Free Won’t: The Marshmallow Test Revisited

The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.

Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.

A failure in this circuitry may be at play, the researchers suspect, in disorders ranging from attention deficit to addictions. In the marshmallow test, impulse control turned out to predict how well those kids were doing 14 years later, as they were graduating high school. Those who waited, compared to those who grabbed, were more popular with their peers, had less trouble delaying gratification, and scored far higher on achievement tests.

These prefrontal circuits are among the last part of the brain to become anatomically mature; much of the increasing self-control that mark a child’s maturation over the years are the external signs that these circuits are developing as they should.

For instance, the “Terrible Twos” refers to the daily child-parent drama of impulse and its control which no doubt revolves around this circuitry. As a toddler lunges for the fragile lamp, dog’s food, paring knife — you name it – a parent’s firm “No” stands in for a fully functioning dorsal fronto-median cortex. As that circuitry matures, the “no” becomes internalized, a basis for free will, some say – or, more specifically, “free won’t,” the capacity to squelch an impulse.

Posted in Child development, Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 3 Comments »

Three Kinds of Empathy: Cognitive, Emotional, Compassionate

Being cool in crisis seems essential for our being able to think clearly. But what if keeping cool makes you too cold to care? In other words, must we sacrifice empathy to stay calm? That’s the dilemma facing those who are preparing top teams to handle the next Katrina-like catastrophe we might face. Which gets me to Paul Ekman, a world expert on emotions and our ability to read and respond to them in others. Paul and I had a long conversation recently, in which he described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings.

The first is “cognitive empathy,” simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective-taking, this kind of empathy can help in, say, a negotiation or in motivating people. A study at the University of Birmingham found, for example, that managers who are good at perspective-taking were able to move workers to give their best efforts.

But there can be a dark side to this sort of empathy – in fact, those who fall within the “Dark Triad” – narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths (see Chapter 8 in Social Intelligence) – can be talented in this regard, while having no sympathy whatever for their victims. As Paul told me, a torturer needs this ability, if only to better calibrate his cruelty – and talented political operatives no doubt have this ability in abundance.

Katrina’s devastation, we all saw, was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the very agencies that were supposed to manage the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that the disaster’s victims were doubly victimized by the indifference to their suffering.

Certainly empathy qualifies as one critical measure of the right leader in a crisis, along with being cool under pressure. But exactly what kind of empathy should we look for? When it comes to the right leader for a crisis, cognitive empathy alone seems insufficient . Then, Paul told me, there’s “emotional empathy,” – when you feel physically along with the other person, as though their emotions were contagious. This emotional contagion, social neuroscience tells us, depends in large part on the mirror neuron system (see Chapter Three in Social Intelligence). Emotional empathy makes someone well-attuned to another person’s inner emotional world, a plus in any of a wide range of callings, from sales to nursing – let alone for any parent or lover.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 14 Comments »

Making Sense of Our Lives

When you were young, which of these did you feel more often:

• No matter what I do, my parents love me.
• I can’t seem to please my parents, no matter what I do.
• My parents don’t really notice me.

The answers to such questions reveal more than about our childhood: they also tend to predict how we act in our closest relationships as adults.

Our childhood shapes our brain in many ways – and so determines our most basic ways of reacting to others — for better and for worse. If we felt well-loved in childhood, we tend to be secure in our relationships – but if not, then we’re more prone to chronic problems. When it comes to the engrained self-defeating habits that we bring to our adult relationships from childhood, understanding why we have these habits in the first place is a first step toward becoming free of their grip.

In Chapter Twelve of Social Intelligence I wrote about how the emotional patterns we first form with our parents survive into adulthood and influence how we behave as parents, lovers and spouses. My thinking relied heavily on the work of Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist at UCLA, who has founded the field of “interpersonal neurobiology,” which explains the brain basis for our habits of bonding with others. His work has dramatic implications for how best to raise a child and for psychotherapy. In my book I was only able to explore Dr. Siegel’s work in brief. But I’m happy to have had the chance for an in-depth conversation with Daniel Siegel that was made into an audiotape. This dialogue let me delve into a range of topics that extend what I could write in Social Intelligence. Among them:

• How a person makes sense of what happened to him in his childhood (and not what actually happened) best predicts how he will treat his children. This is good news for parents who had miserable childhoods. On the other hand, failing to make sense of our unhelpful patterns means we will just go on repeating them.
• Consistent empathy from a parent – that is, tuning into the way a child views and feels about her world – has the optimal impact on the growth of that child’s neural circuitry for empathy and for a sense of security. But a parent who is dismissive of a child can leave an imprint that distances emotions.

Posted in Child development, Emotional intelligence, Health and Wellness, Social intelligence | 10 Comments »

From the Basement to the Balcony: Your Brain in an Emergency

I spoke recently with a psychologist who advises teams handling emergencies, including catastrophes like hurricanes. It occurred to me that a basic bit of neuroscience should adds a crucial piece in preparing for catastrophe, especially for those coordinating the response, as well as those on the front lines.

The plans for emergency, he pointed out, have to take into account the need to “go to the balcony”—that is, see the whole situation, and respond from a perspective that takes everything into account. The perennial challenge, though, is that in the press of the moment, people instead to often “go to the basement,” getting trapped in poor and inflexible responses to just one face of the emergency.

The “basement” in this sense is a neural metaphor, representing the brain’s primitive threat response system. The “balcony” represents the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that can take in information and understand it fully, and respond flexibly and effectively.

The problem, as I point out in Social Intelligence, Chapter Nine (“The Sweet Spot for Achievement”), is that in the brain’s design, the more that stress-response system activates, the less efficient the prefrontal cortex operates. In evolution this meant we responded immediately with whatever habit we had learned in the past – fight, flee, or freeze. In modern life, none of those are necessarily the best way to respond.

This is particularly the case for those in law enforcement, say, or fire-fighters – let alone those who must coordinate a complex array of agencies as they respond to unthinkable tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11.

Meeting such challenges requires cognitive flexibility, the capacity to inhibit an automatic response that does not work, and to choose an innovative one that does.

Everyone knows we need to stay calm and cool in an emergency. But the brain’s natural reaction in an emergency is to fixate on the threat and fall back on automatic responses, whether they work well in this specific situation or not. And our capacity to think nimbly and flexibly collapses.

Now a new finding in brain research tells us just why: the streams of adrenaline and related stress hormones the brain secretes in abundance directly account for our tendency to make poor choices in emergencies. A group at Ohio State University report that the noradrenergic system, which kicks in during emergencies or under threat or stress, accounts for the drop in our ability to come up with innovative solutions or responses (see: Jessica Alexander et al, 2007, “Beta-adrenergic modulation of cognitive flexibility during stress,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 3, 468-478).

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 2 Comments »

SEND: Cooling the Flame

Poor Michael Brown. During the darkest days of the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Brown, then director of FEMA, the agency that so badly bungled the rescue efforts, sent this email: “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”

Emails can come back to haunt us – any of us. Few among us have mastered this medium, and only slowly are we realizing its dangers.

From the earliest days of email people “flamed”, sending off irritating or otherwise annoying messages. One explanation for the failure to inhibit our more unruly impulses online is a mismatch between the screen we stare at as we email, and the cues the social circuits of the brain use to navigate us through an interaction effectively: on email there is no tone of voice, no facial expression. When we talk to someone on the phone or face-to-face these circuits would ordinarily squelch impulses that will seem “off.”

Lacking these crucial cues, flaming occurs. It’s not just flaming – I’ve sent my fair share of emails that were, in retrospect, too familiar or formal, or otherwise wrong in tone, even downright embarrassing. Email invites these lapses in social intelligence in part because the social brain flies blind online.

In the absence of the other person’s real-time emotional signals we need to take a moment to shift from focusing on our own feelings and thoughts, and intentionally focus on the other person, even in absentia, and consider, How might this message come across?

The peril of being off-key is amplified by the temptation to hit SEND prematurely, before we’ve thought it over and had a chance to ease up on that too-stiff tone, drop that bit of sarcasm, and remember to ask about the kids.

In the old days of letter writing – a dying art – we had plenty of time to rewrite before sealing the envelope, and so flaming letters were far more rare than red-hot emails. And so the brave new world of email could benefit from a civilizing force, a voice that articulates the ground rules online.

Enter SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office, a new book by David Shipley (an old friend of mine) and Will Schwaibe. SEND not only articulates the way to win – or keep - friends online, but offers practical tips on both email etiquette and on the writing style most suitable.

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Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-mail Misbehavior

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem. “Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

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Emotional Contagion and Customer Satisfaction

“I had an accountant who used to make me crazy,” a friend tells me. “So I switched to one who always makes me feel fine, no matter what we’re talking about.”

That we gravitate to people who we enjoy being with is obvious. When it comes to the business world, cranky store clerks drive away business, just as that off-putting accountant drove away my friend. But this dynamic for keeping customers and clients satisfied seems to be ignored time and again by businesses. Thus the need to keep finding new ways to make the same old case for hiring for, or developing, interpersonal intelligence skills in those who are at the front lines of customer or client service.

That seems to be the point of an article I read in the Journal of Services Marketing [19/7, 2005, 438-444] called “The impact of service provider emotional intelligence on customer satisfaction,” by Sally Kernback and Nicolar Schutte at the University of New England, in Australia.

They assessed three levels of EI in clerks. At the highest level, the clerk anticipated how the customer would feel, expressed his own feelings clearly, showed that he understood the consequences of these feelings, and acted in ways that led to a positive emotional outcome – presumably they both felt good at the end of the interaction.

At the medium level of EI, the clerk was able to perceive, express and understand the emotions, but was poor at managing his own reactions. And the complete dud in EI showed no understanding of the emotions flying back and forth, nor the least ability to manage his own. Not surprisingly, the more EI the clerk displayed, the greater the satisfaction of the customer with the encounter.

The most intriguing finding, though, came not during run-of-the-mill transactions, but in difficult moments, like when a customer was returning an item that they were unhappy with. Here the EI dud had the strongest negative effect, creating the most customer dissatisfaction. Even a moderate amount of EI helped boost satisfaction during what this kind of dicey exchange.

This suggests that while EI drives customer satisfaction in the vast amount of day-to-day routine transactions in a store, the lack of it matters even more when a customer has a complaint. Hiring, promoting and training employees for EI, then seems one key to repeat business. Seems obvious, but bears repeating.

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Emotional Intelligence Teams

If you were trapped by a blizzard and your very survival depended on how well you could work together with a handful of other people, what should you wish for in your team-mates? A goodly dose of emotional intelligence.

That conclusion stems from two independent studies reported in the journal Human Performance. In both studies teams of volunteers were posed the challenge of how to survive in simulation of desperate survival scenarios, like a blizzard. Close to 20 teams were evaluated on how well they came up with solutions that would help them survive.

The champion teams, both studies found, were highest in group emotional intelligence. Intriguingly, when individuals were given the same challenge, their cognitive ability (as measured by SAT scores – these were college students) was the best predictor of survival. But once people were put in a team situation, individual cognitive ability made virtually no difference – instead emotional intelligence made the difference.

This makes sense in terms of earlier findings on “group IQ,” the ability of teams to perform well. Research with high-IQ team members found, for instance, that if they did not have the skills of cooperation, negotiation and teamwork, they perform poorly (in part because individual members competed to show who was smarter). As I wrote in Emotional Intelligence (p.160), “The key to a high group IQ is social harmony. This ability, all other things being equal, will make one group especially productive and successful.”

In teamwork, emotional intelligence is the crucial social lubricant, providing the capacity to settle disputes well, brainstorm creatively, and work harmoniously.

This is all the more true for great team leaders. It turns out that team members who scored higher on the ECI, a test of emotional and social competencies, were most likely to emerge as the natural leaders.

For details see:

• Jordan, P. J. & Troth, A. C. (2004). “Managing emotions during team problem solving: Emotional intelligence and conflict resolution.” Human Performance, 17(2), 195-218.
• Offermann, L. R., Bailey, J. R., Vasilopoulos, N. L., Seal, C., & Sass, M. (2004). “The relative contribution of emotional competence and cognitive ability to individual and team performance.” Human Performance, 17(2), 219-243.

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The Sweet Spot for Performance

As Congress heads toward debating whether to renew the No Child Left Behind Act, its members might do well to consider the biology of boredom, frazzle and the brain’s sweet spot for performance.

The interplay between being daydreamy, feeling stressed, and effective performance was first codified by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in 1908, in a shape like an upside-down U with its legs spread. The Yerkes-Dodson Law proposes that when our physiological arousal flags (an indicator of boredom), our performance on any task will be poor. But as we get more aroused – motivated, engaged, enthusiastic – performance picks up to a peak point, the brain’s sweet spot. Beyond that tipping point, though, further arousal translates into a debilitating stress – the greater the stress, the worse our performance.

No news there. But now neuroscience has delved into the brain mechanics underlying how different states of arousal shape performance, with lessons not just for the classroom, but the office as well.

Take the neurobiology of frazzle, the upset we feel from an outsized dose of daily hassles. Frazzle arises from the nervous system’s plan for crisis. The biological maneuvers involved shift control from the brain’s executive center in the prefrontal area just behind the forehead to the more primitive emotional circuitry in mid-brain, roughly between the ears. This emergency response favors kneejerk responses over creativity, speed over thoughtfulness.

The ascendant emotional centers handicap the prefrontal area, paralyzing attention and narrowing the space available in memory to take in new information – in other words, to learn. The more pressure intensifies, the less able we are to hold information in working memory, to pay attention or to react flexibly – let alone creatively – to plan or organize well. The further we go on this downward arc, the greater our descent into cognitive dysfunction. For children, this means the more anxious they are, the less they register their lessons.

The full text of this essay is available to subsribers to TimesSelect from The New York Times.

Further resources:

• Eran Chajut and Daniel Algom, 2003, “Selective attention improves under stress: implications for theories of social cognition,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 231-248.
• Amy Arnsten, 1998, “The biology of being frazzled,” Science, 280, 1711-1713.
• J. T. Noteboom et al., 2001,“Activation of the arousal response and impairment of performance increase with anxiety and stressor intensity,” Journal of Applied Physiology, 91, 2039-2101.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 1 Comment »

Cluing in the Critics

Since emotional intelligence (EI) came into prominence as a concept – starting with the seminal article by Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer in 1990, and then taken to a heightened level with my 1995 book by that name, there have been ample criticisms of both the theory and the claims made for it.

In the early years, many of those critiques were justified, particularly those complaining that the statements made for the benefits of EI were not founded on research that was specifically designed to test the effects of EI. That situation was inevitable – EI was too new as a concept for researchers to have had the time to design, execute, analyze, and publish studies showing the impact of EI in, e.g., education or management.

Instead those of us who wrote about the concept had to draw on data that established the impact of one or another aspect of EI, like emotional self-regulation or empathy. But in recent years the data landscape has shifted, with dozens, if not hundreds, of studies on EI finished or in the research pipeline using measures that were designed for that purpose.

Now, drawing on this emerging body of evidence, the case for EI is being made on more solid grounds. A case in point: an article by Cary Cherniss and Melissa Extein of the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University; by Roger Weissberg in the department of psychology at the University of Ilinois at Chicago, and myself. It’s called “Emotional Intelligence: What Does the Research Really Indicate,” and is published in the journal Educational Psychologist (41, 4, 2006, 239-245).

We wrote the article in response to one by an educational psychologist, Linda Waterhouse, who argued:

1. that EI cannot be a valid concept because there are many different constructs of EI;
2. that EI is no different from personality or IQ;
3. that the claim it determines real-world success has not been validated;
4. that brain research does not support the construct.

We make point-by-point refutations of each of these claims:

1. There are many competing constructs of IQ, and always have been. This simply indicates the concept is robust.
2. The preponderance of published studies indicates that EI represents abilities that are distinct from the “Big Five” personality traits.
3. Mounting evidence in a range of work settings shot a strong link between EI and performance outcomes.

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Power, Prestige or Money: What Drives Us

“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.

As for prestige, there’s another distinction: between those who seek glory through over-selling their merits, and those who get prestige through a well-earned reputation. The first motive leads people to hype themselves, fabricate, exaggerate. The second kind of reputation is more robust, since it comes as a natural byproduct of other people recognizing sound effort or good work.

Finally, money. Here McClelland had an intriguing insight. In his studies of the achievement motive – the drive to continually improve one’s own performance, he showed that this was the main driver in highly successful entrepreneurs. And the most successful among them regarded the money they made as a way of keeping score on how well they were doing, not as the end in itself. Their real driver was a very high internal standard of performance and the continual push to find ways to do even better.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Leadership, Social intelligence | 1 Comment »

Kids and Lead: A Puzzle Solved

“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.”

I’ve always wondered what could account for the more recent improvements in this realm of children’s life skills. Now, almost a year later, I have heard an answer that both surprises and satisfies me – I believe it may be true, though I cannot prove it.

The answer came recently when I was on a conference call with several dozen scientists who are members of the Center for Health and the Environment, and interviewed by the group’s co-director, Michael Lerner.

We were discussing the multiple ways in which chemicals in the environment harm our health, and particularly the neural development of children. This has profound implications for emotional and social intelligence, since the neural circuitry for these essential human abilities are the last part of the brain to become anatomically mature, and during this period (which extends into the mid-20s) toxins in food, water and air can interfere in multiple ways with healthy brain growth.

At one point I posed the puzzle of kids’ behavioral problems, asking what might explain the stark dip from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and then the improvement over the 1990s.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Health and Wellness, Social and emotional learning, Transparency/environment | 1 Comment »