Do you think you have the ability to understand people’s emotions? I’m afraid it requires thinking twice.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Leviathan” (ID: liweitan2014) .
Author | Lisa Feldman Barrett
Translation | Carlyle
Proofreading | Dragon Fruit
© Jessica Lin
Leviathan press:
“Fudas are straightforward and righteous, persuasive and conscientious, and consider the following.” The so-called “perspective and conscientiousness” can be regarded as an image depiction through guessing and guessing the heart of others, which is often Used to describe people with high EQs-after all, judging their emotions through their micro-expressions is indeed a science. But what if the opposite is a “face-to-face Pinghu” person? Or, do you think he (she) is in some kind of sorrow, but in fact the opposite?
You may have met people who can control their emotions and understand the emotions of others. Even if the sky falls, these people still seem to be calm-they are very aware of their boss ’s anger or their lover ’s frustration. What to say and what to do.
Undoubtedly, after Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book “Emotional Intelligence” was born in 1995, emotional intelligence was regarded as another key factor for predicting the success of life, even better than IQ. More important. After all, if one person can perceive and respond to all emotions and the other is always confused, who do you choose to work with? Who do you choose to date?
The basis for the establishment of the concept of EQ in the traditional sense comes from two common-sense assumptions. The first assumption is that it is possible for people to accurately sense the emotions of others, that is, human faces and bodies are thought to be able to convey happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotions. If you observe carefully enough, you can read these emotions as you read the text in the book. the secondThe assumption is that emotions are automatically triggered by what happens in the world, and you can control them through reason-this view is the most important view of Western civilization.
For example, in the legal systems of many countries, there is a difference between unpremeditated crimes and premeditated crimes—the former is said to emotionally hijack reason, while the latter contains meticulous planning. In economics, almost every popular investor behavioral model also discusses emotional and cognitive factors separately.
These two core assumptions are very attractive and consistent with our daily experience. However, a large number of studies from the author and other laboratories have shown that the face and body alone cannot convey any specific emotions in a fixed way. Furthermore, we now know that there are no independent emotional and cognitive processes in the brain, and naturally there is no saying that one can control the other. These statements may be contrary to your common sense-the same is true for me. However, no matter how convincing our own emotional experiences are, these feelings do not reflect biologically what is happening inside our bodies. Our traditional understanding and practice of EQ urgently need to be adjusted.
© Jessica Lin
Let ’s start with the assumption that people can accurately perceive the emotions of others. On the surface, this seems very reasonable. Just glance at someone’s face and body language to see the person’s feelings, right? Do n’t we know that the smile and the sad face tell different stories? The high arms and upright chest may show pride, and the low posture generally indicates that someone is feeling sad.
In real life, there is a big problem with this assumption, that is, the face and body do not move in such a cartoonish way. Happy people sometimes smile, sometimes not. Sometimes they even cry when they are happy (such as at a wedding) and smile when they are sad (such as when they remember their beloved aunt who has passed away). Similarly, a person with a worried face may be angry, or just thinking hard, or even indigestion. In fact, there is no specific and constant expression that can only express a single emotion.
Without a specific and unchanging expression, only a single emotion can be expressed. © Imgur
Many scientific studies have confirmed these observations. When we placed electrodes on people’s faces to record their muscle movements, we saw that people’s facial muscles move differently under the same emotional feelings. In the aspect of the body, hundreds of studies have shown that different cases experiencing the same emotions have different performances in other factors such as heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and sweating. Simple and fixed reactions do not exist. Even in the brain, we see that in different situations, different instances of the same emotion (such as fear)-whether in different experiments of the same person or in different people-the brain The processing modes are different. This diversity is not random, but closely linked to your situation.
(science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1225.full)
In short, when we try to recognize the emotions of others, the face and body do not prove anything. On the contrary, differences are the norm. Your brain may automatically understand a person’s behavior in a certain situation, allowing you to guess the person’s feelings, but this is always guessing, not recognizing. Now, I may know my husband enough, knowing that his frowning face means that he is bothering me when I can stay away from him, but this is because I have many years to learn to observe his facial changes in different situations. What it means. However, in general, changes in human behavior are extremely diverse. In order to train EQ in a modern way, we need to recognize this diversity and ensure that the brain has the ability to automatically understand them.
The second wrong assumption is that we can control our emotions through rational thinking. Emotions are often regarded as inner beasts and need to be tame through cognitive efforts. However, this concept is rooted in the false view of brain evolution.
Books and articles on EQ claim that your brain core inherits from reptiles, which are wrapped in a brutal, emotional layer inherited from mammals, and these are wrapped in a logical layer unique to human And controlled by it. This “three-level” view is also called “the triune brain” (the triune brain). It has been popular since the 1950s, but it has no practical basis.
Thethe “Trinity Brain” hypothesis is the theory put forward by Paul MacLean in the 1960s . This theory divides the human brain into three parts: “reptilian brain”, “paleomammalian brain”, and “neomammalian brain” according to the order of appearance in evolution history figure 2). © YouTube
The brain is not evolved hierarchically, but like a company-it reorganizes as it grows in size. The difference between your brain and the brain of a chimpanzee or monkey is not related to the level, but to the microscopic layout. Decades of neuroscience research have confirmed that there is no single part of the human brain responsible for thoughts or emotions, both of which are produced by the entire brain under the coordinated work of billions of neurons.
Even though the “Trinity Brain” is completely fictitious, it has led to significant movements in public discourse. Even after the idea of ”trinity brain” has been abandoned by brain evolution experts for decades, people still use some words such as “lizard brain” and believe that emotions are tiny brain circuits. When the correct external stimulus is reached, it will be triggered uncontrollably, and at a deeper level of biology, cognition and emotion will struggle inextricably.
After all, this is exactly what many people in Western culture have experienced in their emotional lives, as if our emotions want to do impulsive things, while the cognitive side suppresses them. These convincing experiences-emotionally out of control and intellectually controlled-did not reveal their underlying mechanisms in the brain. In order to better understand EQ, we must give up the idea of thinking of the brain as a battlefield.
A reasonable and scientifically-based method for defining and distinguishing EQ, from a modern neuroscience brain function perspective called “construction”: Researchers have observed that your brain will automatically and instantly The process of creating all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions is completely unconscious. It seems that you may have a reflex-like emotional response that can easily recognize the emotions of others, but in the background, your brain is actually doing something completely different.
This is a summary from the perspective of the Lord: the most important job of your brain is not to think, feel, or even watch, but to keep your body alive and healthy so that you can survive and grow (until the final reproduction of offspring). How is your brain doneWhat about these? It’s like an old fortune teller who constantly makes predictions, and these predictions will eventually become the emotions you experience and the expressions of others you understand.
Your brain is completely in your skull, it is a dark, silent box. It only accepts the sensory effects caused by what is happening in the world-the vision, sound, smell, touch, and taste from the body’s receptors-and the brain must guess the reason for these feelings, because any light, fragrance or There can be many different sources of squeeze.
Your brain makes these guesses based on past experience: Under similar circumstances in the past, what caused these feelings? What do you need to ensure your survival and health? Your brain has an amazing ability to make predictions that are most similar to current feelings based on the current situation and combining fragments of past experiences. Past experience is a prediction. Your brain constantly predicts every experience and every action you take, and then guesses what is happening in the world and what you should do about it.
From the perspective of the brain, your body is just one of the sources of information to understand the world, such information includes heartbeat, diastolic and contractive lungs, high body temperature caused by inflammation, and so on. These changes in the body have no objective emotional meaning. For example, the pain in the stomach may be due to nausea, anxiety, or simply hunger. Therefore, the brain spends most of its time microscopically predicting your body’s needs (water, glucose, salt) and trying to satisfy them before they appear.
In the process, the brain also predicts the sensations caused by physical changes, such as your feeling that your heart is beating in your chest, and the actions you should take at this time. This natural and continuous prediction of “storms” beyond your consciousness forms the basis for everything you think, feel, see, hear or otherwise experience. This is how emotions, thoughts and perceptions are formed.
© Jessica Lin
Therefore, EQ requires the brain to be able to use the predictive function to create a series of complex and flexible complex emotions. If you are faced with a difficult situation, and this situation evokes past emotions, your brain will help you by building the most beneficial emotions. If the brain has many emotions to choose from at this time, you can deal with the problem more effectively. If your brain can only citeSmiles mean happiness, pouting means sadness, examples of stereotypes, then that is all you can experience and perceive from others.
However, if your brain can make you frown, smile, open your eyes, squint, yell, meditate, or even make you connect with others in anger, then your The brain can adjust your feelings and behaviors more finely according to the situation. In other words, you have better tools to appear to have high EQ.
This ability is called emotional granularity, and my students and I discovered it about 20 years ago. We asked hundreds of subjects to record their mood changes during the day using handheld computer devices (before the advent of smartphones). From these data, we found that even if people use the same emotional vocabulary, they do not necessarily express the same thing. For example, some people use “anger”, “fear”, and “sadness” to express completely different things, but others may use these three words in rotation to mean “feel bad”.
The emotional granularity is somewhat similar to wine tasting. Even for different batches of grapes in the same vineyard, wine experts can recognize extremely subtle differences. People with relatively little experience may not taste these differences, but perhaps they can at least distinguish pinot noir, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon. Both are grape varieties commonly used to brew red wine). The first person who enters the wine pit may not be able to distinguish these things-maybe he can distinguish between dry wine and sweet wine, or both taste wine.
Similarly, those who show high emotional granularity are also emotional experts. Their brains can automatically construct nuanced emotional experiences, such as surprise, surprise, fright, stun, and consternation. For a person with medium emotional granularity, the above words may all belong to the same concept: “surprise”. For a person with a low emotional granularity, these words may correspond to an increase in emotion.
Emotional granularity is the key to emotional intelligence. If your brain can automatically construct many different emotions and distinguish them carefully, it can better adjust your emotions according to the situation, and you can also predict and perceive the emotions of others in an instant. The more emotions you know, the more your brain can automatically construct emotions from the actions of others. Although your brain is always guessing, when it has more options, it also has a higher probability of guessing.
How can you make your brain produce a wider range of emotions and enhance your EQ? One way is to learn more new expressions of emotions. Each new word will sow the seeds of new emotion prediction in your brain, and the brain can use this as a tool to build your future experience and perception, and then guide your behavior. Try to avoid thinking that someone is “happy” in generalDistinguish more details. Are they “overjoyed”, “satisfied” or “heartedly cherished”? Are they “angry”, “angry”, “angry” or “anger”? More elaborate emotions can prepare your brain for a range of different behaviors, while more general emotions (angry, happy, etc.) provide less information and limit your flexibility.
Elevating emotional quotient by expanding the vocabulary of emotions is a testable neuroscience conclusion. Your brain is not static, it will reorganize itself with experience. When you force yourself to learn a new vocabulary—whether it ’s an emotion-related vocabulary or something—you will reshape the micro-layout in your brain to give it a chance to construct new emotional experiences more easily in the future The emotional perception of others. In short, every emotion-related word you learn is a new tool for your future EQ development.
People who can build high-granular emotional experiences have more than social advantages. According to the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence research, children who broaden their vocabulary related to emotions can simultaneously improve academic performance and social behavior. Adults with a higher emotional granularity tend to be healthier, visit fewer doctors, take drugs, and have shorter hospital stays for illness.
Foreign languages are an important resource for learning new emotion-related vocabulary, and can increase the emotional capacity reserve of the brain. You may already know “schadenfreude” (translator’s note: Chinese translation “gloom”), the word comes from German, which means “happy for the misfortune of others.” There are also a large number of emotional words in other languages that cannot be directly expressed in English vocabulary, such as “gigil” in Filipino, which refers to the urge to knead something very cute; and Inukite “iktsuarpok”, Refers to the feeling of being impatient while waiting for someone to come. When you understand these foreign words and the concepts behind them, you may be able to feel these emotions in others and even experience them yourself.
Ironically, EQ also knows when not to build an emotion. When you feel overwhelmed, you may wish to take a moment to make some non-emotional explanations of your feelings. Maybe the restlessness in your stomach is not anxiety, but a determination, maybe this nasty little friend is just hungry. When you talk to your mother, the sad feeling does not mean that she said the wrong thing.
Remember, your brain is always just guessing, and sometimes it makes mistakes.
20 years ago, when “Emotional Intelligence” was listed on the bestseller list, scientists did not know the predictive function of the brain, did not know that the words you heard could affect the layout of the brain, and the emotional granularity was just a new Find. After all, science is just our best understanding of how things work based on existing evidence. In the face of new discoveries, the interpretation of the problem is also changing, sometimes even the vicissitudes of the sea, this is exactlyThe way science works.
In traditional research, many factors that are excluded from the field of emotions-such as your vocabulary-actually have a profound effect on what you feel and see. In order for the concept of EQ to advance with the times, we must understand what these factors are-even if they challenge common sense-and use them carefully to understand each other and ourselves.
Original / nautil.us / issue / 83 / intelligence / emotional-intelligence-needs-a-rewrite-rp