Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

A recent comparison of the mental and physical health of Americans and Britons raises some intriguing questions. Consider these data points:

• Americans spend 2.5 more on health care than do Brits – yet have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, lung disease, and cancer.
• The richest, healthiest Americans are as sick as the poorest Brits.
• Americans work far longer than Brits (and other Europeans), and are more likely to hold two jobs – virtually unheard of in Britain.

In searching for explanations, the focus goes to the fact that Americans seem to value wealth and work over social connections, in the view of a British epidemiology team, led by Sir Michael Marmot at the University College London Medical School. One reason for this, of course, can be seen in the lack of social safety nets Americans face. Compare Britain, which like most European countries, has a far more humane social system: in England, a student might pay about $3,000 a year for a university education (and in other European countries the government pays the whole thing); everyone who retires in Britain gets both a company and a government pension; health care is free. Americans, by contrast, live in fear of losing health care, not having enough money to retire on, or huge education bills.

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.

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.