions continues.
The argument for there being a handful of core emo-
tions hinges to some extent on the discovery by Paul Ek-
man, at the University of California at San Francisco,
that specific facial expressions for four of them (fear, an-
ger, sadness, enjoyment) are recognized by people in
cultures around the world, including preliterate peoples
presumably untainted by exposure to cinema or televi-
sion—suggesting their universality. Ekman showed fa-
cial photos portraying expressions with technical preci-
sion to people in cultures as remote as the Fore of New
Guinea, an isolated Stone Age tribe in the remote high-
lands, and found people everywhere recognized the
same basic emotions. This universality of facial expres-
sions for emotion was probably first noted by Darwin,
who saw it as evidence the forces of evolution had
stamped these signals in our central nervous system.
In seeking basic principles, I follow Ekman and others
in thinking of emotions in terms of families or dimen-
sions, taking the main families—anger, sadness, fear,
enjoyment, love, shame, and so on—as cases in point for
the endless nuances of our emotional life. Each of these
families has a basic emotional nucleus at its core, with
its relatives rippling out from there in countless
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mutations. In the outer ripples are moods, which, tech-

nically speaking, are more muted and last far longer
than an emotion (while it's relatively rare to be in the
full heat of anger all day, for example, it is not that rare
to be in a grumpy, irritable mood, in which shorter
bouts of anger are easily triggered). Beyond moods are
temperaments, the readiness to evoke a given emotion
or mood that makes people melancholy, timid, or
cheery. And still beyond such emotional dispositions are
the outright disorders of emotion such as clinical de-
pression or unremitting anxiety, in which someone feels
perpetually trapped in a toxic state.
 APPENDIX B
Hallmarks of the Emotion-
al Mind
Only in recent years has there emerged a scientific mod-
el of the emotional mind that explains how so much of
what we do can be emotionally driven—how we can be
so reasonable at one moment and so irrational the
next—and the sense in which emotions have their own
reasons and their own logic. Perhaps the two best as-
sessments of the emotional mind are offered independ-
ently by Paul Ekman, head of the Human Interaction
Laboratory at the University of California, San Fran-
cisco, and by Seymour Epstein, a clinical psychologist at
the University of Massachusetts.1 While Ekman and Ep-
stein have each weighed different scientific evidence, to-
gether they offer a basic list of the qualities that distin-
guish emotions from the rest of mental life.2

A Quick but Sloppy Response

The emotional mind is far quicker than the rational
mind, springing into action without pausing even a mo-
ment to consider what it is doing. Its quickness pre-
cludes the deliberate, analytic reflection that is the hall-
mark of the thinking mind. In evolution this quickness
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most likely revolved around that most basic decision,

what to pay attention to, and, once vigilant while, say,
confronting another animal, making split-second de-
cisions like, Do I eat this, or does it eat me? Those or-
ganisms that had to pause too long to reflect on these
answers were unlikely to have many progeny to pass on
their slower-acting genes.
Actions that spring from the emotional mind carry a
particularly strong sense of certainty, a by-product of a
streamlined, simplified way of looking at things that can
be absolutely bewildering to the rational mind. When
the dust settles, or even in mid-response, we find
ourselves thinking, "What did I do that for?"—a sign
that the rational mind is awakening to the moment, but
not with the rapidity of the emotional mind.
Since the interval between what triggers an emotion
and its eruption can be virtually instantaneous, the
mechanism that appraises perception must be capable
of great speed, even in brain time, which is reckoned in
thousandths of a second. This appraisal of the need to
act needs to be automatic, so rapid that it never enters
conscious awareness.3 This quick-and-dirty variety of
emotional response sweeps over us virtually before we
quite know what is happening.
This rapid mode of perception sacrifices accuracy for
speed, relying on first impressions, reacting to the
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overall picture or the most striking aspects. It takes

things in at once, as a whole, reacting without taking the
time for thoughtful analysis. Vivid elements can determ-
ine that impression, outweighing a careful evaluation of
the details. The great advantage is that the emotional
mind can read an emotional reality (he's angry with me;
she's lying; this is making him sad) in an instant, mak-
ing the intuitive snap judgments that tell us who to be
wary of, who to trust, who's in distress. The emotional
mind is our radar for danger; if we (or our forebears in
evolution) waited for the rational mind to make some of
these judgments, we might not only be wrong—we might
be dead. The drawback is that these impressions and in-
tuitive judgments, because they are made in the snap of
a finger, may be mistaken or misguided.
Paul Ekman proposes that this quickness, in which
emotions can overtake us before we are quite aware they
have started, is essential to their being so highly adapt-
ive: they mobilize us to respond to urgent events
without wasting time pondering whether to react or how
to respond. Using the system he developed for detecting
emotions from subtle changes in facial expression, Ek-
man can track microemotions that flit across the face in
less than a half second. Ekman and his collaborators
have discovered that emotional expressions begin to
show up in changes in facial musculature within a few
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thousandths of a second after the event that triggers the

reaction, and that the physiological changes typical of a
given emotion—like shunting blood flow and increasing
heart rate—also take only fractions of a second to begin.
This swiftness is particularly true of intense emotion,
like fear of a sudden threat.
Ekman argues that, technically speaking, the full heat
of emotion is very brief, lasting just seconds rather than
minutes, hours, or days. His reasoning is that it would
be maladaptive for an emotion to capture the brain and
body for a long time regardless of changing circum-
stance. If the emotions caused by a single event invari-
ably continued to dominate us after it had passed, and
regardless of what else was happening around us, then
our feelings would be poor guides to action. For emo-
tions to last longer the trigger must be sustained, in ef-
fect continually evoking the emotion, as when the loss of
a loved one keeps us mourning. When feelings persist
for hours, it is usually as moods, a muted form. Moods
set an affective tone, but they are not such strong
shapers of how we perceive and act as is the high heat of
full emotion.

First Feelings, Second Thoughts

Because it takes the rational mind a moment or two
longer to register and respond than it does the
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emotional mind, the "first impulse" in an emotional

situation is the heart's, not the head's. There is also a
second kind of emotional reaction, slower than the
quick-response, which simmers and brews first in our
thoughts before it leads to feeling. This second pathway
to triggering emotions is more deliberate, and we are
typically quite aware of the thoughts that lead to it. In
this kind of emotional reaction there is a more extended
appraisal; our thoughts—cognition—play the key role in
determining what emotions will be roused. Once we
make an appraisal—"that taxi driver is cheating me" or
"this baby is adorable," a fitting emotional response fol-
lows. In this slower sequence, more fully articulated
thought precedes feeling. More complicated emotions,
like embarrassment or apprehension over an upcoming
exam, follow this slower route, taking seconds or
minutes to unfold—these are emotions that follow from
thoughts.
By contrast, in the fast-response sequence feeling
seems to precede or be simultaneous with thought. This
rapid-fire emotional reaction takes over in situations
that have the urgency of primal survival. This is the
power of such rapid decisions: they mobilize us in an in-
stant to rise to an emergency. Our most intense feelings
are involuntary reactions; we cannot decide when they
will erupt. "Love," wrote Stendhal, "is like a fever that
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comes and goes independently of the will." Not just love,

but our angers and fears, as well, sweep over us, seem-
ing to happen to us rather than being our choice. For
that reason they can offer an alibi: "It is the fact that we
cannot choose the emotions which we have," notes Ek-
man, that allows people to explain away their actions by
saying they were in the grip of emotion.4
Just as there are quick and slow paths to emo-
tion—one through immediate perception and the other
through reflective thought—there are also emotions
which come bidden. One example is intentionally ma-
nipulated feeling, the actors' stock-in-trade, like the
tears that come when sad memories are intentionally
milked for their effect. But actors are simply more
skilled than the rest of us at the intentional use of the
second pathway to emotion, feeling via thinking. While
we cannot easily change what specific emotions a cer-
tain kind of thought will trigger, we very often can, and
do, choose what to think about. Just as a sexual fantasy
can lead to sexual feelings, so can happy memories
cheer us up, or melancholy thoughts make us reflective.
But the rational mind usually does not decide what
emotions we "should" have. Instead, our feelings typic-
ally come to us as a fait accompli. What the rational
mind can ordinarily control is the course of those
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reactions. A few exceptions aside, we do not decide

when to be mad, sad, and so on.

A Symbolic, Childlike Reality

The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes
elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of
it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes,
metaphors, and images speak directly to the emotional
mind, as do the arts—novels, film, poetry, song, theater,
opera. Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus,
have touched their disciples' hearts by speaking in the
language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables, and
stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little
sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in
the vernacular of the heart.
This logic of the heart—of the emotional mind—is
well-described by Freud in his concept of "primary pro-
cess" thought; it is the logic of religion and poetry, psy-
chosis and children, dream and myth (as Joseph Camp-
bell put it, "Dreams are private myths; myths are shared
dreams"). The primary process is the key that unlocks
the meanings of works like James Joyce's Ulysses: In
primary process thought, loose associations determine
the flow of a narrative; one object symbolizes another;
one feeling displaces another and stands for it; wholes
are condensed into parts. There is no time, no laws of
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cause-and-effect. Indeed, there is no such thing as "No"

in the primary process; anything is possible. The psy-
choanalytic method is in part the art of deciphering and
unraveling these substitutions in meaning.
If the emotional mind follows this logic and its rules,
with one element standing for another, things need not
necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what
matters is how they are perceived; things are as they
seem. What something reminds us of can be far more
important than what it "is." Indeed, in emotional life,
identities can be like a hologram in the sense that a
single part evokes a whole. As Seymour Epstein points
out, while the rational mind makes logical connections
between causes and effects, the emotional mind is indis-
criminate, connecting things that merely have similar
striking features.5
There are many ways in which the emotional mind is
childlike, the more so the stronger the emotion grows.
One way is categorical thinking, where everything is in
black and white, with no shades of gray; someone who is
mortified about a faux pas might have the immediate
thought, "I always say the wrong thing." Another sign of
this childlike mode is personalized thinking, with events
perceived with a bias centering on oneself, like the
driver who, after an accident, explained that "the tele-
phone pole came straight at me."
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This childlike mode is self-confirming, suppressing or

ignoring memories or facts that would undermine its be-
liefs and seizing on those that support it. The beliefs of
the rational mind are tentative; new evidence can dis-
confirm one belief and replace it with a new one—it
reasons by objective evidence. The emotional mind,
however, takes its beliefs to be absolutely true, and so
discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is
so hard to reason with someone who is emotionally up-
set: no matter the soundness of your argument from a
logical point of view, it carries no weight if it is out of
keeping with the emotional conviction of the moment.
Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and
"proofs" all their own.

The Past Imposed on the Present

When some feature of an event seems similar to an
emotionally charged memory from the past, the emo-
tional mind responds by triggering the feelings that
went with the remembered event. The emotional mind
reacts to the present as though it were the past.6 The
trouble is that, especially when the appraisal is fast and
automatic, we may not realize that what was once the
case is no longer so. Someone who has learned, through
painful childhood beatings, to react to an angry scowl
with intense fear and loathing will have that reaction to
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some degree even as an adult, when the scowl carries no

such threat.
If the feelings are strong, then the reaction that is
triggered is obvious. But if the feelings are vague or
subtle, we may not quite realize the emotional reaction
we are having, even though it is subtly coloring how we
react to the moment. Thoughts and reactions at this mo-
ment will take on the coloration of thoughts and reac-
tions then, even though it may seem that the reaction is
due solely to the circumstance of the moment. Our emo-
tional mind will harness the rational mind to its pur-
poses, so we come up with explanations for our feelings
and reactions—rationalizations—justifying them in
terms of the present moment, without realizing the in-
fluence of the emotional memory. In that sense, we can
have no idea of what is actually going on, though we
may have the conviction of certainty that we know ex-
actly what is happening. At such moments the emotion-
al mind has entrained the rational mind, putting it to its
own uses.

State-specific Reality
The working of the emotional mind is to a large de-
gree state-specific, dictated by the particular feeling as-
cendant at a given moment. How we think and act when
we are feeling romantic is entirely different from how
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we behave when enraged or dejected; in the mechanics

of emotion, each feeling has its own distinct repertoire
of thought, reactions, even memories. These state-spe-
cific repertoires become most predominant in moments
of intense emotion.
One sign that such a repertoire is active is selective
memory. Part of the mind's response to an emotional
situation is to reshuffle memory and options for action
so that those most relevant are at the top of the hier-
archy and so more readily enacted. And, as we have
seen, each major emotion has its hallmark biological
signature, a pattern of sweeping changes that entrain
the body as that emotion becomes ascendant, and a
unique set of cues the body automatically sends out
when in its grip.7
 APPENDIX C
The Neural Circuitry of
Fear
The amygdala is central to fear. When a rare brain dis-
ease destroyed the amygdala (but no other brain struc-
tures) in the patient neurologists call "S.M.," fear disap-
peared from her mental repertoire. She became unable
to identify looks of fear on other people's faces, nor to
make such an expression herself. As her neurologist put
it, "If someone put a gun to S.M.'s head, she would know
intellectually to be afraid but she would not feel afraid
as you or I would."
Neuroscientists have mapped the circuitry for fear in
perhaps finest detail, though at the present state of this
art the full circuitry for none of the emotions is com-
pletely surveyed. Fear is an apt case in point for under-
standing the neural dynamics of emotion. Fear, in evol-
ution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any
other emotion it is crucial for survival. Of course in
modern times misplaced fears are the bane of daily life,
leaving us suffering from frets, angst, and garden variety
worries—or at pathological extreme, from panic attacks,
phobias, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
 566/661

Say you're alone one night at home, reading a book,

when suddenly you hear a crash in another room. What
happens in your brain over the next moments offers a
window into the neural circuitry of fear, and the role of
the amygdala as an alarm system. The first brain circuit
involved simply takes in that sound as raw physical
waves and transforms them into the language of the
brain to startle you into alertness. This circuit goes from
the ear to the brainstem and then to the thalamus. From
there two branches separate: a smaller bundle of projec-
tions leads to the amygdala and the nearby hippocam-
pus; the other, larger pathway leads to the auditory cor-
tex in the temporal lobe, where sounds are sorted out
and comprehended.
The hippocampus, a key storage site for memory,
quickly sorts that "crash" against other similar sounds
you've heard, to see if it is familiar—is this "crash" one
that you immediately recognize? Meanwhile the audit-
ory cortex is doing a more sophisticated analysis of the
sound to try to understand its source—is it the cat? A
shutter banging in the wind? A prowler? The auditory
cortex comes up with its hypothesis—it might be the cat
knocking a lamp off the table, say, but it might also be a
prowler—and sends that message to the amygdala and
hippocampus, which quickly compare it to similar
memories.
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If the conclusion is reassuring (it's only the shutter

that bangs whenever it gets too windy) then the general
alert does not escalate to the next level. But if you are
still unsure, another coil of circuitry reverberating
between amygdala, hippocampus, and the prefrontal
cortex further heightens your uncertainty and fixates
your attention, making you even more concerned about
identifying the source of the sound. If no satisfying an-
swer comes from this further keen analysis, the amyg-
dala triggers an alarm, its central area activating the hy-
pothalamus, the brainstem, and the autonomic nervous
system.
The superb architecture of the amygdala as a central
alarm system for the brain becomes evident in this mo-
ment of apprehension and subliminal anxiety. The sev-
eral bundles of neurons in the amygdala each have a dis-
tinct set of projections with receptors primed for differ-
ent neurotransmitters, something like those home alarm
companies where operators stand at the ready to send
out calls to the local fire department, police, and a
neighbor whenever a home security system signals
trouble.
Different parts of the amygdala receive differing in-
formation. To the amygdala's lateral nucleus come pro-
jections from the thalamus and auditory and visual cor-
tices. Smells, via the olfactory bulb, come to the
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corticomedial area of the amygdala, and tastes and mes-

sages from the viscera go to the central area. These in-
coming signals make the amygdala a continual sentinel,
scrutinizing every sensory experience.
From the amygdala projections extend out to every
major part of the brain. From the central and medial
areas a branch goes to the areas of the hypothalamus
that secrete the body's emergency-response substance,
corticotropm-releasing hormone (CRH), which mobil-
izes the fight-or-flight reaction via a cascade of other
hormones. The amygdala's basal area sends out
branches to the corpus striatum, linking into the brain's
system for movement. And, via the nearby central nucle-
us, the amygdala sends signals to the autonomic
nervous system via the medulla, activating a wide range
of far-flung responses in the cardiovascular system, the
muscles, and the gut.
From the amygdala's basolateral area, arms go to the
cingulate cortex and to the fibers known as the "central
gray," cells that regulate the large muscles of the skelet-
on. It is these cells that make a dog snarl or that arch the
back of a cat threatening an interloper on its territory.
In humans these same circuits tighten the muscles of
the vocal cords, creating the high-pitched voice of fright.
Still another pathway from the amygdala leads to the
locus ceruleus in the brainstem, which in turn
 569/661

manufactures norepinephrine (also called "nor-adren-

aline") and disperses it throughout the brain. The net ef-
fect of norepinephrine is to heighten the overall reactiv-
ity of the brain areas that receive it, making the sensory
circuits more sensitive. Norepinephrine suffuses the
cortex, the brainstem, and the limbic system itself, in es-
sence setting the brain on edge. Now even the ordinary
creaking of the house can send a tremor of fear coursing
through you. Most of these changes go on outside
awareness, so that you are not yet aware you feel fear.
But as you begin to actually feel fear—that is, as the
anxiety that had been unconscious pierces aware-
ness—the amygdala seamlessly commands a wide-ran-
ging response. It signals cells in the brainstem to put a
fearful expression on your face, make you edgy and eas-
ily startled, freeze unrelated movements your muscles
had underway, speed your heart rate and raise your
blood pressure, and slow your breathing (you may no-
tice yourself suddenly holding your breath when you
first feel fearful, all the better to hear more clearly what
it is you are fearful of). That is only one part of a wide,
carefully coordinated array of changes the amygdala and
connected areas orchestrate as they commandeer the
brain in a crisis.
Meanwhile the amygdala, along with the interconnec-
ted hippocampus, directs the cells that send key
 570/661

neurotransmitters, for example, to trigger releases of

dopamine that lead to the riveting of attention on the
source of your fear—the strange sounds—and put your
muscles at readiness to react accordingly. At the same
time the amygdala signals sensory areas for vision and
attention, making sure that the eyes seek out whatever is
most relevant to the emergency at hand. Simultaneously
cortical memory systems are reshuffled so that know-
ledge and memories most relevant to the particular
emotional urgency will be most readily recalled, taking
precedence over other less relevant strands of thought.
Once these signals have been sent, you are pitched
into full-fledged fear: you become aware of the charac-
teristic tightness in your gut, your speeding heart, the
tightening of the muscles around your neck and
shoulders or the trembling of your limbs; your body
freezes in place as you strain your attention to hear any
further sounds, and your mind races with possible lurk-
ing dangers and ways to respond. This entire se-
quence—from surprise to uncertainty to apprehension
to fear—can be telescoped within a second or so. (For
more information, see Jerome Kagan, Galen's Prophecy.
New York: Basic Books, 1994.)
 APPENDIX D
W. T. Grant Consortium:
Active Ingredients of Pre-
vention Programs
Key ingredients of effective programs include:

EMOTIONAL SKILLS

• Identifying and labeling feelings

• Expressing feelings
• Assessing the intensity of feelings
• Managing feelings
• Delaying gratification
• Controlling impulses
• Reducing stress
• Knowing the difference between feelings and actions

COGNITIVE SKILLS
• Self-talk—conducting an "inner dialogue" as a way to
cope with a topic or challenge or reinforce one's own
behavior
• Reading and interpreting social cues—for example,
recognizing social influences on behavior and seeing
oneself in the perspective of the larger community
 572/661

• Using steps for problem-solving and decision-mak-

ing—for instance, controlling impulses, setting goals,
identifying alternative actions, anticipating
consequences
• Understanding the perspective of others
• Understanding behavioral norms (what is and is not
acceptable behavior)
• A positive attitude toward life
• Self-awareness—for example, developing realistic ex-
pectations about oneself
BEHAVIORAL SKILLS
• Nonverbal—communicating through eye contact, fa-
cial expressiveness, tone of voice, gestures, and so on
• Verbal—making clear requests, responding effectively
to criticism, resisting negative influences, listening to
others, helping others, participating in positive peer
groups
 573/661

SOURCE: W. T. Grant Consortium on the School-Based Promo-

tion of Social Competence, "Drug and Alcohol Prevention Cur-
ricula," in J. David Hawkins et al., Communities That Care
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
 APPENDIX E
The Self Science
Curriculum
Main components:
• Self-awareness: observing yourself and recognizing
your feelings; building a vocabulary for feelings; know-
ing the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and
reactions
• Personal decision-making: examining your actions
and knowing their consequences; knowing if thought or
feeling is ruling a decision; applying these insights to is-
sues such as sex and drugs
• Managing feelings: monitoring "self-talk" to catch
negative messages such as internal put-downs; realizing
what is behind a feeling (e.g., the hurt that underlies an-
ger);finding ways to handle fears and anxieties, anger,
and sadness
• Handling stress: learning the value of exercise,
guided imagery, relaxation methods
• Empathy: understanding others' feelings and con-
cerns and taking their perspective; appreciating the dif-
ferences in how people feel about things
• Communications: talking about feelings effectively:
becoming a good listener and question-asker;
 575/661

distinguishing between what someone does or says and

your own reactions or judgments about it; sending "I"
messages instead of blame
• Self-disclosure: valuing openness and building trust
in a relationship; knowing when it's safe to risk talking
about your private feelings
• Insight: identifying patterns in your emotional life
and reactions; recognizing similar patterns in others
• Self-acceptance: feeling pride and seeing yourself in
a positive light; recognizing your strengths and weak-
nesses; being able to laugh at yourself
• Personal responsibility: taking responsibility; recog-
nizing the consequences of your decisions and actions,
accepting your feelings and moods, following through
on commitments (e.g., to studying)
• Assertiveness: stating your concerns and feelings
without anger or passivity
• Group dynamics: cooperation; knowing when and
how to lead, when to follow
• Conflict resolution: how to fight fair with other kids,
with parents, with teachers; the win/win model for ne-
gotiating compromise
 576/661

SOURCE: Karen F. Stone and Harold Q. Dillehunt, Self Science:

The Subject Is Me (Santa Monica: Goodyear Publishing Co.,
1978).
 APPENDIX F
Social and Emotional
Learning: Results
Child Development Project
Eric Schaps, Development Studies Center, Oakland,
California.
Evaluation in schools in Northern California, grades
K-6; rating by independent observers, comparing with
control schools.

RESULTS:

• more responsible
• more assertive
• more popular and outgoing
• more pro-social and helpful
• better understanding of others
• more considerate, concerned
• more pro-social strategies for interpersonal problem-
solving
• more harmonious
• more "democratic"
• better conflict-resolution skills
 578/661

SOURCES: E. Schaps and V. Battistich, "Promoting Health

Development Through School-Based Prevention: New Ap-
proaches," OSAP Prevention Monograph, no. 8: Preventing
Adolescent Drug Use: From Theory to Practice. Eric Gopelrud
(ed.), Rockville, MD: Office of Substance Abuse Prevention,
U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1991.
D. Solomon, M. Watson, V. Battistich, E. Schaps, and
K. Delucchi, "Creating a Caring Community: Education-
al Practices That Promote Children's Prosocial Develop-
ment," in F. K. Oser, A. Dick, and J.-L. Patry, eds., Ef-
fective and Responsible Teaching: The New Synthesis
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).

Paths
Mark Greenberg, Fast Track Project, University of
Washington.
Evaluated in schools in Seattle, grades 1-5; ratings by
teachers, comparing matched control students among 1)
regular students, 2) deaf students, 3) special-education
students.

RESULTS:
• Improvement in social cognitive skills
• Improvement in emotion, recognition, and
understanding
• Better self-control
 579/661

• Better planning for solving cognitive tasks

• More thinking before acting
• More effective conflict resolution
• More positive classroom atmosphere
SPECIAL-NEEDS STUDENTS:
Improved classroom behavior on:
• Frustration tolerance
• Assertive social skills
• Task orientation
• Peer skills
• Sharing
• Sociability
• Self-control

IMPROVED EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING:

• Recognition
• Labeling
• Decreases in self-reports of sadness and depression
• Decrease in anxiety and withdrawal

SOURCES: Conduct Problems Research Group, "A Develop-

mental and Clinical Model for the Prevention of Conduct
Disorder: The Fast Track Program," Development and Psycho-
pathology 4 (1992).
 580/661

M. T. Greenberg and C. A. Kusche, Promoting Social

and Emotional Development in Deaf Children: The
PATHS Project (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1993).
M. T. Greenberg, C. A. Kusche, E. T. Cook, and J. P.
Quamma, "Promoting Emotional Competence in
School-Aged Children: The Effects of the PATHS Cur-
riculum," Development and Psychopathology 7 (1995).

Seattle Social Development Project

J. David Hawkins, Social Development Research Group,
University of Washington
Evaluated in Seattle elementary and middle schools
by independent testing and objective standards, in com-
parison to nonprogram schools.
RESULTS:
• More positive attachment to family and school
• Boys less aggressive, girls less self-destructive
• Fewer suspensions and expulsions among low-achiev-
ing students
• Less drug-use initiation
• Less delinquency
• Better scores on standardized achievement tests

SOURCES: E. Schaps and V. Battistich, "Promoting Health

Development Through School-Based Prevention: New
 581/661

Approaches," OSAP Prevention Monograph, no. 8: Prevent-

ing Adolescent Drug Use: From Theory to Practice. Eric
Gopelrud (ed.), Rockville, MD: Office of Substance Abuse Pre-
vention, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1991.
J. D. Hawkins et al., "The Seattle Social Development
Project," in J. McCord and R. Tremblay, eds., The Pre-
vention of Antisocial Behavior in Children (New York:
Guil-ford, 1992).
J. D. Hawkins, E. Von Cleve, and R. F. Catalano, "Re-
ducing Early Childhood Aggression: Results of a
Primary Prevention Program, "Journal of the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 30, 2
(1991), pp. 208-17.
J. A. O'Donnell, J. D. Hawkins, R. F. Catalano, R. D.
Abbott, and L. E. Day, "Preventing School Failure, Drug
Use, and Delinquency Among Low-Income Children: Ef-
fects of a Long-Term Prevention Project in Elementary
Schools," American Journal of Ortho-psychiatry 65
(1994).
Yale-New Haven Social Competence Promotion
Program
Roger Weissberg, University of Illinois at Chicago
Evaluated in New Haven Public Schools, grades 5-8,
by independent observations and student and teacher
reports, compared with control group.
 582/661

RESULTS:
• Improved problem-solving skills
• More involvement with peers
• Better impulse control
• Improved behavior
• Improved interpersonal effectiveness and popularity
• Enhanced coping skills
• More skill in handling interpersonal problems
• Better coping with anxiety
• Less delinquent behaviors
• Better conflict-resolution skills
SOURCES: M. J. Elias and R. P. Weissberg, "School-Based So-
cial Competence Promotion as a Primary Prevention Strategy:
A Tale of Two Projects," Prevention in Human Services 7, 1
(1990), pp. 177-200.
M. Caplan, R. P. Weissberg, J. S. Grober, P. J. Sivo, K.
Grady, and C. Jacoby, "Social Competence Promotion
with Inner-City and Suburban Young Adolescents: Ef-
fects of Social Adjustment and Alcohol Use," Journal of
Consulting and Clinical Psychology 60, 1 (1992), pp.
56-63.
Resolving Conflict Creatively Program
Linda Lantieri, National Center for Resolving Conflict
Creatively Program (an initiative of Educators for Social
Responsibility), New York City
 583/661

Evaluated in New York City schools, grades K-12, by

teachers' ratings, pre- and post-program.
RESULTS:
• Less violence in class
• Fewer verbal put-downs in class
• More-caring atmosphere
• More willingness to cooperate
• More empathy
• Improved communication skills

SOURCE: Metis Associates, Inc., The Resolving Conflict Creat-

ively Program: 1988-1989. Summary of Significant Findings
of RCCP New York Site (New York: Metis Associates, May
1990).
The Improving Social Awareness-Social Problem Solv-
ing Project
Maurice Elias, Rutgers University
Evaluated in New Jersey schools, grades K-6, by
teacher ratings, peer assessments, and school records,
compared to nonparticipants.
RESULTS:
• More sensitive to others' feelings
• Better understanding of the consequences of their
behavior
 584/661

• Increased ability to "size up" interpersonal situations

and plan appropriate actions
• Higher self-esteem
• More prosocial behavior
• Sought out by peers for help
• Better handled the transition to middle school
• Less antisocial, self-destructive, and socially dis-
ordered behavior, even when followed up into high
school
• Improved learning-to-learn skills
• Better self-control, social awareness, and social
decision-making in and out of the classroom

SOURCES: M. J. Elias, M. A. Gara, T. R Schuyler, L. R.

Branden-Muller, and M. A. Sayette, "The Promotion of Social
Competence: Longitudinal Study of a Preventive School-Based
Program," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 61 (1991),
pp. 409-17.
M. J. Elias and J. Clabby, Building Social Problem
Solving Skills: Guidelines From a School-Based Pro-
gram (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
 Notes
PART ONE: THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN

Chapter 1. What Are Emotions For?

1. Associated Press, September 15, 1993.

2. The timelessness of this theme of selfless love is suggested

by how pervasive it is in world myth: The Jataka tales, told
throughout much of Asia for millennia, all narrate vari-
ations on such parables of self-sacrifice.

3. Altruistic love and human survival: The evolutionary the-

ories that posit the adaptive advantages of altruism are
well-summarized in Malcolm Slavin and Daniel Kriegman,
The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche (New York:
Guilford Press, 1992).

4. Much of this discussion is based on Paul Ekman's key es-

say, "An Argument for Basic Emotions," Cognition and
Emotion, 6, 1992, pp. 169-200. This point is from P. N.
Johnson-Laird and K. Oatley's essay in the same issue of
the journal.

5. The shooting of Matilda Crabtree: The New York Times,

Nov. 11, 1994.
 586/661

6. Only in adults: An observation by Paul Ekman, University

of California at San Francisco.

7. Body changes in emotions and their evolutionary reasons:

Some of the changes are documented in Robert W. Leven-
son, Paul Ekman, and Wallace V. Friesen, "Voluntary Fa-
cial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomous Ner-
vous System Activity," Psychophysiology, 27, 1990. This
list is culled from there and other sources. At this point
such a list remains speculative to a degree; there is scientif-
ic debate over the precise biological signature of each emo-
tion, with some researchers taking the position that there is
far more overlap than difference among emotions, or that
our present ability to measure the biological correlates of
emotion is too immature to distinguish among them reli-
ably. For this debate see: Paul Ekman and Richard David-
son, eds., Fundamental Questions About Emotions (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

8. As Paul Ekman puts it, "Anger is the most dangerous emo-

tion; some of the main problems destroying society these
days involve anger run amok. It's the least adaptive emo-
tion now because it mobilizes us to fight. Our emotions
evolved when we didn't have the technology to act so
powerfully on them. In prehistoric times, when you had an
instantaneous rage and for a second wanted to kill
someone, you couldn't do it very easily—but now you can."

9. Erasmus of Rotterdam, In Praise of Folly, trans. Eddie

Radice (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 87.
 587/661

10. Such basic responses defined what might pass for the
"emotional life"—more aptly, an "instinct life"—of these
species. More important in evolutionary terms, these are
the decisions crucial to survival; those animals that could
do them well, or well enough, survived to pass on their
genes. In these early times, mental life was brutish: the
senses and a simple repertoire of reactions to the stimuli
they received got a lizard, frog, bird, or fish—and, perhaps,
a brontosaurus—through the day. But this runt brain did
not yet allow for what we think of as an emotion.
11. The limbic system and emotions: R. Joseph, "The Naked
Neuron: Evolution and the Languages of the Brain and
Body," New York: Plenum Publishing, 1993; Paul D.
MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New York: Plen-
um, 1990).
12. Rhesus infants and adaptability: "Aspects of emotion con-
served across species," Ned Kalin, M.D., Departments of
Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, pre-
pared for the MacArthur Affective Neuroscience Meeting,
Nov., 1992.

Chapter 2. Anatomy of an Emotional

Hijacking
1. The case of the man with no feelings was described by R.
Joseph, op. cit. p. 83. On the other hand, there may be
some vestiges of feeling in people who lack an amygdala
(see Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson, eds., Questions
 588/661

About Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

The different findings may hinge on exactly which parts of
the amygdala and related circuits were missing; the last
word on the detailed neurology of emotion is far from in.

2. Like many neuroscientists, LeDoux works at several levels,

studying, for instance, how specific lesions in a rat's brain
change its behavior; painstakingly tracing the path of
single neurons; setting up elaborate experiments to condi-
tion fear in rats whose brains have been surgically altered.
His findings, and others reviewed here, are at the frontier
of exploration in neuroscience, and so remain somewhat
speculative—particularly the implications that seem to flow
from the raw data to an understanding of our emotional
life. But LeDoux's work is supported by a growing body of
converging evidence from a variety of neuroscientists who
are steadily laying bare the neural underpinnings of emo-
tions. See, for example, Joseph LeDoux, "Sensory Systems
and Emotion," Integrative Psychiatry, 4, 1986; Joseph
LeDoux, "Emotion and the Limbic System Concept," Con-
cepts in Neuroscience, 2,1992.

3. The idea of the limbic system as the brain's emotional cen-

ter was introduced by neurologist Paul MacLean more than
forty years ago. In recent years discoveries like LeDoux's
have refined the limbic system concept, showing that some
of its central structures like the hippocampus are less dir-
ectly involved in emotions, while circuits linking other
parts of the brain—particularly the prefrontal lobes—to the
amygdala are more central. Beyond that, there is a growing
 589/661

recognition that each emotion may call on distinct brain

areas. The most current thinking is that there is not a
neatly defined single "emotional brain," but rather several
systems of circuits that disperse the regulation of a given
emotion to farflung, but coordinated, parts of the brain.
Neuroscientists speculate that when the full brain mapping
of the emotions is accomplished, each major emotion will
have its own topography, a distinct map of neuronal path-
ways determining its unique qualities, though many or
most of these circuits are likely to be interlinked at key
junctures in the limbic system, like the amygdala, and pre-
frontal cortex. See Joseph LeDoux, "Emotional Memory
Systems in the Brain," Behavioral and Brain Research,
58,1993.

4. Brain circuitry of different levels of fear: This analysis is

based on the excellent synthesis in Jerome Kagan, Galen's
Prophecy (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

5. I wrote about Joseph LeDoux's research in The New York

Times on August 15,1989. The discussion in this chapter is
based on interviews with him, and several of his articles,
including Joseph LeDoux, "Emotional Memory Systems in
the Brain," Behavioural Brain Research, 58,1993; Joseph
LeDoux, "Emotion, Memory and the Brain," Scientific
American, June, 1994; Joseph LeDoux, "Emotion and the
Limbic System Concept," Concepts in Neuroscience, 2,
1992.
 590/661

6. Unconscious preferences: William Raft Kunst-Wilson and

R. B. Zajonc, "Affective Discrimination of Stimuli That
Cannot Be Recognized," Science (Feb. 1, 1980).

7. Unconscious opinion: John A. Bargh, "First Second: The

Preconscious in Social Interactions," presented at the
meeting of the American Psychological Society, Washing-
ton, DC (June 1994).

8. Emotional memory: Larry Cahill et al., "Beta-adrenergic

activation and memory for emotional events," Nature (Oct.
20, 1994).

9. Psychoanalytic theory and brain maturation: the most de-

tailed discussion of the early years and the emotional con-
sequences of brain development is Allan Schore, Affect
Regulation and the Origin of Self (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
10. Dangerous, even if you don't know what it is: LeDoux,
quoted in "How Scary Things Get That Way," Science (Nov.
6, 1992), p. 887.
11. Much of this speculation about the fine-tuning of emotional
response by the neocortex comes from Ned Kalin, op. cit.
12. A closer look at the neuroanatomy shows how the prefront-
al lobes act as emotional managers. Much evidence points
to part of the prefrontal cortex as a site where most or all
cortical circuits involved in an emotional reaction come to-
gether. In humans, the strongest connections between neo-
cortex and amygdala run to the left prefrontal lobe and the
 591/661

temporal lobe below and to the side of the frontal lobe (the
temporal lobe is critical in identifying what an object is).
Both these connections are made in a single projection,
suggesting a rapid and powerful pathway, a virtual neural
highway. The single-neuron projection between the amyg-
dala and prefrontal cortex runs to an area called the orbito-
frontal cortex. This is the area that seems most critical for
assessing emotional responses as we are in the midst of
them and making mid-course corrections.

The orbitofrontal cortex both receives signals from the

amygdala and has its own intricate, extensive web of pro-
jections throughout the limbic brain. Through this web it
plays a role in regulating emotional responses—including
inhibiting signals from the limbic brain as they reach other
areas of the cortex, thus toning down the neural urgency of
those signals. The orbitofrontal cortex's connections to the
limbic brain are so extensive that some neuroanatomists
have called it a kind of "limbic cortex"—the thinking part of
the emotional brain. See Ned Kalin, Departments of Psy-
chology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, "Aspects
of Emotion Conserved Across Species," an unpublished
manuscript prepared for the MacArthur Affective Neuros-
cience Meeting, November, 1992; and Allan Schore, Affect
Regulation and the Origin of Self (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1994).

There is not only a structural bridge between amygdala

and prefrontal cortex, but, as always, a biochemical one:
both the ventromedial section of the prefrontal cortex and
 592/661

the amygdala are especially high in concentrations of

chemical receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin.
This brain chemical seems, among other things, to prime
cooperation: monkeys with extremely high density of re-
ceptors for serotonin in the prefrontal-amygdala circuit are
"socially well-tuned," while those with low concentrations
are hostile and antagonistic. See Antonio Damosio, Des-
cartes' Error (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994).
13. Animal studies show that when areas of the prefrontal
lobes are lesioned, so that they no longer modulate emo-
tional signals from the limbic area, the animals become er-
ratic, impulsively and unpredictably exploding in rage or
cringing in fear. A. R. Luria, the brilliant Russian neuro-
psychologist, proposed as long ago as the 1930s that the
prefrontal cortex was key for self-control and constraining
emotional outbursts; patients who had damage to this area,
he noted, were impulsive and prone to flareups of fear and
anger. And a study of two dozen men and women who had
been convicted of impulsive, heat-of-passion murders
found, using PET scans for brain imaging, that they had a
much lower than usual level of activity in these same sec-
tions of the prefrontal cortex.
14. Some of the main work on lesioned lobes in rats was done
by Victor Dermenberg, a psychologist at the University of
Connecticut.
15. Left hemisphere lesions and joviality: G. Gianotti, "Emo-
tional behavior and hemispheric side of lesion," Cortex,
8,1972.
 593/661

16. The case of the happier stroke patient was reported by

Mary K. Morris, of the Department of Neurology at the
University of Florida, at the International Neuro-physiolo-
gical Society Meeting, February 13-16,1991, in San Antonio.
17. Prefrontal cortex and working memory: Lynn D. Selemon
et al., "Prefrontal Cortex," American Journal of Psychi-
atry, 152,1995.
18. Faulty frontal lobes: Philip Harden and Robert Pihl, "Cog-
nitive Function, Cardiovascular Reactivity, and Behavior in
Boys at High Risk for Alcoholism," Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 104,1995.
19. Prefrontal cortex: Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error:
Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Gros-
set/Putnam, 1994).

PART TWO: THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE

Chapter 3. When Smart Is Dumb

1. Jason H.'s story was reported in "Warning by a Valedictori-
an Who Faced Prison," in The New York Times (June
23,1992).

2. One observer notes: Howard Gardner, "Cracking Open the

IQ Box," The American Prospect, Winter 1995.
 594/661

3. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve:

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New
York: Free Press, 1994), p. 66.

4. George Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown,

1977). The average SAT score of the Harvard group was
584, on a scale where 800 is tops. Dr. Vaillant, now at Har-
vard University Medical School, told me about the relat-
ively poor predictive value of test scores for life success in
this group of advantaged men.

5. J. K. Felsman and G. E. Vaillant, "Resilient Children as

Adults: A 40-Year Study," in E. J. Anderson and B. J.
Cohler, eds., The Invulnerable Child (New York: Guilford
Press, 1987).

6. Karen Arnold, who did the study of valedictorians with

Terry Denny at the University of Illinois, was quoted in The
Chicago Tribune (May 29,1992).

7. Project Spectrum: Principal colleagues of Gardner in devel-

oping Project Spectrum were Mara Krechevsky and David
Feldman.

8. I interviewed Howard Gardner about his theory of multiple

intelligences in "Rethinking the Value of Intelligence
Tests," in The New York Times Education Supplement
(Nov. 3,1986) and several times since.
 595/661

9. The comparison of IQ tests and Spectrum abilities is repor-

ted in a chapter, coauthored with Mara Krechevsky, in
Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in
Practice (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
10. The nutshell summary is from Howard Gardner, Multiple
Intelligences, p. 9.
11. Howard Gardner and Thomas Hatch, "Multiple Intelli-
gences Go to School," Educational Researcher IS, 8 (1989).
12. The model of emotional intelligence was first proposed in
Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, "Emotional Intelli-
gence," Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 9 (1990),
pp. 185-211.
13. Practical intelligence and people skills: Robert J. Stern-
berg, Beyond I.Q. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985).
14. The basic definition of "emotional intelligence" is in
Salovey and Mayer, "Emotional Intelligence," p. 189.
15. IQ vs. emotional intelligence: Jack Block, University of
California at Berkeley, unpublished manuscript, February,
1995. Block uses the concept "ego resilience" rather than
emotional intelligence, but notes that its main components
include emotional self-regulation, an adaptive impulse
control, a sense of self-efficacy, and social intelligence.
Since these are main elements of emotional intelligence,
ego resilience can be seen as a surrogate measure for emo-
tional intelligence, much like SAT scores are for IQ. Block
analyzed data from a longitudinal study of about a hundred
men and women in their teen years and early twenties, and
 596/661

used statistical methods to assess the personality and beha-

vioral correlates of high IQ independent of emotional intel-
ligence, and emotional intelligence apart from IQ. There is,
he finds, a modest correlation between IQ and ego resili-
ence, but the two are independent constructs.

Chapter 4. Know Thyself

1. My usage of self-awareness refers to a self-reflexive, intro-
spective attention to one's own experience, sometimes
called mindfulness.

2. See also: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You

Are (New York: Hyperion, 1994).

3. The observing ego: An insightful comparison of the

psychoanalyst's attentional stance and self-awareness ap-
pears in Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker (New
York: Basic Books, 1995). Epstein notes that if this ability is
cultivated deeply, it can drop the self-consciousness of the
observer and become a "more flexible and braver 'de-
veloped ego,' capable of embracing all of life."

4. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

(New York: Random House, 1990), p. 64.

5. John D. Mayer and Alexander Stevens, "An Emerging

Understanding of the Reflective (Meta) Experience of
Mood," unpublished manuscript (1993).
 597/661

6. Mayer and Stevens, "An Emerging Understanding." Some

of the terms for these emotional self-awareness styles are
my own adaptations of their categories.

7. The intensity of emotions: Much of this work was done by

or with Randy Larsen, a former graduate student of
Diener's now at the University of Michigan.

8. Gary, the emotionally bland surgeon, is described in Hillel

I. Swiller, "Alexithymia: Treatment Utilizing Combined In-
dividual and Group Psychotherapy," International Journal
for Group Psychotherapy 38, 1 (1988), pp. 47-61.

9. Emotional illiterate was the term used by M. B. Freedman

and B. S. Sweet, "Some Specific Features of Group Psycho-
therapy," International Journal for Group Psychotherapy
4 (1954), pp. 335-68.
10. The clinical features of alexithymia are described in
Graeme J. Taylor, "Alexithymia: History of the Concept,"
paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Psychiatric Association in Washington, DC (May 1986).
11. The description of alexithymia is from Peter Sifneos, "Af-
fect, Emotional Conflict, and Deficit: An Overview,"
Psychotherapy-and-Psychosomatics 56 (1991), pp. 116-22.
12. The woman who did not know why she was crying is repor-
ted in H. Warnes, "Alexithymia, Clinical and Therapeutic
Aspects," Psychotherapy-and-Psychosomatics 46 (1986),
pp. 96-104.
13. Role of emotions in reasoning: Damasio, Descartes' Error.
 598/661

14. Unconscious fear: The snake studies are described in

Kagan, Galen's Prophecy.

Chapter 5. Passion's Slaves

1. For details on the ratio of positive to negative feelings and
well-being, see Ed Diener and Randy J. Larsen, "The Ex-
perience of Emotional Well-Being," in Michael Lewis and
Jeannette Haviland, eds., Handbook of Emotions (New
York: Guilford Press, 1993).

2. I interviewed Diane Tice about her research on how well

people shake off bad moods in December 1992. She pub-
lished her findings on anger in a chapter she wrote with her
husband, Roy Baumeister, in Daniel Wegner and James
Pennebaker, eds., Handbook of Mental Control v. 5
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993).

3. Bill collectors: also described in Arlie Hochschild, The

Managed Heart (New York: Free Press, 1980).

4. The case against anger, and for self-control, is based

largely on Diane Tice and Roy F. Baumeister, "Controlling
Anger: Self-Induced Emotion Change," in Wegner and
Pennebaker, Handbook of Mental Control. But see also
Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (New
York: Touchstone, 1989).
 599/661

5. The research on rage is described in Dolf Zillmann, "Ment-

al Control of Angry Aggression," in Wegner and Pen-
nebaker, Handbook of Mental Control.

6. The soothing walk: quoted in Tavris, Anger: The Misun-

derstood Emotion, p. 135.

7. Redford Williams's strategies for controlling hostility are

detailed in Redford Williams and Virginia Williams, Anger
Kills (New York: Times Books, 1993).

8. Venting anger does not dispel it: see, for example, S. K.

Mallick and B. R. McCandless, "A Study of Catharsis Ag-
gression," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4
(1966). For a summary of this research, see Tavris, Anger:
The Misunderstood Emotion.

9. When lashing out in anger is effective: Tavris, Anger: The

Misunderstood Emotion.
10. The work of worrying: Lizabeth Roemer and Thomas
Borkovec, "Worry: Unwanted Cognitive Activity That Con-
trols Unwanted Somatic Experience," in Wegner and Pen-
nebaker, Handbook of Mental Control.
11. Fear of germs: David Riggs and Edna Foa, "Obsessive-
Compulsive Disorder," in David Barlow, ed., Clinical
Handbook of Psychological Disorders (New York: Guilford
Press, 1993).
12. The worried patient was quoted in Roemer and Borkovec,
"Worry," p. 221.
 600/661

13. Therapies for anxiety disorder: see, for example, David H.

Barlow, ed., Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders
(New York: Guilford Press, 1993).
14. Styron's depression: William Styron, Darkness Visible: A
Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990).
15. The worries of the depressed are reported in Susan Nolen-
Hoeksma, "Sex Differences in Control of Depression," in
Wegner and Pennebaker, Handbook of Mental Control, p.
307.
16. Therapy for depression: K. S. Dobson, "A Meta-analysis of
the Efficacy of Cognitive Therapy for Depression," Journal
of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57 (1989).
17. The study of depressed people's thought patterns is repor-
ted in Richard Wenzlaff, "The Mental Control of Depres-
sion," in Wegner and Pennebaker, Handbook of Mental
Control.
18. Shelley Taylor et al., "Maintaining Positive Illusions in the
Face of Negative Information," Journal of Clinical and So-
cial Psychology 8 (1989).
19. The repressing college student is from Daniel A. Weinber-
ger, "The Construct Validity of the Repressive Coping
Style," in J. L. Singer, ed., Repression and Dissociation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Weinberger,
who developed the concept of repressors in early studies
with Gary F. Schwartz and Richard Davidson, has become
the leading researcher on the topic.

Chapter 6. The Master Aptitude

 601/661

1. The terror of the exam: Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple

Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception (New York: Si-
mon and Schuster, 1985).

2. Working memory: Alan Baddeley, Working Memory

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

3. Prefrontal cortex and working memory: Patricia Goldman-

Rakic, "Cellular and Circuit Basis of Working Memory in
Prefrontal Cortex of Nonhuman Primates," Progress in
Brain Research, 85, 1990; Daniel Weinberger, "A Connec-
tionist Approach to the Prefrontal Cortex," Journal of
Neuropsychiatry 5 (1993).

4. Motivation and elite performance: Anders Ericsson, "Ex-

pert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition," Americ-
an Psychologist (Aug. 1994).

5. Asian IQ advantage: Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell

Curve.

6. IQ and occupation of Asian-Americans: James Flynn,

Asian-American Achievement Beyond IQ (New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).

7. The study of delay of gratification in four-year-olds was re-

ported in Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K.
Peake, "Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-regulat-
ory Competencies From Preschool Delay of Gratification,"
Developmental Psychology, 26, 6 (1990), pp. 978-86.
 602/661

8. SAT scores of impulsive and self-controlled children: The

analysis of SAT data was done by Phil Peake, a psychologist
at Smith College.

9. IQ vs. delay as predictors of SAT scores: personal commu-

nication from Phil Peake, psychologist at Smith College,
who analyzed the SAT data in Walter Mischel's study of
delay of gratification.
10. Impulsivity and delinquency: See the discussion in: Jack
Block, "On the Relation Between IQ, Impulsivity, and De-
linquency," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995).
11. The worried mother: Timothy A. Brown et al., "Generalized
Anxiety Disorder," in David H. Barlow, ed., Clinical Hand-
book of Psychological Disorders (New York: Guilford
Press, 1993).
12. Air traffic controllers and anxiety: W. E. Collins et al.,
"Relationships of Anxiety Scores to Academy and Field
Training Performance of Air Traffic Control Specialists,"
FAA Office of Aviation Medicine Reports (May 1989).
13. Anxiety and academic performance: Bettina Seipp, "Anxi-
ety and Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis," Anxiety
Research 4, 1 (1991).
14. Worriers: Richard Metzger et al., "Worry Changes
Decision-making: The Effects of Negative Thoughts on
Cognitive Processing," Journal of Clinical Psychology
(Jan. 1990).
15. Ralph Haber and Richard Alpert, "Test Anxiety," Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 13 (1958).
 603/661

16. Anxious students: Theodore Chapin, "The Relationship of

Trait Anxiety and Academic Performance to Achievement
Anxiety," Journal of College Student Development (May
1989).
17. Negative thoughts and test scores: John Hunsley, "Internal
Dialogue During Academic Examinations," Cognitive Ther-
apy and Research (Dec. 1987).
18. The internists given a gift of candy: Alice Isen et al., "The
Influence of Positive Affect on Clinical Problem Solving,"
Medical Decision Making (July-Sept. 1991).
19. Hope and a bad grade: C. R. Snyder et al., "The Will and
the Ways: Development and Validation of an Individual-
Differences Measure of Hope," Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 60, 4 (1991), p. 579.
20. I interviewed C. R. Snyder in The New York Times (Dec.
24, 1991).
21. Optimistic swimmers: Martin Seligman, Learned Optim-
ism (New York: Knopf, 1991).
22. A realistic vs. naive optimism: see, for example, Carol
Whalen et al., "Optimism in Children's Judgments of
Health and Environmental Risks," Health Psychology 13
(1994).
23. I interviewed Martin Seligman about optimism in The New
York Times (Feb. 3,1987).
24. I interviewed Albert Bandura about self-efficacy in The
New York Times(Mzy 8,1988).
25. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Play and Intrinsic Rewards,"
Journal of Humanistic Psychology 15, 3 (1975).
 604/661

26. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optim-

al Experience, 1st ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
27. "Like a waterfall": Newsweek (Feb. 28, 1994).
28. I interviewed Dr. Csikszentmihalyi in The New York Times
(Mar. 4, 1986).
29. The brain in flow: Jean Hamilton et al., "Intrinsic Enjoy-
ment and Boredom Coping Scales: Validation With Person-
ality, Evoked Potential and Attention Measures," Personal-
ity and Individual Differences 5, 2 (1984).
30. Cortical activation and fatigue: Ernest Hartmann, The
Functions of Sleep (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1973).
31. I interviewed Dr. Csikszentmihalyi in The New York Times
(MM. 22, 1992).
32. The study of flow and math students: Jeanne Nakamura,
"Optimal Experience and the Uses of Talent," in Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Csikszentmihalyi, Optimal
Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Conscious-
ness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Chapter 7. The Roots of Empathy

1. Self-awareness and empathy: see, for example, John Mayer
and Melissa Kirkpatrick, "Hot Information-Processing Be-
comes More Accurate With Open Emotional Experience,"
University of New Hampshire, unpublished manuscript
(Oct. 1994); Randy Larsen et al., "Cognitive Operations
 605/661

Associated With Individual Differences in Affect Intensity,"

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987).

2. Robert Rosenthal et al., "The PONS Test: Measuring Sens-

itivity to Nonverbal Cues," in P. McReynolds, ed., Ad-
vances in Psychological Assessment (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1977).

3. Stephen Nowicki and Marshall Duke, "A Measure of Non-

verbal Social Processing Ability in Children Between the
Ages of 6 and 10," paper presented at the American Psy-
chological Society meeting (1989).

4. The mothers who acted as researchers were trained by

Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the
Laboratory of Developmental Psychology, National Insti-
tute of Mental Health.

5. I wrote about empathy, its developmental roots, and its

neurology in The New York Times (Mar. 28, 1989).

6. Instilling empathy in children: Marian Radke-Yarrow and

Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, "Roots, Motives and Patterns in
Children's Prosocial Behavior," in Ervin Staub et al., eds.,
Development and Maintenance of Prosocial Behavior
(New York: Plenum, 1984).

7. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New

York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 30.
 606/661

8. Stern, op. cit.

9. The depressed infants are described in Jeffrey Pickens and

Tiffany Field, "Facial Expressivity in Infants of Depressed
Mothers," Developmental Psychology 29, 6 (1993).
10. The study of violent rapists' childhoods was done by
Robert Prentky, a psychologist in Philadelphia.
11. Empathy in borderline patients: "Giftedness and Psycholo-
gical Abuse in Borderline Personality Disorder: Their Rel-
evance to Genesis and Treatment," Journal of Personality
Disorders 6 (1992).
12. Leslie Brothers, "A Biological Perspective on Empathy,"
American Journal of Psychiatry 146, 1 (1989).
13. Brothers, "A Biological Perspective," p. 16.
14. Physiology of empathy: Robert Levenson and Anna Ruef,
"Empathy: A Physiological Substrate," Journal of Person-
ality and Social Psychology 63, 2 (1992).
15. Martin L. Hoffman, "Empathy, Social Cognition, and Moral
Action," in W. Kurtines and J. Gerwitz, eds., Moral Behavi-
or and Development: Advances in Theory, Research, and
Applications (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984).
16. Studies of the link between empathy and ethics are in Hoff-
man, "Empathy, Social Cognition, and Moral Action."
17. I wrote about the emotional cycle that culminates in sex
crimes in The New York Times (Apr. 14, 1992). The source
is William Pithers, a psychologist with the Vermont De-
partment of Corrections.
 607/661

18. The nature of psychopathy is described in more detail in an

article I wrote in The New York Times on July 7,1987.
Much of what I write here comes from the work of Robert
Hare, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia,
an expert on psychopaths.
19. Leon Bing, Do or Die (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
20. Wife batterers: Neil S. Jacobson et al., "Affect, Verbal Con-
tent, and Psychophysiology in the Arguments of Couples
With a Violent Husband," Journal of Clinical and Consult-
ing Psychology (July 1994).
21. Psychopaths have no fear—the effect is seen as criminal
psychopaths are about to receive a shock: One of the more
recent replications of the effect is Christopher Patrick et al.,
"Emotion in the Criminal Psychopath: Fear Image Pro-
cessing," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103 (1994).

Chapter 8. The Social Arts

1. The exchange between Jay and Len was reported by Judy
Dunn and Jane Brown in "Relationships, Talk About Feel-
ings, and the Development of Affect Regulation in Early
Childhood," Judy Garber and Kenneth A. Dodge, eds., The
Development of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The dra-
matic flourishes are my own.
 608/661

2. The display rules are in Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen,

Unmasking the Face (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1975).

3. Monks in the heat of battle: the story is told by David

Busch in "Culture Cul-de-Sac," Arizona State University
Research (Spring/Summer 1994).

4. The study of mood transfer was reported by Ellen Sullins

in the April 1991 issue of the Personality and Social Psy-
chology Bulletin.

5. The studies of mood transmission and synchrony are by

Frank Bernieri, a psychologist at Oregon State University; I
wrote about his work in The New York Times. Much of his
research is reported in Bernieri and Robert Rosenthal, "In-
terpersonal Coordination, Behavior Matching, and Inter-
personal Synchrony," in Robert Feldman and Bernard
Rime, eds., Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

6. The entrainment theory is proposed by Bernieri and

Rosenthal, Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior.

7. Thomas Hatch, "Social Intelligence in Young Children," pa-

per delivered at the annual meeting of the American Psy-
chological Association (1990).

8. Social chameleons: Mark Snyder, "Impression Manage-

ment: The Self in Social Interaction," in L. S. Wrightsman
 609/661

and K. Deaux, Social Psychology in the '80s (Monterey,

CA: Brooks/Cole, 1981).

9. E. Lakin Phillips, The Social Skills Basis of Psychopatho-

logy (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1978), p. 140.
10. Nonverbal learning disorders: Stephen Nowicki and Mar-
shall Duke, Helping the Child Who Doesn't Fit In (Atlanta:
Peachtree Publishers, 1992). See also Byron Rourke, Non-
verbal Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press,
1989).
11. Nowicki and Duke, Helping the Child Who Doesn't Fit In.
12. This vignette, and the review of research on entering a
group, is from Martha Putallaz and Aviva Wasserman,
"Children's Entry Behavior," in Steven Asher and John
Coie, eds., Peer Rejection in Childhood (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990).
13. Putallaz and Wasserman, "Children's Entry Behavior."
14. Hatch, "Social Intelligence in Young Children."
15. Terry Dobson's tale of the Japanese drunk and the old man
is used by permission of Dobson's estate. It is also retold by
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, How Can I Help? (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), pp. 167-71.

PART THREE: EMOTIONAL

INTELLIGENCE APPLIED

Chapter 9. Intimate Enemies

 610/661

1. There are many ways to calculate the divorce rate, and the
statistical means used will determine the outcome. Some
methods show the divorce rate peaking at around 50 per-
cent and then dipping a bit. When divorces are calculated
by the total number in a given year, the rate appears to
have peaked in the 1980s. But the statistics I cite here cal-
culate not the number of divorces that occur in a given
year, but rather the odds that a couple marrying in a given
year will eventually have their marriage end in divorce.
That statistic shows a climbing rate of divorce over the last
century. For more detail: John Gottman, What Predicts Di-
vorce: The Relationship Between Marital Processes and
Marital Outcomes (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Asso-
ciates, Inc., 1993).

2. The separate worlds of boys and girls: Eleanor Maccoby

and C. N. Jacklin, "Gender Segregation in Childhood," in
H. Reese, ed., Advances in Child Development and Behavi-
or (New York: Academic Press, 1987).

3. Same-sex playmates: John Gottman, "Same and Cross Sex

Friendship in Young Children," in J. Gottman and J. Park-
er, eds., Conversation of Friends (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).

4. This and the following summary of sex differences in so-

cialization of emotions are based on the excellent review in
Leslie R. Brody and Judith A. Hall, "Gender and Emotion,"
in Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland, eds., Handbook
of Emotions (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).
 611/661

5. Brody and Hall, "Gender and Emotion," p. 456.

6. Girls and the arts of aggression: Robert B. Cairns and

Beverley D. Cairns, Lifelines and Risks (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994).

7. Brody and Hall, "Gender and Emotion," p. 454.

8. The findings about gender differences in emotion are re-

viewed in Brody and Hall, "Gender and Emotion."

9. The importance of good communication for women was re-

ported in Mark H. Davis and H. Alan Oathout, "Mainten-
ance of Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships: Empathy
and Relational Competence," Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 53, 2 (1987), pp. 397-410.
10. The study of husbands' and wives' complaints: Robert J.
Sternberg, "Triangulating Love," in Robert Sternberg and
Michael Barnes, eds., The Psychology of Love (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988).
11. Reading sad faces: The research is by Dr. Ruben C. Gur at
the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
12. The exchange between Fred and Ingrid is from Gottman,
What Predicts Divorce, p. 84.
13. The marital research by John Gottman and colleagues at
the University of Washington is described in more detail in
two books: John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), and What Predicts
Divorce.
 612/661

14. Stonewalling: Gottman, What Predicts Divorce.

15. Poisonous thoughts: Aaron Beck, Love Is Never Enough
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 145-46.
16. Thoughts in troubled marriages: Gottman, What Predicts
Divorce.
17. The distorted thinking of violent husbands is described in
Amy Holtzworth-Munroe and Glenn Hutchinson, "Attrib-
uting Negative Intent to Wife Behavior: The Attributions of
Maritally Violent Versus Nonviolent Men," Journal of Ab-
normal Psychology 102, 2 (1993), pp. 206-11. The suspi-
ciousness of sexually aggressive men: Neil Malamuth and
Lisa Brown, "Sexually Aggressive Men's Perceptions of
Women's Communications," Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 67 (1994).
18. Battering husbands: There are three kinds of husbands
who become violent: those who rarely do, those who do so
impulsively when they get angered, and those who do so in
a cool, calculated manner. Therapy seems helpful only with
the first two kinds. See Neil Jacobson et al., Clinical Hand-
book of Marital Therapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1994).
19. Flooding: Gottman, What Predicts Divorce.
20. Husbands dislike squabbles: Robert Levenson et al., "The
Influence of Age and Gender on Affect, Physiology, and
Their Interrelations: A Study of Long-term Marriages,"
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994).
21. Flooding in husbands: Gottman, What Predicts Divorce.
22. Men stonewall, women criticize: Gottman, What Predicts
Divorce.
 613/661

23. "Wife Charged with Shooting Husband Over Football on

TV," The New York Times (Nov. 3, 1993).
24. Productive marital fights: Gottman, What Predicts
Divorce.
25. Lack of repair abilities in couples: Gottman, What Predicts
Divorce.
26. The four steps that lead to "goodfights" are from Gottman,
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail.
27. Monitoring pulse rate: Gottman, Ibid.
28. Catching automatic thoughts: Beck, Love Is Never
Enough.
29. Mirroring: Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want
(New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

Chapter 10. Managing With Heart

1. The crash of the intimidating pilot: Carl Lavin, "When
Moods Affect Safety: Communications in a Cockpit Mean a
Lot a Few Miles Up," The New York Times (June 26, 1994).

2. The survey of 250 executives: Michael Maccoby, "The Cor-

porate Climber Has to Find His Heart," Fortune (Dec.
1976).

3. Zuboff: in conversation, June 1994. For the impact of in-

formation technologies, see her book In the Age of the
Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
 614/661

4. The story of the sarcastic vice president was told to me by

Hendrie Weisinger, a psychologist at the UCLA Graduate
School of Business. His book is The Critical Edge: How to
Criticize Up and Down the Organization and Make It Pay
Off "(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

5. The survey of times managers blew up was done by Robert

Baron, a psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
whom I interviewed for The New York Times (Sept. 11,
1990).

6. Criticism as a cause of conflict: Robert Baron, "Countering

the Effects of Destructive Criticism: The Relative Efficacy
of Four Interventions," Journal of Applied Psychology 75,
3 (1990).

7. Specific and vague criticism: Harry Levinson, "Feedback to

Subordinates" Addendum to the Levinson Letter, Levinson
Institute, Waltham, MA (1992).

8. Changing face of workforce: A survey of 645 national com-

panies by Towers Perrin management consultants in Man-
hattan, reported in The New York Times (Aug. 26, 1990).

9. The roots of hatred: Vamik Volkan, The Need to Have

Enemies and Allies (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988).
10. Thomas Pettigrew: I interviewed Pettigrew in The New
York Times (May 12, 1987).
 615/661

11. Stereotypes and subtle bias: Samuel Gaertner and John

Davidio, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (New
York: Academic Press, 1987).
12. Subtle bias: Gaertner and Davidio, Prejudice, Discrimina-
tion, and Racism.
13. Relman: quoted in Howard Kohn, "Service With a Sneer,"
The New York Times Sunday Magazine (Now. 11, 1994).
14. IBM: "Responding to a Diverse Work Force," The New
York Times (Aug. 26, 1990).
15. Power of speaking out: Fletcher Blanchard, "Reducing the
Expression of Racial Prejudice," Psychological Science
(vol. 2,1991).
16. Stereotypes break down: Gaertner and Davidio, Prejudice,
Discrimination, and Racism.
17. Teams: Peter Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation,"
The Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1994).
18. The concept of group intelligence is set forth in Wendy
Williams and Robert Sternberg, "Group Intelligence: Why
Some Groups Are Better Than Others," Intelligence (1988).
19. The study of the stars at Bell Labs was reported in Robert
Kelley and Janet Caplan, "How Bell Labs Creates Star Per-
formers," Harvard Business Review (July-Aug. 1993).
20. The usefulness of informal networks is noted by David
Krackhardt and Jeffrey R. Hanson, "Informal Networks:
The Company Behind the Chart," Harvard Business
Review (July-Aug. 1993), p. 104.
 616/661

Chapter 11. Mind and Medicine

1. Immune system as the body's brain: Francisco Varela at the
Third Mind and Life meeting, Dharamsala, India (Dec.
1990).

2. Chemical messengers between brain and immune system:

see Robert Ader et al., Psychoneuroimmunology, 2nd edi-
tion (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990).

3. Contact between nerves and immune cells: David Felten et

al., "Noradrenergic Sympathetic Innervation of Lymphoid
Tissue," Journal of Immunology 135 (1985).

4. Hormones and immune function: B. S. Rabin et al., "Bi-

directional Interaction Between the Central Nervous Sys-
tem and the Immune System," Critical Reviews in Immun-
ology 9 (4), (1989), pp. 279-312.

5. Connections between brain and immune system: see, for

example, Steven B. Maier et al.,
"Psychoneuroimmunology," American Psychologist (Dec.
1994).

6. Toxic emotions: Howard Friedman and S. Boothby-Kew-

ley, "The Disease-Prone Personality: A Meta-Analytic
View," American Psychologist 42 (1987). This broad ana-
lysis of studies used "meta-analysis," in which results from
many smaller studies can be combined statistically into one
 617/661

immense study. This allows effects that might not show up

in any given study to be detected more easily because of the
much larger total number of people being studied.

7. Skeptics argue that the emotional picture linked to higher

rates of disease is the profile of the quintessential neurot-
ic—an anxious, depressed, and angry emotional
wreck—and that the higher rates of disease they report are
due not so much to a medical fact as to a propensity to
whine and complain about health problems, exaggerating
their seriousness. But Friedman and others argue that the
weight of evidence for the emotion-disease link is borne by
research in which it is physicians' evaluations of observable
signs of illness and medical tests, not patients' complaints,
that determine the level of sickness—a more objective
basis. Of course, there is the possibility that increased dis-
tress is the result of a medical condition, as well as precipit-
ating it; for that reason the most convincing data come
from prospective studies in which emotional states are
evaluated prior to the onset of disease.

8. Gail Ironson et al., "Effects of Anger on Left Ventricular

Ejection Fraction in Coronary Artery Disease," The Americ-
an Journal of Cardiology 10 1992. Pumping efficiency,
sometimes referred to as the "ejection fraction," quantifies
the heart's ability to pump blood out of the left ventricle in-
to the arteries; it measures the percentage of blood
pumped out of the ventricles with each beat of the heart. In
heart disease the drop in pumping efficiency means a
weakening of the heart muscle.
 618/661

9. Of the dozen or so studies of hostility and death from heart

disease, some have failed to find a link. But that failure
may be due to differences in method, such as using a poor
measure of hostility, and to the relative subdety of the ef-
fect. For instance, the greatest number of deaths from the
hostility effect seem to occur in midlife. If a study fails to
track down the causes of death for people during this peri-
od, it misses the effect.
10. Hostility and heart disease: Redford Williams, The Trust-
ing Heart (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1989).
11. Peter Kaufman: I interviewed Dr. Kaufman in The New
York Times (Sept. 1, 1992).
12. Stanford study of anger and second heart attacks: Carl
Thoreson, presented at the International Congress of Beha-
vioral Medicine, Uppsala, Sweden (July 1990).
13. Lynda H. Powell, Emotional Arousal as a Predictor of
Long-Term Mortality and Morbidity in Post M.I. Men,"
Circulation, vol. 82, no. 4, Supplement III, Oct. 1990.
14. Murray A. Mittleman, "Triggering of Myocardial Infarction
Onset by Episodes of Anger," Circulation, vol. 89, no. 2
(1994).
15. Suppressing anger raises blood pressure: Robert Levenson,
"Can We Control Our Emotions, and How Does Such Con-
trol Change an Emotional Episode?" in Richard Davidson
and Paul Ekman, eds., Fundamental Questions About
Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
 619/661

16. The angry personal style: I wrote about Redford Williams's

research on anger and the heart in The New York Times
Good Health Magazine (Kpx. 16, 1989).
17. A 44 percent reduction in second heart attacks: Thoreson,
op. cit.
18. Dr. Williams's program for anger control: Williams, The
Trusting Heart.
19. The worried woman: Timothy Brown et al., "Generalized
Anxiety Disorder," in David H. Barlow, ed., Clinical Hand-
book of Psychological Disorders (New York: Guilford
Press, 1993).
20. Stress and metastasis: Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar,
"Stress and the Individual: Mechanisms Leading to
Disease," Archives of Internal Medicine 153 (Sept.
27,1993). The study they are describing is M. Robertson
and J. Ritz, "Biology and Clinical Relevance of Human Nat-
ural Killer Cells," Blood 76 (1990).
21. There may be multiple reasons why people under stress are
more vulnerable to sickness, apart from biological path-
ways. One might be that the ways people try to soothe their
anxiety—for example, smoking, drinking, or bingeing on
fatty foods—are in themselves unhealthy. Still another is
that constant worry and anxiety can make people lose sleep
or forget to comply with medical regimens—such as taking
medications—and so prolong illnesses they already have.
Most likely, all of these work in tandem to link stress and
disease.
 620/661

22. Stress weakens the immune system: For instance, in the

study of medical students facing exam stress, the students
had not only a lowered immune control of the herpes virus,
but also a decline in the ability of their white blood cells to
kill infected cells, as well as an increase in levels of a chem-
ical associated with suppression of immune abilities in
lymphocytes, the white blood cells central to the immune
response. See Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser,
"Stress-Associated Depression in Cellular Immunity,"
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 1 (1987). But in most such
studies showing a weakening of immune defenses with
stress, it has not been clear that these levels were low
enough to lead to medical risk.
23. Stress and colds: Sheldon Cohen et al, "Psychological
Stress and Susceptibility to the Common Cold," New Eng-
land Journal of Medicine 325 (1991).
24. Daily upsets and infection: Arthur Stone et al., "Secretory
IgA as a Measure of Immunocompetence," Journal of Hu-
man Stress 13 (1987). In another study, 246 husbands,
wives, and children kept daily logs of stresses in their
family's life over the course of the flu season. Those who
had the most family crises also had the highest rate of flu,
as measured both by days with fever and flu antibody
levels. See R. D. Clover et al., "Family Functioning and
Stress as Predictors of Influenza B Infection," Journal of
Family Practice 28 (May 1989).
25. Herpes virus flare-up and stress: a series of studies by
Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser—e.g., "Psycholo-
gical Influences on Immunity," American Psychologist A3
 621/661

(1988). The relationship between stress and herpes activity

is so strong that it has been demonstrated in a study of only
ten patients, using the actual breaking-out of herpes sores
as a measure; the more anxiety, hassles, and stress repor-
ted by the patients, the more likely they were to have
herpes outbreaks in the following weeks; placid periods in
their lives led to dormancy of the herpes. See H. E. Schmidt
et al., "Stress as a Precipitating Factor in Subjects With Re-
current Herpes Labialis,"Journal " of Family Practice, 20
(1985).
26. Anxiety in women and heart disease: Carl Thoreson,
presented at the International Congress of Behavioral
Medicine, Uppsala, Sweden (July 1990). Anxiety may also
play a role in making some men more vulnerable to heart
disease. In a study at the University of Alabama medical
school, 1,123 men and women between the ages of forty-
five and seventy-seven were assessed on their emotional
profiles. Those men most prone to anxiety and worry in
middle age were far more likely than others to have hyper-
tension when tracked down twenty years later. See Abra-
ham Markowitz et al., Journal of the American Medical
Association (Nov. 14, 1993).
27. Stress and colorectal cancer: Joseph C. Courtney et al.,
"Stressful Life Events and the Risk of Colorectal Cancer,"
Epidemiology (Sept. 1993), 4(5).
28. Relaxation to counter stress-based symptoms: See, for ex-
ample, Daniel Goleman and Joel Gurin, Mind Body Medi-
cine (New York: Consumer Reports Books/St. Martin's
Press, 1993).
 622/661

29. Depression and disease: see, e.g., Seymour Reichlin,

"Neuroendocrine-Immune Interactions," New England
Journal of Medicine (Oct. 21, 1993).
30. Bone marrow transplant: cited in James Strain, "Cost Off-
set From a Psychiatric Consultation-Liaison Intervention
With Elderly Hip Fracture Patients," American Journal of
Psychiatry 148 (1991).
31. Howard Burton et al., "The Relationship of Depression to
Survival in Chronic Renal Failure," Psychosomatic Medi-
cine (March 1986).
32. Hopelessness and death from heart disease: Robert Anda
et al., "Depressed Affect, Hopelessness, and the Risk of Is-
chemic Heart Disease in a Cohort of U.S. Adults," Epidemi-
ology (July 1993).
33. Depression and heart attack: Nancy Frasure-Smith et al.,
"Depression Following Myocardial Infarction," Journal of
the American Medical Association (Oct. 20,1993).
34. Depression in multiple illness: Dr. Michael von Korff, the
University of Washington psychiatrist who did the study,
pointed out to me that with such patients, who face tre-
mendous challenges just in living from day to day, "If you
treat a patient's depression, you see improvements over
and above any changes in their medical condition. If you're
depressed, your symptoms seem worse to you. Having a
chronic physical disease is a major adaptive challenge. If
you're depressed, you're less able to learn to take care of
your illness. Even with physical impairment, if you're mo-
tivated and have energy and feelings of self-worth—all of
 623/661

which are at risk in depression—then people can adapt re-

markably even to severe impairments."
35. Optimism and bypass surgery: Chris Peterson et al.,
Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal
Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
36. Spinal injury and hope: Timothy Elliott et al., "Negotiating
Reality After Physical Loss: Hope, Depression, and Disabil-
ity," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, 4
(1991).
37. Medical risk of social isolation: James House et al., "Social
Relationships and Health," ScienceQuly 29,1988). But also
see a mixed finding: Carol Smith et al., "Meta-Analysis of
the Associations Between Social Support and Health Out-
comes," Journal of Behavioral Medicine (1994).
38. Isolation and mortality risk: Other studies suggest a biolo-
gical mechanism at work. These findings, cited in House,
"Social Relationships and Health," have found that the
simple presence of another person can reduce anxiety and
lessen physiological distress in people in intensive-care
units. The comforting effect of another person's presence
has been found to lower not just heart rate and blood pres-
sure, but also the secretion of fatty acids that can block ar-
teries. One theory put forward to explain the healing effects
of social contact suggests a brain mechanism at work. This
theory points to animal data showing a calming effect on
the posterior hypothalamic zone, an area of the limbic sys-
tem with rich connections to the amygdala. The comforting
presence of another person, this view holds, inhibits limbic
activity, lowering the rate of secretion of acetylcholine,
 624/661

cortisol, and catecholamines, all neurochemicals that trig-

ger more rapid breathing, a quickened heartbeat, and other
physiological signs of stress.
39. Strain, "Cost Offset."
40. Heart attack survival and emotional support: Lisa
Berkman et al., "Emotional Support and Survival After
Myocardial Infarction, A Prospective Population Based
Study of the Elderly," Annals of Internal Medicine (Dec. 15,
1992).
41. The Swedish study: Annika Rosengren et al., "Stressful Life
Events, Social Support, and Mortality in Men Born in
1933," British Medical Journal (Oct. 19, 1993).
42. Marital arguments and immune system: Janice Kiecolt-
Glaser et al., "Marital Quality, Marital Disruption, and Im-
mune Function," Psychosomatic Medicine 49 (1987).
43. I interviewed John Cacioppo for The New York Times
(Dec. 15, 1992).
44. Talking about troubling thoughts: James Pennebaker,
"Putting Stress Into Words: Health, Linguistic and Thera-
peutic Implications," paper presented at the American Psy-
chological Association meeting, Washington, DC (1992).
45. Psychotherapy and medical improvements: Lester Lubor-
sky et al., "Is Psychotherapy Good for Your Health?" paper
presented at the American Psychological Association meet-
ing, Washington, DC (1993).
46. Cancer support groups: David Spiegel et al., "Effect of
Psychosocial Treatment on Survival of Patients with Meta-
static Breast Cancer," Lancet No. 8668, ii (1989).
 625/661

47. Patients' questions: The finding was cited by Dr. Steven

Cohen-Cole, a psychiatrist at Emory University, when I in-
terviewed him in The New York Times (Nov. 13, 1991).
48. Full information: For example, the Planetree program at
Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco will do
searches of medical and lay research on any medical topic
for anyone who requests it.
49. Making patients effective: One program has been de-
veloped by Dr. Mack Lipkin, Jr., at New York University
Medical School.
50. Emotional preparation for surgery: I wrote about this in
The New York Times (Dec. 10, 1987).
51. Family care in the hospital: Again, Planetree is a model, as
are the Ronald McDonald houses that allow parents to stay
next door to hospitals where their children are patients.
52. Mindfulness and medicine: See Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Cata-
strophe Living (New York: Delacorte, 1991).
53. Program for reversing heart disease: See Dean Ornish, Dr.
Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease (New
York: Ballantine, 1991).
54. Relationship-centered medicine: Health Professions Edu-
cation and Relationship-Centered Care. Report of the
Pew-Fetzer Task Force on Advancing Psychosocial Health
Education, Pew Health Professions Commission and Fetzer
Institute at The Center of Health Professions, University of
California at San Francisco, San Francisco (Aug. 1994).
55. Left the hospital early: Strain, "Cost Offset."
 626/661

56. Unethical not to treat depression in heart disease patients:

Redford Williams and Margaret Chesney, "Psychosocial
Factors and Prognosis in Established Coronary Heart
Disease," Journal of the American Medical Association
(Oct. 20,1993).
57. An open letter to a surgeon: A. Stanley Kramer, "A Pre-
scription for Healing," Newsweek (June 7,1993).

PART FOUR: WINDOWS Of OPPORTUNITY

Chapter 12. The Family Crucible

1. Leslie and the video game: Beverly Wilson and John
Gottman, "Marital Conflict and Parenting: The Role of
Negativity in Families," in M. H. Bornstein, ed., Handbook
of Parenting, vol. 4 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1994).

2. The research on emotions in the family was an extension of

John Gottman's marital studies reviewed in Chapter 9. See
Carole Hooven, Lynn Katz, and John Gottman, "The Fam-
ily as a Meta-emotion Culture," Cognition and Emotion
(Spring 1994).

3. The benefits for children of having emotionally adept par-

ents: Hooven, Katz, and Gottman, "The Family as a Meta-
emotion Culture."
 627/661

4. Optimistic infants: T. Berry Brazelton, in the preface to

Heart Start: The Emotional Foundations of School Readi-
ness (Arlington, VA: National Center for Clinical Infant
Programs, 1992).

5. Emotional predictors of school success: Heart Start.

6. Elements of school readiness: Heart Start, p. 7.

7. Infants and mothers: Heart Start, p. 9.

8. Damage from neglect: M. Erickson et al., "The Relation-

ship Between Quality of Attachment and Behavior Prob-
lems in Preschool in a High-Risk Sample," in I. Betherton
and E. Waters, eds., Monographs of the Society of Re-
search in Child Development 50, series no. 209-

9. Lasting lessons of first four years: Heart Start, p. 13.

10. The follow-up of aggressive children: L. R. Huesman,
Leonard Eron, and Patty Warnicke-Yarmel, "Intellectual
Function and Aggression," The Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology (Jan. 1987). Similar findings were re-
ported by Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, in the
September 1988 issue of Child Development, in their study
of seventy-five children who were assessed at regular inter-
vals since 1956, when they were between seven and twelve
years old. Alexander Thomas et al., "Longitudinal Study of
Negative Emotional States and Adjustments From Early
Childhood Through Adolescence," Child Development 59
(1988). A decade later the children who parents and
 628/661

teachers had said were the most aggressive in grade school

were having the most emotional turmoil in late adoles-
cence. These were children (about twice as many boys as
girls) who not only continually picked fights, but who also
were belittling or openly hostile toward other children, and
even toward their families and teachers. Their hostility was
unchanged over the years; as adolescents they were having
trouble getting along with classmates and with their famil-
ies, and were in trouble at school. And, when contacted as
adults, their difficulties ranged from tangles with the law to
anxiety problems and depression.
11. Lack of empathy in abused children: The day-care observa-
tions and findings are reported in Mary Main and Carol
George, "Responses of Abused and Disadvantaged Tod-
dlers to Distress in Agemates: A Study in the Day-Care Set-
ting," Developmental Psychology 21, 3 (1985). The find-
ings have been repeated with preschoolers as well: Bonnie
Klimes-Dougan and Janet Kistner, "Physically Abused
Preschoolers' Responses to Peers' Distress," Development-
al Psychology 26 (1990).
12. Difficulties of abused children: Robert Emery, "Family Vi-
olence," American Psychologist (Feb. 1989).
13. Abuse over generations: Whether abused children grow up
to be abusing parents is a point of scientific debate. See, for
example, Cathy Spatz Widom, "Child Abuse, Neglect and
Adult Behavior," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
(July 1989).
 629/661

Chapter 13. Trauma and Emotional

Relearning
1. I wrote about the lasting trauma of the killings at Cleveland
Elementary School in The New York Times "Education
Life" section (Jan. 7, 1990).
2. The examples of PTSD in crime victims were offered by Dr.
Shelly Niederbach, a psychologist at the Victims' Counsel-
ing Service, Brooklyn.
3. The Vietnam memory is from M. Davis, "Analysis of Avers-
ive Memories Using the Fear-Potentiated Startle
Paradigm," in N. Butters and L. R Squire, eds., The Neuro-
psychology of Memory (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).
4. LeDoux makes the scientific case for these memories being
especially enduring in "Indelibility of Subcortical Emotion-
al Memories," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1989),
vol. 1, 238-43.
5. I interviewed Dr. Charney in The New York Times (June 12,
1990).
6. The experiments with paired laboratory animals were de-
scribed to me by Dr. John Krystal, and have been repeated
at several scientific laboratories. The major studies were
done by Dr. Jay Weiss at Duke University.
7. The best account of the brain changes underlying PTSD, and
the role of the amygdala in them, is in Dennis Charney et
al., "Psychobiologic Mechanisms of Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder," Archives of General Psychiatry 50 (April 1993),
294-305.
 630/661

8. Some of the evidence for trauma-induced changes in this

brain network comes from experiments in which Vietnam
vets with PTSD were injected with yohimbine, a drug used
on the tips of arrows by South American Indians to render
their prey helpless. In tiny doses yohimbine blocks the ac-
tion of a specific receptor (the point on a neuron that re-
ceives a neurotransmitter) that ordinarily acts as a brake
on the catecholamines. Yohimbine takes the brakes off,
keeping these receptors from sensing the secretion of cat-
echolamines; the result is increasing catecholamine levels.
With the neural brakes on anxiety disarmed by the drug in-
jections, the yohimbine triggered panic in 9 of 15 PTSD pa-
tients, and lifelike flashbacks in 6. One vet had a hallucina-
tion of a helicopter being shot down in a trail of smoke and
a bright flash; another saw the explosion by a land mine of
a Jeep with his buddies in it—the same scene that had
haunted his nightmares and appeared as flashbacks for
more than 20 years. The yohimbine study was conducted
by Dr. John Krystal, director of the Laboratory of Clinical
Psychopharmacology at the National Center for PTSD at
the West Haven, Conn., VA Hospital.
9. Fewer alpha-2 receptors in men with PTSD: see Charney,
"Psychobiologic Mechanisms."
10. The brain, trying to lower the rate of CRF secretion, com-
pensates by decreasing the number of receptors that re-
lease it. One telltale sign that this is what happens in
people with PTSD comes from a study in which eight pa-
tients being treated for the problem were injected with
CRF. Ordinarily, an injection of CRF triggers a flood of
 631/661

ACTH, the hormone that streams through the body to trig-

ger catecholamines. But in the PTSD patients, unlike a
comparison group of people without PTSD, there was no
discernible change in levels of ACTH—a sign that their
brains had cut back on CRF receptors because they already
were overloaded with the stress hormone. The research
was described to me by Charles Nemeroff, a Duke
University psychiatrist.
11. I interviewed Dr. Nemeroff in The New York Times (June
12, 1990).
12. Something similar seems to occur in PTSD: For instance, in
one experiment Vietnam vets with a PTSD diagnosis were
shown a specially edited 15-minute film of graphic combat
scenes from the movie Platoon. In one group, the vets were
injected with naloxone, a substance that blocks en-
dorphins; after watching the movie, these vets showed no
change in their sensitivity to pain. But in the group without
the endorphin blocker, the men's pain sensitivity decreased
30 percent, indicating an increase in endorphin secretion.
The same scene had no such effect on veterans who did not
have PTSD, suggesting that in the PTSD victims the nerve
pathways that regulate endorphins were overly sensitive or
hyperactive—an effect that became apparent only when
they were reexposed to something reminiscent of the ori-
ginal trauma. In this sequence the amygdala first evaluates
the emotional importance of what we see. The study was
done by Dr. Roger Pitman, a Harvard psychiatrist. As with
other symptoms of PTSD, this brain change is not only
learned under duress, but can be triggered once again if
 632/661

there is something reminiscent of the original terrible

event. For example, Pitman found that when laboratory
rats were shocked in a cage, they developed the same
endorphin-based analgesia found in the Vietnam vets
shown Platoon. Weeks later, when the rats were put into
the cages where they had been shocked—but without any
current being turned on—they once again became insensit-
ive to pain, as they originally had been when shocked. See
Roger Pitman, "Naloxone-Reversible Analgesic Response
to Combat-Related Stimuli in Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder," Archives ofGeneral Medicine (June 1990). See
also Hillel Glover, "Emotional Numbing: A Possible
Endorphin-Mediated Phenomenon Associated with Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorders and Other Allied Psychopatho-
logic States," Journal of Traumatic Stress 5, 4 (1992).
13. The brain evidence reviewed in this section is based on
Dennis Charney's excellent article, "Psychobiologic
Mechanisms."
14. Charney, "Psychobiologic Mechanisms," 300.
15. Role of prefrontal cortex in unlearning fear: In Richard
Davidson's study, volunteers had their sweat response
measured (a barometer of anxiety) while they heard a tone.
followed by a loud, obnoxious noise. The loud noise
triggered a rise in sweat. After a time, the tone alone was
enough to trigger the same rise, showing that the volun-
teers had learned an aversion to the tone. As they contin-
ued to hear the tone without the obnoxious noise, the
learned aversion faded away—the tone sounded without
any increase in sweat. The more active the volunteers' left
 633/661

prefrontal cortex, the more quickly they lost the learned

fear. In another experiment showing the prefrontal lobes'
role in getting over a fear, lab rats—as is so often the case
in these studies—learned to fear a tone paired with an elec-
tric shock. The rats then had what amounts to a lobotomy,
a surgical lesion in their brain that cut off the prefrontal
lobes from the amygdala. For the next several days the rats
heard the tone without getting an electric shock. Slowly,
over a period of days, rats who have once learned to fear a
tone will gradually lose their fear. But for the rats with the
disconnected prefrontal lobes, it took nearly twice as long
to unlearn the fear—suggesting a crucial role for the pre-
frontal lobes in managing fear and, more generally, in mas-
tering emotional lessons. This experiment was done by
Maria Morgan, a graduate student of Joseph LeDoux's at
the Center for Neural Science, New York University.
16. Recovery from PTSD: I was told about this study by Rachel
Yehuda, a neurochemist and director of the Traumatic
Stress Studies Program at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
in Manhattan. I reported on the results in The New York
Times (Oct. 6,1992).
17. Childhood trauma: Lenore Terr, Too Scared to Cry (New
York: HarperCollins, 1990).
18. Pathway to recovery from trauma: Judith Lewis Herman,
Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
19. "Dosing" of trauma: Mardi Horowitz, Stress Response Syn-
dromes (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1986).
20. Another level at which relearning goes on, at least for
adults, is philosophical. The eternal question of the
 634/661

victim—"Why me?"—needs to be addressed. Being the vic-

tim of trauma shatters a person's faith that the world is a
place that can be trusted, and that what happens to us in
life is just—that is, that we can have control over our des-
tiny by living a righteous life. The answers to the victim's
conundrum, of course, need not be philosophical or reli-
gious; the task is to rebuild a system of belief or faith that
allows living once again as though the world and the people
in it can be trusted.
21. That the original fear persists, even if subdued, has been
shown in studies where lab rats were conditioned to fear a
sound, such as a bell, when it was paired with an electric
shock. Afterward, when they heard the bell they reacted
with fear, even though no shock accompanied it. Gradually,
over the course of a year (a very long time for a rat—about
a third of its life), the rats lost their fearfulness of the bell.
But the fear was restored in full force when the sound of
the bell was once again paired with a shock. The fear came
back in a single instant—but took months and months to
subside. The parallel in humans, of course, is when a trau-
matic fear from long ago, dormant for years, floods back in
full force with some reminder of the original trauma.
22. Luborsky's therapy research is detailed in Lester Luborsky
and Paul Crits-Christoph, Understanding Transference:
The CCRT Method (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

Chapter 14. Temperament Is Not Destiny

 635/661

1. See, for example, Jerome Kagan et al., "Initial Reactions to

Unfamiliarity," Current Directions in Psychological
Science (Dec. 1992). The fullest description of the biology
of temperament is in Kagan, Galen's Prophecy.

2. Tom and Ralph, archetypically timid and bold types, are

described in Kagan, Galen's Prophecy, pp. 155-57.

3. Lifelong problems of the shy child: Iris Bell, "Increased

Prevalence of Stress-related Symptoms in Middle-aged
Women Who Report Childhood Shyness," Annals of Beha-
vior Medicine 16 (1994).

4. The heightened heart rate: Iris R. Bell et al., "Failure of

Heart Rate Habituation During Cognitive and Olfactory
Laboratory Stressors in Young Adults With Childhood Shy-
ness," Annals of Behavior Medicine 16 (1994).

5. Panic in teenagers: Chris Hayward et al., "Pubertal Stage

and Panic Attack History in Sixth-and Seventh-grade
Girls," American Journal of Psychiatry vol. 149(9) (Sept.
1992), pp. 1239-43; Jerold Rosenbaum et al., "Behavioral
Inhibition in Childhood: A Risk Factor for Anxiety
Disorders," Harvard Review of Psychiatry (May 1993).

6. The research on personality and hemispheric differences

was done by Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of
Wisconsin, and by Dr. Andrew Tomarken, a psychologist at
Vanderbilt University: see Andrew Tomarken and Richard
Davidson, "Frontal Brain Activation in Repressors and
 636/661

Nonrepressors," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103

(1994).

7. The observations of how mothers can help timid infants

become bolder were done with Doreen Arcus. Details are in
Kagan, Galen's Prophecy.

8. Kagan, Galen's Prophecy, pp. 194-95.

9. Growing less shy: Jens Asendorpf, "The Malleability of Be-

havioral Inhibition: A Study of Individual Developmental
Functions," Developmental Psychology 30, 6 (1994).
10. Hubel and Wiesel: David H. Hubel, Thorsten Wiesel, and
S. Levay, "Plasticity of Ocular Columns in Monkey Striate
Cortex," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London 278 (1977).
11. Experience and the rat's brain: The work of Marian Dia-
mond and others is described in Richard Thompson, The
Brain (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1985).
12. Brain changes in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder:
L. R. Baxter et al., "Caudate Glucose Metabolism Rate
Changes With Both Drug and Behavior Therapy for
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder," Archives of General Psy-
chiatry 49 (1992).
13. Increased activity in prefrontal lobes: L. R. Baxter et al.,
"Local Cerebral Glucose Metabolic Rates in Obsessive-
Compulsive Disorder," Archives of General Psychiatry AA
(1987).
 637/661

14. Prefrontal lobes maturity: Bryan Kolb, "Brain Develop-

ment, Plasticity, and Behavior," American Psychologist AA
(1989).
15. Childhood experience and prefrontal pruning: Richard
Davidson, "Asymmetric Brain Function, Affective Style and
Psychopathology: The Role of Early Experience and Plasti-
city," Development and Psychopathology vol. 6 (1994), pp.
741-58.
16. Biological attunement and brain growth: Schore, Affect
Regulation.
17. M. E. Phelps et al, "PET: A Biochemical Image of the Brain
at Work," in N. A. Lassen et al., Brain Work and Mental
Activity: Quantitative Studies with Radioactive Tracers
(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1991).

PART FIVE: EMOTIONAL LITERACY

Chapter 15. The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy

1. Emotional literacy: I wrote about such courses in The New
York Times (March 3,1992).

2. The statistics on teen crime rates are from the Uniform

Crime Reports, Crime in the U.S., 1991, published by the
Department of Justice.

3. Violent crimes in teenagers: In 1990 the juvenile arrest

rate for violent crimes climbed to 430 per 100,000, a 27
 638/661

percent jump over the 1980 rate. Teen arrest rates for for-
cible rape rose from 10.9 per 100,000 in 1965 to 21.9 per
100,000 in 1990. Teen murder rates more than quadrupled
from 1965 to 1990, from 2.8 per 100,000 to 12.1; by 1990
three of four teenage murders were with guns, a 79 percent
increase over the decade. Aggravated assault by teenagers
jumped by 64 percent from 1980 to 1990. See, e.g., Ruby
Takanashi, "The Opportunities of Adolescence," American
Psychologist (Feb. 1993).

4. In 1950 the suicide rate for those 15 to 24 was 4.5 per

100,000. By 1989 it was three times higher, 13.3. Suicide
rates for children 10 to 14 almost tripled between 1968 and
1985. Figures on suicide, homicide victims, and pregnan-
cies are from Health, 1991, U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, and Children's Safety Network, A Data
Book of Child and Adolescent Injury (Washington, DC: Na-
tional Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health,
1991).

5. Over the three decades since 1960, rates of gonorrhea

jumped to a level four times higher among children 10 to
14, and three times higher among those 15 to 19. By 1990,
20 percent of AIDS patients were in their twenties, many
having become infected during their teen years. Pressure to
have sex early is getting stronger. A survey in the 1990s
found that more than a third of younger women say that
pressure from peers made them decide to have sex the first
time; a generation earlier just 13 percent of women said so.
See Ruby Takanashi, "The Opportunities of Adolescence,"
 639/661

and Children's Safety Network, A Data Book of Child and

Adolescent Injury.

6. Heroin and cocaine use for whites rose from 18 per

100,000 in 1970 to a rate of 68 in 1990—about three times
higher. But over the same two decades among blacks, the
rise was from a 1970 rate of 53 per 100,000 to a staggering
766 in 1990—close to 13 times the rate 20 years before.
Drug use rates are from Crime in the U.S., 1991, U.S. De-
partment of Justice.

7. As many as one in five children have psychological diffi-

culties that impair their lives in some way, according to
surveys done in the United States, New Zealand, Canada,
and Puerto Rico. Anxiety is the most common problem in
children under 11, afflicting 10 percent with phobias severe
enough to interfere with normal life, another 5 percent
with generalized anxiety and constant worry, and another 4
percent with intense anxiety about being separated from
their parents. Binge drinking climbs during the teenage
years among boys to a rate of about 20 percent by age 20. I
reported much of this data on emotional disorders in chil-
dren in The New York Times (Jan. 10, 1989).

8. The national study of children's emotional problems, and

comparison with other countries: Thomas Achenbach and
Catherine Howell, "Are America's Children's Problems Get-
ting Worse? A 13-Year Comparison, "Journal of the Amer-
ican Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Nov.
1989).
 640/661

9. The comparison across nations was by Urie Bronfenbren-

ner, in Michael Lamb and Kathleen Sternberg, Child Care
in Context: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Englewood, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992).
10. Urie Bronfenbrenner was speaking at a symposium at Cor-
nell University (Sept. 24, 1993).
11. Longitudinal studies of aggressive and delinquent children:
see, for example, Alexander Thomas et al., "Longitudinal
Study of Negative Emotional States and Adjustments from
Early Childhood Through Adolescence," Child Develop-
ment, vol. 59 (Sept. 1988).
12. The bully experiment: John Lochman, "Social-Cognitive
Processes of Severely Violent, Moderately Aggressive, and
Nonaggressive Boys," Journal of Clinical and Consulting
Psychology, 199'4.
13. The aggressive boys research: Kenneth A. Dodge, "Emotion
and Social Information Processing," in J. Garber and K.
Dodge, The Development ofEmotion Regulation and Dys-
regulation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
14. Dislike for bullies within hours: J. D. Coie and J. B. Kuper-
smidt, "A Behavioral Analysis of Emerging Social Status in
Boys' Groups," Child Development 54 (1983).
15. Up to half of unruly children: See, for example, Dan Offord
et al., "Outcome, Prognosis, and Risk in a Longitudinal
Follow-up Study," Journal of the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31 0992).
16. Aggressive children and crime: Richard Tremblay et al.,
"Predicting Early Onset of Male Antisocial Behavior from
 641/661

Preschool Behavior," Archives of General Psychiatry (Sept.

1994).
17. What happens in a child's family before the child reaches
school is, of course, crucial in creating a predisposition to
aggression. One study, for example, showed that children
whose mothers rejected them at age 1, and whose birth was
more complicated, were four times as likely as others to
commit a violent crime by age 18. Adriane Raines et al.,
"Birth Complications Combined with Early Maternal Re-
jection at Age One Predispose to Violent Crime at Age 18
Years," Archives of General Psychiatry (Dec. 1994).
18. While low verbal IQ has appeared to predict delinquency
(one study found an eight-point difference in these scores
between delinquents and nondelinquents), there is evid-
ence that impulsivity is more directly and powerfully at
cause for both the low IQ scores and delinquency. As for
the low scores, impulsive children don't pay attention well
enough to learn the language and reasoning skills on which
verbal IQ scores are based, and so impulsivity lowers those
scores. In the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a well-designed lon-
gitudinal project where both IQ and impulsivity were as-
sessed in ten-to twelve-year-olds, impulsivity was almost
three times more powerful than verbal IQ in predicting de-
linquency. See the discussion in: Jack Block, "On the Rela-
tion Between IQ, Impulsivity, and Delinquency," Journal
of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995).
19. "Bad" girls and pregnancy: Marion Underwood and
Melinda Albert, "Fourth-Grade Peer Status as a Predictor
of Adolescent Pregnancy," paper presented at the meeting
 642/661

of the Society for Research on Child Development, Kansas

City, Missouri (Apr. 1989).
20. The trajectory to delinquency: Gerald R. Patterson,
"Orderly Change in a Stable World: The Antisocial Trait as
Chimera, "Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology
62 (1993).
21. Mind-set of aggression: Ronald Slaby and Nancy Guerra,
"Cognitive Mediators of Aggression in Adolescent Offend-
ers," Developmental Psychology 24 (1988).
22. The case of Dana: from Laura Mufson et al., Interpersonal
Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (New York:
Guilford Press, 1993).
23. Rising rates of depression worldwide: Cross-National Col-
laborative Group, "The Changing Rate of Major
Depression: Cross-National Comparisons," Journal of the
American Medical Association (Dec. 2, 1992).
24. Ten times greater chance of depression: Peter Lewinsohn
et al., "Age-Cohort Changes in the Lifetime Occurrence of
Depression and Other Mental Disorders," Journal of Ab-
normal Psychology 102 0993).
25. Epidemiology of depression: Patricia Cohen et al., New
York Psychiatric Institute, 1988; Peter Lewinsohn et al.,
"Adolescent Psychopathology: I. Prevalence and Incidence
of Depression in High School Students, "Journal of Abnor-
mal Psychology 102 0993). See also Mufson et al., Inter-
personal Psychotherapy. For a review of lower estimates:
E. Costello, "Developments in Child Psychiatric
 643/661

Epidemiology," Journal of the Academy of Child and

Adolescent Psychiatry 28 (1989).
26. Patterns of depression in youth: Maria Kovacs and Leo
Bastiaens, "The Psychotherapeutic Management of Major
Depressive and Dysthymic Disorders in Childhood and
Adolescence: Issues and Prospects," in I. M. Goodyer, ed.,
Mood Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
27. Depression in children: Kovacs, op. cit.
28. I interviewed Maria Kovacs in The New York Times (Jan.
11, 1994).
29. Social and emotional lag in depressed children: Maria Ko-
vacs and David Goldston, "Cognitive and Social Develop-
ment of Depressed Children and Adolescents," Journal of
the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychi-
atry (May 1991).
30. Helplessness and depression: John Weiss et al., "Control-
related Beliefs and Self-reported Depressive Symptoms in
Late Childhood," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102
(1993).
31. Pessimism and depression in children: Judy Garber,
Vanderbilt University. See, e.g., Ruth Hilsman and Judy
Garber, "A Test of the Cognitive Diathesis Model of De-
pression in Children: Academic Stressors, Attributional
Style, Perceived Competence and Control," Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology 67 (1994); Judith Garber,
"Cognitions, Depressive Symptoms, and Development in
 644/661

Adolescents," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102

(1993).
32. Garber, "Cognitions."
33. Garber, "Cognitions."
34. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema et al., "Predictors and Con-
sequences of Childhood Depressive Symptoms: A Five-Year
Longitudinal Study," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 101
(1992).
35. Depression rate halved: Gregory Clarke, University of Ore-
gon Health Sciences Center, "Prevention of Depression in
At-Risk High School Adolescents," paper delivered at the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
(Oct. 1993).
36. Garber, "Cognitions."
37. Hilda Bruch, "Hunger and Instinct," Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease 149 (1969). Her seminal book, The
Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press) was not published
until 1978.
38. The study of eating disorders: Gloria R. Leon et al., "Per-
sonality and Behavioral Vulnerabilities Associated with
Risk Status for Eating Disorders in Adolescent Girls,"
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102 (1993).
39. The six-year-old who felt fat was a patient of Dr. William
Feldman, a pediatrician at the University of Ottawa.
40. Noted by Sifneos, "Affect, Emotional Conflict, and Deficit."
41. The vignette of Ben's rebuff is from Steven Asher and
Sonda Gabriel, "The Social World of Peer-Rejected
 645/661

Children," paper presented at the annual meeting of the

American Educational Research Association, San Francisco
(Mar. 1989).
42. The dropout rate among socially rejected children: Asher
and Gabriel, "The Social World of Peer-Rejected Children."
43. The findings on the poor emotional competence of unpop-
ular children are from Kenneth Dodge and Esther Feld-
man, "Social Cognition and Sociometric Status," in Steven
Asher and John Coie, eds., Peer Rejection in Childhood
(New York-. Cambridge University Press, 1990).
44. Emory Cowen et al., "Longterm Follow-up of Early Detec-
ted Vulnerable Children," Journal of Clinical and Consult-
ing Psychology 41 (1973).
45. Best friends and the rejected: Jeffrey Parker and Steven
Asher, "Friendship Adjustment, Group Acceptance and So-
cial Dissatisfaction in Childhood," paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Educational Research As-
sociation, Boston (1990).
46. The coaching for socially rejected children: Steven Asher
and Gladys Williams, "Helping Children Without Friends
in Home and School Contexts," in Children's Social Devel-
opment: Information for Parents and Teachers (Urbana
and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
47. Similar results: Stephen Nowicki, "A Remediation Proced-
ure for Nonverbal Processing Deficits," unpublished
manuscript, Duke University (1989).
 646/661

48. Two fifths are heavy drinkers: a survey at the University of

Massachusetts by Project Pulse, reported in The Daily
Hampshire Gazette (Nov. 13, 1993).
49. Binge drinking: Figures are from Harvey Wechsler, direct-
or of College Alcohol Studies at the Harvard School of
Public Health (Aug. 1994).
50. More women drink to get drunk, and risk of rape: report
by the Columbia University Center on Addiction and Sub-
stance Abuse (May 1993).
51. Leading cause of death: Alan Marlatt, report at the annual
meeting of the American Psychological Association (Aug.
1994).
52. Data on alcoholism and cocaine addiction are from Meyer
Glantz, acting chief of the Etiology Research Section of the
National Institute for Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
53. Distress and abuse: Jeanne Tschann, "Initiation of Sub-
stance Abuse in Early Adolescence," Health Psychology A
(1994).
54. I interviewed Ralph Tarter in The New York Times (Apr.
26, 1990).
55. Tension levels in sons of alcoholics: Howard Moss et al.,
"Plasma GABA-like Activity in Response to Ethanol Chal-
lenge in Men at High Risk for Alcoholism" Biological Psy-
chiatry 27(6) (Mar. 1990).
56. Frontal lobe deficit in sons of alcoholics: Philip Harden
and Robert Pihl, "Cognitive Function, Cardiovascular Re-
activity, and Behavior in Boys at High Risk for Alcohol-
ism," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995).
 647/661

57. Kathleen Merikangas et al., "Familial Transmission of De-

pression and Alcoholism," Archives of General Psychiatry
(Kpt. 1985).
58. The restless and impulsive alcoholic: Moss et al.
59. Cocaine and depression: Edward Khantzian, "Psychiatric
and Psychodynamic Factors in Cocaine Addiction," in
Arnold Washton and Mark Gold, eds., Cocaine: A
Clinician's Handbook (NewYork: Guilford Press, 1987).
60. Heroin addiction and anger: Edward Khantzian, Harvard
Medical School, in conversation, based on over 200 pa-
tients he has treated who were addicted to heroin.
61. No more wars: The phrase was suggested to me by Tim
Shriver of the Collaborative for the Advancement of Social
and Emotional Learning at the Yale Child Studies Center.
62. Emotional impact of poverty: "Economic Deprivation and
Early Childhood Development" and "Poverty Experiences
of Young Children and the Quality of Their Home Environ-
ments." Greg Duncan and Patricia Garrett each described
their research findings in separate articles in Child Devel-
opment (Kpv. 1994).
63. Traits of resilient children: Norman Garmezy, The Invul-
nerable Child (New York: Guilford Press, 1987). I wrote
about children who thrive despite hardship in The New
York Times (Oct. 13, 1987).
64. Prevalence of mental disorders: Ronald C. Kessler et al.,
"Lifetime and 12-month Prevalence of DSM-III-R Psychiat-
ric Disorders in the U.S.," Archives of General Psychiatry
(Jan. 1994).
 648/661

65. The figure for boys and girls reporting sexual abuse in the
United States are from Malcolm Brown of the Violence and
Traumatic Stress Branch of the National Institute of Ment-
al Health; the number of substantiated cases is from the
National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse and
Neglect. A national survey of children found the rates to be
32 percent for girls and 0.6 percent for boys in a given
year: David Finkelhor and Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman,
"Children as Victims of Violence: A National Survey," Pedi-
atrics (Oct. 1984).
66. The national survey of children about sexual abuse preven-
tion programs was done by David Finkelhor, a sociologist
at the University of New Hampshire.
67. The figures on how many victims child molesters have are
from an interview with Malcolm Gordon, a psychologist at
the Violence and Traumatic Stress Branch of the National
Institute of Mental Health.
68. W. T. Grant Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of
Social Competence, "Drug and Alcohol Prevention Cur-
ricula," in J. David Hawkins et al., Communities That Care
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
69. W. T. Grant Consortium, "Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Curricula," p. 136.

Chapter 16. Schooling the Emotions

1. I interviewed Karen Stone McCown in The New York
Times (Nov. 7, 1993).
 649/661

2. Karen F. Stone and Harold Q. Dillehunt, Self Science: The

Subject Is Me (Santa Monica: Goodyear Publishing Co.,
1978).

3. Committee for Children, "Guide to Feelings," Second Step

4-5(1992), p. 84.

4. The Child Development Project: See, e.g., Daniel Solomon

et al., "Enhancing Children's Prosocial Behavior in the
Classroom," American Educational Research Journal (
Winter 1988).

5. Benefits from Head Start: Report by High/Scope Educa-

tional Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan (Apr.
1993).

6. The emotional timetable: Carolyn Saarni, "Emotional

Competence: How Emotions and Relationships Become In-
tegrated," in R. A. Thompson, ed., Socioemotional Devel-
opment/Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 36 (1990).

7. The transition to grade school and middle school: David

Hamburg, Today's Children: Creating a Future for a Gen-
eration in Crisis (New York: Times Books, 1992).

8. Hamburg, Today's Children, pp. 171-72.

9. Hamburg, Today's Children, p. 182.

10. I interviewed Linda Lantieri in The New York Times (Mar.
3, 1992).
 650/661

11. Emotional-literacy programs as primary prevention:

Hawkins et al., Communities That Care.
12. Schools as caring communities: Hawkins et al., Communit-
ies That Care.
13. The story of the girl who was not pregnant: Roger P. Weis-
berg et al., "Promoting Positive Social Development and
Health Practice in Young Urban Adolescents," in M. J. Eli-
as, ed., Social Decision-making in the Middle School
(Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers, 1992).
14. Character-building and moral conduct: Amitai Etzioni, The
Spirit of Community (New York: Crown, 1993).
15. Moral lessons: Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey. Reli-
gious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
16. Doing right by others: Thomas Lickona, Educating for
Character (New York: Bantam, 1991).
17. The arts of democracy: Francis Moore Lappe and Paul
Martin DuBois, The Quickening of America (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).
18. Cultivating character: Amitai Etzioni et al., Character
Building for a Democratic, Civil Society (Washington, DC:
The Communitarian Network, 1994).
19. Three percent rise in murder rates: "Murders Across Na-
tion Rise by 3 Percent, but Overall Violent Crime Is Down,"
The New York Times (May 2, 1994).
20. Jump in juvenile crime: "Serious Crimes by Juveniles
Soar," Associated Press (July 25, 1994).
 651/661

Appendix B. Hallmarks of the Emotional Mind

1. I have written about Seymour Epstein's model of the "ex-

periential unconscious" on several occasions in The New
York Times, and much of this summary of it is based on
conversations with him, letters to me, his article, "Integra-
tion of the Cognitive and Psychodynamic Unconscious"
(American Psychologist AA (1994), and his book with
Archie Brodsky, You're Smarter Than You Think (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). While his model of the ex-
periential mind informs my own about the "emotional
mind," I have made my own interpretation.

2. Paul Ekman, "An Argument for the Basic Emotions," Cog-

nition and Emotion, 6,1992, p. 175. The list of traits that
distinguish emotions is a bit longer, but these are the traits
that will concern us here.

3. Ekman, op cit., p. 187.

4. Ekman, op cit., p. 189.

5. Epstein, 1993, p. 55.

6. J. Toobey and L. Cosmides, "The Past Explains the

Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of
Ancestral Environments," Ethology and Sociobiology, 11,
pp. 418-19-
 652/661

7. While it may seem self-evident that each emotion has its

own biological pattern, it has not been so for those study-
ing the psychophysiology of emotion. A highly technical de-
bate continues over whether emotional arousal is basically
the same for all emotions, or whether unique patterns can
be teased out. Without going into the details of the debate,
I have presented the case for those who hold to unique bio-
logical profiles for each major emotion.
 Acknowledgments
I first heard the phrase "emotional literacy" from Eileen
Rockefeller Growald, then the founder and president of
the Institute for the Advancement of Health. It was this
casual conversation that piqued my interest and framed
the investigations that finally became this book. Over
the course of these years it has been a pleasure to watch
Eileen as she has nurtured this field along.
Support from the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo,
Michigan, has allowed me the luxury of time to explore
more fully what "emotional literacy" might mean, and I
am grateful for the crucial early encouragement of Rob
Lehman, president of the Institute, and an ongoing col-
laboration with David Sluyter, program director there. It
was Rob Lehman who, early on in my explorations,
urged me to write a book about emotional literacy.
Among my most profound debts is to the hundreds of
researchers who over the years have shared their find-
ings with me, and whose efforts are reviewed and syn-
thesized here. To Peter Salovey at Yale I owe the concept
of "emotional intelligence." I have also gained much
from being privy to the ongoing work of many educators
and practitioners of the art of primary prevention, who
are at the forefront of the nascent movement in emo-
tional literacy. Their hands-on efforts to bring
 654/661

heightened social and emotional skills to children, and

to re-create schools as more humane environments,
have been inspiring. Among them are Mark Greenberg
and David Hawkins at the University of Washington;
David Schaps and Catherine Lewis at the Developmental
Studies Center in Oakland, California; Tim Shriver at
the Yale Child Studies Center; Roger Weissberg at the
University of Illinois at Chicago; Maurice Elias at Rut-
gers; Shelly Kessler of the Goddard Institute on Teach-
ing and Learning in Boulder, Colorado; Chevy Martin
and Karen Stone McCown at the Nueva Learning Center
in Hillsborough, California; and Linda Lantieri, director
of the National Center for Resolving Conflict Creatively
in New York City.
I have a special debt to those who reviewed and com-
mented on parts of this manuscript: Howard Gardner of
the Graduate School of Education at Harvard
University; Peter Salovey, of the psychology department
at Yale University; Paul Ekman, director of the Human
Interaction Laboratory at the University of California at
San Francisco; Michael Lerner, director of Commonweal
in Bolinas, California; Denis Prager, then director of the
health program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacAr-
thur Foundation; Mark Gerzon, director of Common
Enterprise, Boulder, Colorado; Mary Schwab-Stone,
MD, Child Studies Center, Yale University School of
 655/661

Medicine; David Spiegel, MD, Department of Psychi-

atry, Stanford University Medical School; Mark Green-
berg, director of the Fast Track Program, University of
Washington; Shoshona Zuboff, Harvard School of Busi-
ness; Joseph LeDoux, Center for Neural Science, New
York University; Richard Davidson, director of the Psy-
chophysiology Laboratory, University of Wisconsin;
Paul Kaufman, Mind and Media, Point Reyes, Califor-
nia; Jessica Brackman, Naomi Wolf, and, especially, Fay
Goleman.
Helpful scholarly consultations came from Page
DuBois, a Greek scholar at the University of Southern
California; Matthew Kapstein, a philosopher of ethics
and religion at Columbia University; and Steven Rocke-
feller, intellectual biographer of John Dewey, at Middle-
bury College. Joy Nolan gathered vignettes of emotional
episodes; Margaret Howe and Annette Spychalla pre-
pared the appendix on the effects of emotional literacy
curricula. Sam and Susan Harris provided essential
equipment.
My editors at The New York Times over the last dec-
ade have been marvelously supportive of my many en-
quiries into new findings on the emotions, which first
appeared in the pages of that paper and which inform
much of this book.
 656/661

Toni Burbank, my editor at Bantam Books, offered the

editorial enthusiasm and acuity that sharpened my re-
solve and thinking.
And my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman, provided the co-
coon of warmth, love, and intelligence that nurtured this
project along.
 About the Author
DANIEL GOLEMAN, Ph.D., covers the behavioral and
brain sciences for The New York Times and his articles
appear throughout the world in syndication. He has
taught at Harvard (where he received his Ph.D.) and was
formerly senior editor at Psychology Today. His previ-
ous books include Vital Lies, Simple Truths; The Medit-
ative Mind; and, as co-author, The Creative Spirit.
 By the same author
Vital Lies, Simple Truths
Working with Emotional Intelligence
Destructive Emotions
First published in Great Britain 1996
Copyright © Daniel Goleman
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