Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

“All the people in this room are motivated by power, prestige, or money. Which do you think is most important?”

That was the question asked of me recently by a managing director of a large European bank who had asked me to speak to about 200 top executives. Let’s take them one by one.

I remember David McClelland, my mentor years ago in grad school, making a crucial distinction among people who are motivated by power: whether they seek power simply to aggrandize themselves, or for something beyond themselves. The first group, the genuinely power-hungry, include “unhealthy” narcissists and Machiavellians – people who care only about their own goals, without caring about the consequences for other people of what they do (as I detail in the chapter on the “dark triad” in my book Social Intelligence).

In contrast, those with what McClelland called “socialized” power seek to influence others not just for their own goals, but for greater concerns – whether for their team, family, organization, or a cause. From an organizational point of view, people driven by personal power present a danger – they don’t care whether what they do furthers the common good. Those who wield socialized power, however, can be good or even great leaders.

When I wrote an essay in the Science section of the New York Times on how we are connected to each other physiologically, and so can be biological allies for loved ones in distress, it became the “most e-mailed” article in the Times that day. The idea that social neuroscience sees people as connected physiologically strikes a chord – we all sense it. The implications for emotional suffering – and perhaps for disease itself – could be profound.

My friend George Kohlreiser, who teaches leadership at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, called my attention to a remarkable interview with Dr. James Lynch, one of the first scientists to study the profound impact on the cardiovascular system of our relationships. His work is an early precursor to my own, most recently in Part V of Social Intelligence, which reviews how relationships matter for health, for better or worse – and how our loved ones can be biological allies. An excellent interview of Lynch can be found at: http://www.stress.org/interview-SpeakingHeartToHeart.htm

“What do you believe that you cannot prove?” was the question posed to me and maybe a hundred others by The Edge, a website devoted to cutting edge thinking.

In my answer, I proposed that children we unintended victims of larger technological and economic forces that inadvertently were hampering the development of emotional and social intelligence. I wrote: “The most compelling data come from a random nationwide sample, conducted by Thomas Achenbach at the University of Vermont, of more than 3,000 representative American schoolchildren aged seven to sixteen, whose behavior was rated by their parents and teachers—adults who knew them well. The first sampling was taken in the early 1970s, another roughly fifteen years later, and a third in the late 1990s. The results show a startling decline in social and emotional health.

“There is a precipitous drop between the first and second cohorts. American children in the mid 1980s were more withdrawn, sulky, unhappy, anxious and depressed, impulsive and unable to concentrate, delinquent and aggressive, than they were in the early 1970s. They did worse on 42 indicators, better on none. In the late 1990s, however, scores crept back up, but not as high as they had been on the first round.”

A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary.

My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home.

Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him.

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

Daniel Goleman and Michael Lerner of Commonweal discuss the “neural ballet” of social intelligence, the sociability that connects us brain to brain with those around us, and the implications of both social and emotional intelligence for environmental health. What are the intersections of social and emotional intelligence with environmental contaminants? To what degree can social and emotional intelligence protect us from the cumulative impact of other forms of stress? Listen to the interview.